Here's an interesting development from Palm. The Ares SDK. You will need a Palm Developer Account to access it, but once you've got that you're in. So far it looks like an online Visual Basic for Palm Pre. I heard about this yesterday via Engadget but didn't have time to check it out until today. And, yes, its very, very cool.

I can certainly see how this is going to encourage people to develop for Palm. Since the whole thing is online, say goodbye to having to install Mojo, their other development environment. Isn't this based on Bespin, Mozilla experimental online code editor...? Its a great advert for coding in the Cloud...

The only thing I'm a bit worried about is the "Visual Basic" thing. I can remember back to Visual Basic for Windows and the abominations that produced. They were certainly useful applications, but some of the UI designs were, um, "innovative". The were also a teeny bit buggy and apt to crash often...!

It cool though... Its just a pity that market share for Palm Pre is so low I can't justify to myself the cost of getting a Pre development machine.

The other concern is that any "App" produced will be a Javascript/HTML mash-up. Great for quick Apps and Pototypes but I can't see any exciting games being produced.