What IDE for newbies, now that CodeWarrior for Palm is "temporarily unavailable"?

I'm interested in getting involved with developing Palm OS apps, and I'm looking for a good IDE to get started. I want something that's reasonably powerful (at least enough to make hi-res, Treo 650 compatible apps), does not require the use of runtime modules, and does not have a learning curve too steep for someone with limited programming experience (but plenty of free time and enthusiasm). A GUI would be nice, I think, as well.

From what I can tell, CodeWarrior is (or has been) the IDE of choice for Palm programming, but it is listed as "temporarily unavailable" on Metrowerks' website, and the company tells me by email that it doesn't know if and when it will be re-released. Is there some other IDE I can/should try that will meet my needs? HB++, maybe? Others?

TIA for any suggestions . . . :cool:

palmsource has a complete suite of free IDE and development tools based off of the eclipse project. It's the recommended method of developing for palm os as far as I know. [url]www.palmsource.com[/url]

Thanks!! I'll check it out.

Hi Cisco187.

I am a newcomer to Palm OS programming as well. When I decided I wanted to do some programming in it, I looked at numerous options for doing it. The one I ultimately decided on was HB++. It has everything you mentioned that you were wanting in your message. It is a visual-basic like, rapid application development environment with a nice IDE and fast executables. As it is similar to visual basic, you will be able to write programs in it much faster than you could with C/C++ compliers. It has a good collection of classes that take much of the work out of programming for you as well. Every review I have seen of it is very positive. It is free to try.

On the downside, it is fairly new development tool, so there is less programming material devoted specifically to it. There are numerous websites and discussion groups with good information about it, however, as well as the more general Palm OS programming reference material that is not compiler specific. The biggest factor is cost. It is one of the most expensive compliers - if not the most expensive.

So, in the end, it came down to the choice for me of which did I want to spend - my money or my time. The choice I made was to spend the money up front and save myself the development time.

I hope this helps.

Ken

Don't overlook NSBasic. It's very good and is a mature product. The developers give excellent support and there is a very active user group on Yahoo. Over 1000 posts per month, and the developer suppport guy hangs out there as well.