Russian site
Mobile-Review has leaked more screenshots of the ALP demo that PalmSource gave at 3GSM in Barcelona last week.
Both PalmInfocenter.com and LinuxDevices.com appear to have misindentified what some of the screenshots represent. I'll give my impressions of what we're looking at here, which I grant you are still only best guesses based on the limited information I have.
This first screenshot does indeed appear to be a launcher, although, as we'll see in a moment, it's almost certainly not the launcher application written against ALP's native application framework, codenamed MAX. It's probably something put together just for the demo, which is of a very early version of ALP.
All agree that this screenshot shows the legacy Palm OS MemoPad application running in ALP's built-in Palm OS emulator. This is not to be confused with POSE, the Palm OS emulator that runs on the Windows desktop. It's a different animal, although it will perform much the same function: to enable software written for Palm OS to run without modification on a different OS, in this case Linux.
According to the Russian site, this third screenshot is not a Java game as LinuxDevices.com reports, but a native GTK+ "MineSweeper" game. GTK+ is one of the two most popular Linux toolkits for developing graphical user interfaces and is used in the Nokia 770's Maemo platform as well as the GPE palmtop Linux system. ALP was announced as running native GTK+ applications in addition to legacy Palm OS apps, Java apps, and applications developed specifically for the new MAX framework.
If you go by the Russian site, this fourth image is not a native MAX application as Palm Infocenter reports, but a Java MIDlet running inside a MAX shell. Even that is probably not a very accurate description. PalmSource engineer David Fedor recently explained on the Palm Entrepreneur's Forum that the MAX framework will be designed to "float above" applications that are written against APIs other than MAX, enabling the user to interact with the device via some of the navigation functionality that MAX provides even when you're not running a MAX application. You'll notice a toolbar across the top of the screen in this image that appears to have buttons for accessing other applications. MAX is supposed to provide easy ways to view and switch between different running applications without resorting to the stylus and touchscreen. From these pictures it's my guess that the "float above" feature of MAX hasn't been implemented yet for Palm OS or GTK applications.
The fact that we don't see this toolbar in the first image is (in addition to the fact that the icons are stupidly large!) what leads me to believe it has nothing to do with the MAX application launcher. The launcher was described as enabling all apps on the device to be viewed and launched from a single interface regardless of what API was used to develop them, and this seems to be designed with something similar in mind, but that's about all you can say about it.
In short, I don't think we really have anything here that gives a good idea yet of how MAX will look or work. We'll just have to wait--either for better leaked pictures or an official release of MAX screenshots. If PalmSource isn't releasing screenshots themselves, you can bet it's because they know things are going to look different when ALP ships around the end of the year.
Here's LinuxDevices.com's write-up:
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS7558035858.html