Sprint’s Open Developer Conference is taking place this week in Santa Clara, California.  I had the opportunity to attend this event, which is sponsored by Palm and HTC.  This morning featured a number of sessions about webOS.  I have been ‘live-tweeting’ the conference from the twitter account, so tune in if you’re interested in finding out what happens tomorrow or to go back and look at some pics from the event.

The first session of the morning featured Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer of Palm.  They opened the conference by giving a little bit of their background and how they came to Palm.  They went on to discuss more about webOS and what makes it so interesting.  They were then followed by Mitch Allen, Palm’s CTO, who talked some more about webOS.  Mitch was followed by Geoff Schuller who talked the Palm’s user interface design.  Geoff was followed by Matthew Hornyak who took us further into UI and how webOS apps interface with the UI components.

Following these sessions Palm brought out the developers of some of their popular apps.  First up was Chris Sepulveda of Pivotal Labs, makers of the popular Twitter client Tweed.  He showed off Tweed and Scoop and talked about why the like developing with the Mojo SDK for webOS.  Chris was followed by Lawrence Davison of Mark/Space, makers of The Missing Sync.  One of the comments Chris made was that they at first viewed the Mojo SDK’s use of JavaScript as a problem for app development but came to realize that it was a real advantage.  The use technologies built around Web standards allowed one of their IT folks to make the transition to a developer role, which he has carried forward into other applications.

Following a quick demo of The Missing Sync we had Alex Pachikov of Evernote. After a demonstration of some of the features of Evernote Alex talked about how they had developed their own grid view widget for webOS.  He went on to say that they have opened up the Evernote API completely to developers:  The same API they use can be used by others wanting to develop apps to Evernote’s server-side.  Finally, Dan Kurtz of SelfAware Games did a somewhat trouble-plagued demo of Word Ace and talked about the process behind developing that game and the followup Card Ace.

One thing that was clear is that these developers were excited to be developing for webOS and that they were all able to develop the apps they wanted to develop with the tools Palm has provided.  After a short break they were back to answer some questions from the audience.  Some of the interesting tidbits (as tweeted) were that Pivotal has made available a DOM-less JavaScript unit testing framework called Jasmine and will be soon releasing a tool targeting webOS development called Pockets.  Also, Mark/Space indicated that all the API’s they’re using for syncing are the published APIs (as in, they are not using any special Palm-only APIs).  Ben Galbraith also said that Palm is currently synchronizing with the Webkit trunk, which will bring the browser in the Pre up to Webkit 4.  The upside of this would be much better HTML5 support, including more complete Canvas and CSS transition support.

Next up was Stephen Feaster of Palm who gave an introduction to installing the Mojo SDK.  Stephen led the crowd through the development of an application that pulled a feed from Twitter to track Caltrain delays.  This was followed by Ben and Dion discussing the app distribution channels that will be opened up to developers when the developer program is officially launched in December.  Although we’ve covered this before, the interesting new bit of information is that they will open up an API to the app distribution feed to allow developers to use the information generated by Palm for new and interesting purposes.

After this, HTC took the stage to show off their upcoming Windows Mobile and Android devices.  During the presentation I asked if HTC would be interested in creating a phone with the webOS platform if Palm were willing to license it.  The response I got indicated that there was definitely some interest in that.  Whether that would be a strategic move for Palm or not is another question.  Certainly Palm has created one of the most talked about smartphone OS’es and other manufacturers are taking notice.

In the evening, Palm and HTC each had coding conferences.  A great group of Palm staffers were on hand to help people write apps for webOS and to talk with the developers.  One thing that I took away from this is that Palm is really interested in helping out the developer community and that the developer community is really interested in working together to create something great for this platform.  The folks at webOS School were really helpful for those who were getting going with the Mojo SDK.

It’s been a long and really fruitful day.  I’m looking forward to the sessions tomorrow and getting to meet more developers and talk with the folks from Palm.  Tune in tomorrow for more!