Palm Pre apps toolkit fixed for Windows, Macs

Palm has released an updated version of its webOS Mojo software developer kit, a set of frameworks and APIs for building native applications for the Palm Pre smartphone.

The changes fix a number of problems when loading the SDK on Windows XP and Vista and Mac OS X computers. Though Windows 7 is not currently supported by Palm, developers have been finding workarounds that permit them to load Mojo on a pre-release build of the forthcoming Microsoft release.

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The update corrects the following:

• System DLLs being wrongly replaced in some cases when installing the SDK on Windows XP
• Failure to install, causing a rollback at the end of the install process, on Windows XP and Vista
• On Macs, the install process could short-circuit when an older version of the Palm Emulator program wasn’t removed first
• On Vista-64 machines, shortcuts to launch Emulator didn’t work; they now point to .bat file instead of .exe

Palm made Mojo generally available in mid-July, weeks earlier than anticipated. The webOS combines a Linux kernel with an embedded version of Webkit, the open source HTML/JavaScript rendering engine. Webkit acts as the native execution environment for webOS applications written in Javascript, HTML/HTML 5, and CSS, an approach that promises to simplify development of mobile Web applications. Early Mojo users have generally been enthusiastic in their assessment.

The new version is 1.1, Build 12. The full release notes are online.

SDK versions for Windows XP, OS X and Linux are ready for download.