WebOS 3.0.4 released | Hacker News Reader

WebOS 3.0.4 released

jaaksi.blogspot.com

76 pointsj_col31 comments

Love one of the anonymous comments on there:

"From one HP employee to another: THANK YOU for this awesome OS and OTA. The Touchpad, the Pre 3 ... such awesome products. I truly hope our new leadership will do the right thing and bring the platforms back."

It is an awesome OS except for one significant drawback: javascript. If not for the dependency on js these phones and tablets wouldn't lock-up hard so often or hang for several seconds after touching the screen more often than not. I know js fans will object but their single-threaded, interpreted language is the #2 source of Palm/HP's troubles.

The #1 Palm issue, however, is the hardware manufacturer/s. If Palm had been able to use the same CN fabs as Apple the Pre would be _big_. But they weren't and as a result the Pre/Pixi/Touchpad are larger than they could have been and, more significantly, the (Pre/Pixi) keyboards are the worst on any smartphone.

Great for the many HP employees like myself who got a TouchPad in the employee fire sale, supposedly there will be a lot of TouchPads going out as Christmas presents. If nothing else, the current TouchPad population is one giant, if expensive, beta program for WebOS - let's hope someone does something awesome with it.

I am lucky enough to own a tablet of each breed, and my TouchPad is by far my favorite. Sure there are less apps by an order of magnitude, but HP nailed most of the core services. For example, mark all as read -- I've yet to find this basic feature on my Honeycomb tab or iPad.

You can now mark multiple emails as read in iOS5.

mark multiple emails = O(n), mark all = O(1)

"Mark read" is a broken interaction anyway. You only ever use it when you haven't read the message.

So why do people do it? I do it to clear out messages that aren't worth reading, to get that number of unread emails in my Inbox folder down to 0.

Why do I care about unread messages? What I'm really worried about are unseen messages, and the set of unread messages contains these.

"Read/unread" and "Seen/unseen" are really just labels anyway, right? These could be automatically applied on seeing the message in a list view and on reading the message.

Now I have some sort of cool multiple-select label filter in place, and all I need to do is select the "Inbox" and "unseen" labels to get to email that I need to peruse. Every time I look at this label combination, all mail is marked "seen" and I never have to check off messages or apply a "read" state to messages that I have not read.

Notmuch (notmuchmail.org) gets close to what I want. I want to see its ideas adopted by the major webmail/mobile interfaces, so I don't have to contend with the legacy of email sorting.

I don't know, I feel like you're over-thinking it. "Mark as Read" is exactly that- "mark this as if I have read it, even though I have not". I don't see how it's broken.

Just to add to the over-thinking: I find myself marking things as read when I've gleaned their meaning from the subject, without instructing the app to display the entire message body.

"Mark as Read" should be "Mark as Understood".

The problem is that I can no longer distinguish between mail that I have read and mail that I simply don't care about. The solution I presented requires no explicit interaction and gives me this granularity. Sure, I can manually apply a label in Gmail, but that's explicit once more (and requires far too many clicks for such a simple operation).

> I can no longer distinguish between mail that I have read and mail that I simply don't care about.

Why is this distinction important? When do you need to browse through mail that you've read? If you need to find something you can just search for it by content or individual.

The problem with automatically applying a 'seen' label, is that it forces you to to immediately filter through all your new mail. You can't stop halfway because then some 'unseen' mail will get marked 'seen'.

You have to kinda feel for Ari Jaaksi: jumped ship from Nokia when Maemo/Meego was going down, only to find himself at Palm/HP...

made connectivity with non-HP phones possible

I wonder what that means. Synchronization? Tethering? Notifications about calls and SMS on the device?

The TouchPad can now work as a Bluetooth speakerphone for non-webOS phones that support the right profiles. It can also do SMS access on phones that expose that database.

Hi. I don't understand anymore. Didn't HP kill the tablet and WebOS?

What does this mean? Will there new tablets? If not, why WebOS is being updated?

HP probably wants to keep it updated in case they can sell the WebOS unit.

They killed the hardware. They have the #2 tablet by user base (admittedly due to selling many tablets at a loss during the fire sale) and do need to support them for a reasonable period of time, bug fixes and such, which is what this release is. They always said they wanted to keep the software alive.

I own a touchpad and without a developed app base it feels so rigid to me. I don't want to share links by email I want to share them through my various online accounts. I don't want to multitask by navigating to cards I want to have in-app multitasking through swipes. Even reading a PDF on it is painful because the font rendering is so poor. I don't think HP really "got it". It was barely worth the 99 I paid for it. I installed the new update today. And while this update increased the responsiveness it didn't address the fundamental workflow problems... But since they are abandoning it anyway I probably shouldn't expect anything anyway.

Sounds like you should sell it on eBay to someone who loves webOS, and make yourself a tidy profit in the process. The workflow issues you describe are basically how webOS fundamentally works, so it sounds like it is a design decision that you will never be comfortable with.

Thanks for the link! Does anyone know if this breaks the 3.0.2 recommended patches (e.g. muffling logging, etc.)

Word 'round the Precentral forums is that it breaks most patches. Like with all updates, you'll lose custom kernels until the kernel source is released. So I made a list of all the patched I use then removed them along with UberKernel.

muffle is broken until I have time to make a new patch. Probably not till this weekend.

Yet did HP not announce there would be no more Web OS devices, HP needs to open source this. The more choice the better! I can see Samsung or HTC producing some slick devices running Web OS. Hardware was always a key issue for me, the Pre was slow and boring.

I forget, didn't people demo Android running much quicker on touchpad hardware? If so, it's the decision to depend too much on the JavaScript stack and not the hardware that's the ultimate problem.

Android really doesn't run quicker than WebOS yet. There isn't any 2D hardware acceleration (last I knew, a few days ago). This means that sometimes Android is really fluid, but then it starts studdering and kind of ruins the experience.

I also had a ton of Force-Close's on the browser. I'm back to WebOS until the Android CM7 builds get past Alpha. It looks like it'll be usable, but not really yet.

You are correct, Android does run fast on the Touchpad.

This is still my #1 problem with the TouchPad:

http://forums.hpwebos.com/t5/HP-TouchPad-Software-Hardware/A...

Otherwise it's great.

I didn't realize that it converted all ampersands in the URL -- what a ridiculous oversight. What bugs me is that the browser doesn't support @font-face fonts. I don't understand the design process that led to implementing node.js as a service on a mobile device before adding in fundamental CSS support...

Can you provide more detail? Is this when entering URLs directly? Have you tried going through j.mp or bitly.com and shortening the URL, then bookmarking that version?

It's when entering them directly, clicking on links, or using bookmarks. The & gets passed through to the server--it's not just an issue with the UI. Annoying as hell.

For some reason this reminds me of the guy who recently ported Prince of Persia from the Apple 2 to the Commodore 64.

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