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The second day of the PalmSource Dev Con certainly didn't have the excitement of the first day as the convention focused more on the business of assisting the development community with software tools, providing industry  and strategic guidance, and promoting relationships between developers and PalmSource's Partners.  The standout talk today was not from PalmSource but from the author of Emotional Design, a cognitive psychologist and consultant named Donald Norman. 

In his talk Donald Norman discussed emotional design --essentially the idea that a product has to appeal to a consumer's gut instinct.  Achieving this emotional' appeal involves a complex combination of powerful features that are well-integrated, simple to use, and packaged in a product with a compelling look and feel.  As one might expect, Apple was used as an example of a company benefiting from an emotional appeal focus.   Norman was generally positive about the Treo as well, but had his share of criticism for both software  and OS developers and hardware manufacturers.  He felt that the Palm OS, Palm software, and hardware still need work to be more user-friendly and that hardware needs to be more attractive and elegant.  He blamed the current lack of attention to emotional design on an outdated technologist mindset.  A good deal of what he said appeared to be well received, despite the fact it was his audience he criticized and this community prides itself on their attention to a positive user experience.
 
Later talks by Larry Slotnick, Patrick McVeigh, and Bill Lee, all of PalmSource, focused on PalmSource's business strategy and central to that is making Linux work for PalmSource.  Clearly PalmSource's future success will be closely tied to how well Palm OS for Linux, as it is officially called for now, is implemented over the next 12 months.  The planned release for Palm OS for Linux version 1.0 appears to be at the end June 2006 with developer tools coming out a few month prior.  Patrick McVeigh mentioned that there was great industry-wide interest in what PalmSource is doing with Linux.  It certainly seemed evident that Treo's success in the mobile phone market and PalmSource's work on designing Palm OS for Linux has gotten the attention of the industry.