Palm to Add Camera and Microphone Access for Developers, Improved Tools

Image courtesy of PreCentral

During Palm’s Developer Day conference this past weekend, the manufacturer took time out to introduce a new slate of functionality and tools for developers to use. Palm has confirmed that the improvements should be available to owners by Fall.

Palm will open up hardware access to the microphone and camera via new API calls, add new security and cryptography features, a “media indexer” API that will simplify media application development, support for Bonjour, zero-configuration networking and the Bluetooth Serial Port Profile for third party accessory support. HTML5 support is also improved with the addition of hardware accelerated CSS animation, which will speed up application transitions in webOS

Palm will also be adding support for asynchronous background services using JavaScript, which will allow data-intensive apps to be more responsive while processing activity, a redesigned App Catalog and a new set of developer extensions called Mojo Core that will work with existing web apps by converting them into fully functional webOS with a few lines of code.

Another major addition on the code front is db8, which is a new backend interface for apps to store and sync data on the device that uses Javascript. Storing and accessing data will be improved markedly over current sync operations, it allows for multiple backend storage choices and fast, simple, and reliable sync services to sync locally stored data, improving sync speed, time and overall reliability.