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Tutorial: Palm Pre SDK

The Palm Pre SDK, named Mojo, is not supposed to be available to the general public of developers for a few months.  Apparently it was leaked on the internets last night.  I was able to get a Hello World program running on the emulator.  Here is how I did it.

Environment:
Windows XP
Java JDK 1.6.0_11 (any 1.6 probably works)
Any modern CPU should work.  Mine is 32 bit – not sure about 64 bit.
The emulator takes ~300MB of memory so you’ll probably want at least 1GB.I’ve got 2GB

1 – Download and install VirtualBox
(http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads).  I am using version 2.2.4

2 – Download and install the SDK.
Palm has the SDK available for free download.  I think registration is required.
link: http://developer.palm.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&layout=page&id=1788

3 – Start the Emulator.
When the SDK finishes installing you should see a “Palm Emulator” icon on your desktop.  Open it.

The emulator should start up and it should look like this:

Linux kernel starting

Starting Linux

The splash screen

Splash screen

Finished!

started

Ok, you’ve got your emulator running.  Now its time for the fun part.  Lets make a program!

4 – Open up your command prompt (start-run-”cmd”).   If you’re running vista, make sure you run “cmd” as Administrator.  Navigate to ‘Program Files\Palm\SDK\bin’.  Type in “palm-generate helloWorld” to create the shell of a hello world program.  The output should say “Generating new_app in C:\Program Files\Palm\SDK\bin\helloWorld”

5 – Go into your new helloWorld directory and modify index.html.  Now we’re just programming a web page!

Hello World

Hello World

6 – once you’ve modified and saved index.html, go back to the command prompt and run “palm-package helloWorld”.  It should create a .ipk file in the bin directory.

7 – run “palm-install <name of .ipk file>”  Mine got named ‘com.yourdomain.helloworld_1.0_all.ipk’.  At this point you will want to make sure that your emulator is still running.

install

7 – Go to your emulator and run the program!

Program Menu

running

8- Profit!

6/28/2009-updated with hardware specs

5/1/2010 – linked to SDK download through palm.com

Categories: Pre, Programming Tags:
  1. cak
    July 5th, 2009 at 21:31 | #1

    Thanks for your useless tutorial, it was really great to see an exact copy of the Palm Pre official tutorial, except you slightly changes the text. It must have taken you weeks.

  2. philo
    July 6th, 2009 at 11:55 | #2

    When you don’t have content of your own, how else will you draw people from search engines to click on your google ads?

  3. July 6th, 2009 at 12:17 | #3

    @cak
    Excuse me? Where can I find a Palm Pre official tutorial? At the time that I wrote this (the day after the SDK got leaked) there was no official palm pre official tutorial.

  4. July 7th, 2009 at 09:22 | #4

    Thanks for posting this. By the official Palm Pre Tutorial, I think they are referring to this:
    https://prerelease.palm.com/confluence/display/sdk/Hello+World

    Weirdly, there’s no “getting started” documentation installed with the SDK, so I actually found your page before I found Palm’s.

  5. smv
    July 7th, 2009 at 23:53 | #5

    Thanks a bunch Chris, i was able to resolve my issue with your tutorial.

  6. Bob
    July 11th, 2009 at 20:14 | #6

    Thanks for your time and help – this was the first sample I was able to find.

  7. Matt
    July 13th, 2009 at 14:56 | #7

    I have the same problems as two others have posted.

    C:\Program Files\Palm\SDK\bin>palm-generate.bat helloWorld
    Generating new_app in C:\Program Files\Palm\SDK\bin\helloWorld
    palm-generate: helloWorld\appinfo.json (The system cannot find the path specified)

    both resolved their problems by running cmd as administrator. is this different then logging onto windows as administrator? because I have the only windows account on my computer, and am obviously logged in as the administrator.

    Ive only barely played with alice, dr.java, and visual basic in an intro class at school so I probably wont be able to get anything out of this anyways but id like to try.

  8. Ron
    July 15th, 2009 at 10:11 | #8

    Can you use this same program for Modifying only? Like in some of the “my notifications” changes @ Pre-Central.net?

  9. Matt
    July 15th, 2009 at 13:58 | #9

    I tried creating an icon and saving it to the palm folder where the icon with the moon is, and it wouldnt let me save there and to contact the administrator? well I created another user account and made it the admin, and the emulator wont even open in that account, still works fine in my other account though…

  10. Vincent
    July 22nd, 2009 at 14:02 | #10

    I got stuck at:

    7 – run “palm-install ”

    but after changing that to:

    7 – run “palm-install.bat ”

    it worked

  11. Sean
    August 4th, 2009 at 20:52 | #11

    I agree that this was very helpful The only bloody tutorial that actually shows what to expect, not useless written text.@Bob

  12. May 1st, 2010 at 11:18 | #12

    Thanks for writing this article. Now everything is clear for me.

  13. June 18th, 2010 at 14:09 | #13

    Great info, thanks for useful post. I am waiting for more

  14. July 12th, 2010 at 19:51 | #14

    Different people in all countries get the mortgage loans from different banks, just because that is fast and easy.

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