Palm Pre developers gather Monday in first East Coast meeting

The first Palm Pre/webOS meeting for East Coasters will be held Monday in New York City.

The developer meetup is organized by Blueswitch, a 10-year-old Web development firm with experience in Windows Mobile applications. The company has begun a new focus on mobile Web applications for the iPhone and now the Palm Pre.

So far, about 75 people have registered to attend the inaugural New York Palm Pre Software Developers Meetup. There are still openings for the 7pm meeting (more details here)

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Guest speaker will be Eric Marthinsen, a partner at Agile Commerce, a Lexington, Mass., development shop that created the FlightView application for the Pre. The program lets Pre users check flight status information, receive updates on changes, and see the aircraft's in-flight progress, all in real-time.

Marthinsen was one of several early webOS developers who talked with Network World about their experience with webOS and Palm's Mojo software development kit. The webOS consists of the Linux kernel married with an embedded open source Webkit engine, which is the basis for a number of popular mobile Web browsers. Webkit acts as the program execution environment: applications can be created with JavaScript, HTML (including HTML 5 features) and Cascading Style Sheets. The Mojo SDK provides a range of services and frameworks, and APIs to underlying features on the smartphone hardware itself.

Blueswitch's Alex Paskie, vice president of development, and Michael Prenez-Isbell, director of mobile development, also are impressed by the ease of development for the Pre. Prenez-Isbell recently gave the Mojo toolset to one of his developers at the start of the work day: an application was ready by the end of the morning.

"The Pre will be an open platform for everyone who knows Javascript," he says. "It's the ‘people's' OS."

Blueswitch is organizing and hosting other Palm Pre meetups in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, D. C. in coming months. "These meetings testify to our belief in the viability of the [Palm] platform, and its coming popularity," says Prenez-Isbell.