Following an apparent rejection of our suggestion of "Immaculate Collection," Palm's Developer Network site suggests that the official name of its app store for webOS is simply going to be "App Catalog". The name isn't terribly important, but the concept is critical -- every mobile platform of consequence is moving in the direction of intelligent, on-the-go app management, and with the Pre, Palm can't afford to be any different in that regard.
Outside Palm's inner circle of trusted partners, the webOS SDK (playfully named "Mojo") won't be released to would-be app developers until we get closer to the Pre's launch, but we know a few key details. First off, as "webOS" implies, apps written for the platform are web-based -- HTML, JavaScript, that sort of stuff -- but unlike Apple's original vision for the iPhone, Palm's going to include libraries that allow devs to tap in to the Pre's hardware capabilities and interact closely with services exposed by the operating system. For users, that means apps are hopefully going to be rich and powerful, but graphically intensive, heavily interactive things -- think games, mainly -- aren't likely to happen. That's not to say Palm won't eventually offer a binary SDK, but the tools they appear to be offering up front won't get the job done, and we've confirmed in talking to Palm that Pre gaming was never a priority for the company during the development cycle. In a nutshell: Tetris, yes; Tetrisphere, not so much.
