Intel® Atom™ Developer Program

Question

I am a devlopere and i saw Intel® Atom™ Developer Program ads on stackoverflow. I have read the details but dont know if it is worth joining. Is it worh joining ?? http://appdeveloper.intel.com/en-us/

Answer 1

Is it worth joining is a very subjective question which invites more questions to really analyze:

Do you have / use an Atom-based machine (netbook or nettop) on a regular basis ?

Do you have a business idea for a program that would benefit owners of these Machines?

Basically, they are looking for either games or apps that will run on fairly low end hardware without extra input devices (small keyboard / small trackpad). You can't expect very fast graphics acceleration (Intel Graphics) and you have to target common netbook resolutions (as low as 1024x600 and 800x600).

Most netbooks are used as a second (or third) machine. Either for basic internet browsing, portable e-mail, or by travelers with light computing needs.

This isn't to say there isn't a netbook market. You just need to bring something of value that can target these machines.

There are quite a few apps that would run fine on the netbook CPU's but could benefit immensely just from readjusting the UI so that the interface works better on a low-resolution as many current apps are now requiring 1280x768 screen res or higher to work well. This is certainly true for webpages -- check out BrowserSize on Google Labs.

For example, I own a netbook and I'd certainly pay for a cheap but usable low-res mail app that could handle POP mail much better than the clunky interfaces provided by most Internet Providers (Comcast.net is a huge offender in this case -- having webmail that is unuseable on netbooks due to it's high resolution requirements).