Pivotal Labs Breaks Silence On Palm Pre webOS SDK

Tim Carroll of Palm Infocenter happened to tweet me and it led to a brief exchange where one of the CES introductory partners, Pivotal Labs, came up.

That led me to do some searching and I found some actual news.

They’ve hired two new people: Nate Clark (Twitter, blog) and Ben Nguyen (Twitter).

One of their key products is Pivotal Tracker:

Tracker is a simple, story-based project planning tool that allows teams to collaborate and instantly react to real-world changes. It’s based on agile software development methods, but it can be used on a variety of types of projects. Tracker frees you up to focus on getting things done, without getting bogged down keeping your plans in sync with reality.

As if that wasn’t intriguing enough — just imagine accessing that with a customized app on the Palm Pre! — Pivotal also blogged about the Mojo Application Framework at the heart of the webOS SDK:

The Mojo Application Framework is built for the developer, just as a BMW is built for the driver. (Not that the passengers get a bad deal either.) Most mobile platforms frustrate me as they seem like the state of the art in desktop development circa the 1990′s. With Mojo, the development experience is more like using Rails or Django and less like using C++.

Pivotal plans to bring our practices to developing with the Mojo framework, such as Continuous Integration, and Test/Behavior Driven Development. Expect to see a variety of open source tools from us to support these efforts.

To get a feel for Pivotal Tracker, see this blog post: Thoughtworks Mingle vs. Pivotal Labs Tracker

Agile software development is an idea I first came across via Twitter Follower Rick Cogley, in his blog: Reading Between the Lines of the Agile Manifesto.

This is the Agile Manifesto. The wikipedia entry for Agile software development reads as if some of the principles espoused by W. Edwards Deming are being transfered to software creation.

On the other hand: There is no Agile.

Personally speaking, much of this is outside of my realm of experience. What I see here is the possible connection between a Cloud application and the first Cloudphone: the Palm Pre.

I hope Pivotal will offer — or contribute to offering — Pre apps for the non-coding general public (like … me!).

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Three posts were done here today. But look at what else that was pointed at via Twitter:

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The Pre And The Cloud And You #6

Microsoft’s Cloud service goes live before it was scheduled to. What, did their servers turn on themselves?

Microsoft Comes Clean on My Phone — More Deets at MWC

This is the interesting bit:

This new Microsoft cloud service syncs critical information (e.g., contacts, calendar appointments, tasks, text messages, photos, video, etc) on a user’s mobile phone to a password protected Web site.

Emphasis added by me.

It will back up video? How will that actually work? I can’t think of any carrier that would be pleased to have to send several gigabytes of data through their cell network in order for someone to have their own entertainment prior to, say, boarding a flight.

I have to think there will be an option to delay downloading gigabytes of data for when the phone is either syncing with a desktop PC or using WiFi (and even with WiFi, that’d seriously degrade the bandwidth for everyone else — imagine the pain, say, at a Starbucks!).

We’ve seen Apple’s MobileMe service. Next up will be Microsoft’s My Phone.

Both of these will provide indications of what Palm might offer.

Documents To Go For iPhone, Android

Documents To Go, which I’ve promised to try again when I get my Palm Pre, is widening its reach to both the iPhone and Android platforms:

Dataviz Promises MS Office for Android, iPhone at MWC

Dataviz, makers of the popular DocumentsToGo mobile Microsoft Office compatible suite, are promising two bombshells at the Mobile World Congress trade show. According to an email they sent to press, they’ll be demoing DocumentsToGo for both iPhone and Android, as well as RoadSync for Android, an Exchange ActiveSync client that will connect Android phones to Microsoft Exchange servers.

It will be interesting to see what that does when it arrives for the iPhone. Will there be a renewed clamor for a Bluetooth keyboard?

One of the key points raised at the Pre introduction at CES was its keyboard: “You can author on this.”

Yes. But I’d still like to use my Bluetooth keyboard when it’s on the Pre!

I think iPhone and Android owners will share my desire.

With DTG running on the iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and soon the Pre, all smartphones will suddenly have a cross-platform document file format they should easily be able to freely share.

– via a labyrinth of leads; origin source in link

There’s A Palm Pre At The TED Conference

It belongs to Roger McNamee. And he’s apparently been found out and people are tweeting about it.

One lucky guy:

The excitement continues to build!