It’s not all bad news for Palm, as the company just introduced its Ares development tool to enable developers to create applications within a browser.
Palm will be hosting the development environment in the cloud, which should significantly lower the barrier to entry. Palm’s App Catalog really needs the boost too, as it only has a few thousand apps compared to the 38,000 programs in the Android Market and the more than 185,000 in the App Store.
Like webOS, Project Ares embodies Palm’s belief that the future of mobile will be built on the web. Project Ares aims to enable a next-generation mobile development workflow, in which developers move quickly and seamlessly from editing in a browser, to debugging on a device, to selling applications in Palm’s App Catalog or on the web.
It’s free if you’re part of the developer’s program, so have at it devs.
[Via Palm]