PreDevCamp Continues to Add Cities and Garner Attention

A burgeoning community of developers have signed up to participate in webOS “dev camps” that are slated to take place the first weekend after Palm releases webOS and Pre, according to a story by Jeffrey Schwartz posted at the Redmond Developer News website.

The preDevCamp, in which developers get together and write code, is on track to take place in at least 73 cities and possibly more (the list grows weekly).  We've noted their growth before and are pleased to see it continue.

William Hurley (AKA whurley), a member of the original iPhone development team, stated the iPhoneDevCamp in San Francisco resulted in 80 applications being developed in just one weekend.  Hurley is one of the founding organizers of the preDevCamp.

The draw for webOS is simple: Anyone who can develop for the Web in JavaScript can build apps for it.  Of course, multi-tasking and the physical keyboard are big pluses too.

Then there’s the whole Apple backlash (i.e. strict licensing terms. issues with getting paid).  Clearly, developers are weighing the tradeoffs.

The article goes on to quote a number of developers, including Greg Stevenson creator of a scheduling app called Runway that links the Pre’s calendar with multiple online calendars, who said:

“I would say I have guarded optimism… It may go nowhere or it could be a huge success. But it's worth at least giving it a shot."

We wish the best of luck to the folks at PreDevCamp (and we're still wondering what magical wonders they saw when they invaded SprintHQ)