Palm Offers Free, Browser-Based Dev Toolkit, Tempts iPhone Devs

From DailyTech: After sliding for some time in terms of marketshare, Palm appears to at last be ready to right the ship with its new webOS offerings. According to recent market research, Palm's phones like the Pixi and Pre have helped fuel the company to gains over the course of this year. Despite some recent disappointments in terms of unit sales, the company still enjoys a lead over Google's Android phones and remains a strong competitor to Microsoft's Windows Mobile and the iPhone in the smart phone market.

Now Palm has released a new app development environment called Ares that offers, at first glance, compelling improvements over Apple's much lauded development environment. The new environment is web-hosted and allows developers to register for free and use the web interface which features one-click access to the webOS phone emulator, drag and drop code and project management, full debugging, and code editing.

Better yet, when developers finish a project, it just takes a click to send the finished app off to Palm for approval and insertion in the app catalog. That streamline setup should help app developers overcome the months of delays that they sometimes face when coding for the iPhone or other platforms.

The new environment requires Safari version 4 and higher, Chrome version 3 and higher, and Firefox version 3.5 (Palm hasn't said whether Opera is compatible, and it seems unlikely that Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 will be compatible due to its lagging web standards support). In order to access the webOS emulator you also need to have Palm's Mojo SDK installed.

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