14 DAY TRIAL // In its attempt to attract more developers towards its webOS mobile platform, mobile phone maker Palm has waved the $99 annual fee for those joining the webOS developer army. The creation of a developer account on the Palm Developer Center is now free, and application builder will be able to publish their solutions in the App Catalog without paying for the move. However, Palm notes that the fee has been waved only for a limited time.
Palm already had the webOS SDK available for download for free, yet those interested in publishing their applications in the App Catalog had to pay a $99 annual fee to be able to do so. It should be interesting to see whether the handset vendor will manage to significantly increase the number of software solutions available for its phones. Hopefully, it will, for Palm certainly needs a boost in sales, and a larger number of apps available for its devices will prove beneficial.
On the other hand, the number of developers joining the Palm network might not increase that much in the end. Similar annual fees are present with other application portals too, and, since some of them enjoy a large number of developers, one can easily conclude that the problem is not here. Even so, new developers to Palm's community mean new applications, and some of them might prove highly appealing to users, so the company's move is a welcome one.
The development of apps for webOS will require downloading the webOS SDK, the latest release of which is v1.4.1 - Build 427. The software development kit was released soon after webOS 1.4.1 arrived on handsets, and Palm notes that multiple 1.4.X releases were delivered to users, but that the webOS SDK v1.4.1 offers support for all of them. There are a great deal of new features, enhancements and fixes included in the latest release of the SDK, all of which can be seen here.
The Palm webOS SDK v1.4.1 Build 427 is available for download from Softpedia too, via this link.