webosarchive.com
Seems like several others, my actual development career began on WebOS. In high school, I was intrigued by the idea of a web-based, multitasking capable smartphone and begged my parents to buy me one.
Ultimately I learned a ton and have great stories such as staying up all night re-architecting Weatherman (https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?&a...) because of the popularity (and this was before it was on the WebOS store, at this time it was invite-only so I had to post it on a forum!). Weatherman was just a hack on top of a hack on top of a hack. There was no Canvas API on the device so I had to generate the weather images on a server and then send them to the device, for example.
The highlight for me was winning one of the top spots in the Palm Hot Apps competition for the "free apps" category with Pixi Dust (https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?ca...). The physics weren't accurate by any means, but it was the first time I had seriously used C++ (I think it was, it was so long ago!).
I miss having platforms like these with innovative ideas and small communities. I learned so much by having to hack my way around the limitations of the operating system, and really miss WebOS overall. I think I might still have an old Palm Pre sitting a drawer somewhere.
Fun story: there was no internal API for app stats so every morning I had to manually extract data via Excel, then run scripts to generate the JSON that powered the Hot Apps dashboard. Fun times.
https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?se...
Edit: Yep, I just checked and have both the app client and backend code. I will post everything I can this weekend and ping you via email if I can find it in your profiles or I see you have your Discord alias.
[1]: https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?ca...
I'm getting so nostalgic, even tearing up a little :-)
Flickr Mundo - https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?se...
Mazer - https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?se...
Irish Rain - https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?&a...
As a random second anecdote, I really miss the hacker community around it. I can't remember the name of the forum, but there was a super active thread the day we got root on the device, and it was unbelievably cool to see some Palm employees show up in it and pointing folks in the right direction. Such a fun device.
* I have a personal gmail account with my events and apointments.
* Shared a URL from my work calendar (it helps that they use google workspace), and added that to my personal calendar. Especially useful if you don't want to add a work profile in your personal device. Personally the work calendar is all I need to check on my phone when I'm not on my work laptop.
* Added the Facebook Events calendar URL.
* Added the Songkick Events calendar URL for keeping track of concert dates.
* You can also subcribe to anything else you need, e.g. TV shows feed, Garmin's calendar feed, Formula One or other sports' calendars, holidays calendar...
What did it do that CalDAV doesn't permit?
If you want to archive my old Twitter feed, https://twitter.com/webostips, that might be useful for the help section. It really only ran in 2009-2010, as I got too busy after returning to Palm from my stint at Mozilla.
App menu was always on the upper-left side. Settings were on the upper-left. There was a dock at the bottom for most-used applications and an app drawer to hold the rest sorted into tabs.
CMD+Space to search your system was "Just Type" from the "home screen". Their unified notification feed is something I haven't really seen iOS or Android even attempt.
I once heard the iOS app paradigm was the equivalent of having a house with only doors facing to the outside. Going from your master bedroom to the master bath requires leaving the bedroom entirely, walking around the outside until you find the master bath and then going in.
When you multitask on OSX, do you switch applications by minimizing your app and opening it again from a desktop icon or from the app drawer? Nope. You use expose/mission control to see what's open on your current screen. You can also swipe left/right to view other virtual desktops. Your running applications (rather than your desktop) is your default view.
Same thing with webOS. Swipe up for expose where you'd see your current fanned out set of cards (one per app). Swiping left/right would show different sets of cards that you could create/rearrange based on whatever task. Just like OSX, those tabs would be LIVE rather than paused background stuff.
The default view with webOS was also application-first rather than desktop first. iOS and Android encourage having EVERYTHING "open" even though anything past the last handful of apps will probably have to reload anyway. The result is that finding anything useful in that deck of cards is very hard. webOS encouraged sorting that list and keeping it limited to what you were actually using.
While all the differences may seem small, but together, the overall experience feels much different.
HP's second (third?) CEO of the year killed the whole palm division when an investment and licensing webOS could have made HP/webOS into what Google/Android is today. They were finally coming out with decent hardware designs with bigger screens and without the dedicated keyboard.
Their in-progress Mochi design would be around a decade old today, but when you look at it, it has an aesthetic that I think most people would find very refreshing today.
https://www.theverge.com/2014/4/5/5585216/team-behind-webos-...
All flushed down the toilet in a span of ~10 years in the 00s, now known as a purveyor of subpar laptops and printers.
A shame that the HP brand didn't stay with what turned in to Agilent and Keysight.
Having a hardware keyboard made it a bit chunky but didn't feel bad in your pocket because it was so smooth. Also the hardware keyboard provided a true tactile feel so you could even type out some messages without looking at your screen nearly as much as you need to with on-screen keyboards.
(A variant is saying smaller phones are better for women who have smaller hands. They care even less because they have purses.)
IMO the hard-headed refusal to make a touch keyboard even optionally available also contributed to their demise.
I returned it after a few days.
Like many of the others, WebOS kicked off my career into software development and was my first endeavor building software larger then a simple website.
I created GetMeVino as a simple wine resource for myself as there were similar apps on IOS and I wanted one to use on WebOS. I remember posting it on precentral forums and actually got interest from Palm themselves to build it out further and release it on their catalog. I was blown away, inspired by the possibilities and that really lit a fire in me to want to continue creating even outside WebOS.
Definitely wouldn't have been here today without WebOS.
Some other highlights, the browser based IDE Ares way ahead of its time, WebOS at CES2010 and the Palm developer relations, getting invited to Mozilla for Firefox OS.
I am going to need to find my old devices now!
I've already tested with older BlackBerry, IE3, and as far back as Netscape 2.x, but I don't have a webOS device.
Is it possible you could spend just a few minutes on it and send me some feedback? Ideally, you should be able to register in one click (no email), write a post, and vote and reply to your own post.
The URL is in my profile...
Those two issues are resolved for now.
The first one is due to a feature designed to reduce the impact of crawler bots, which I'm still testing, so it's off for now.
The second is due to a caching issue, so I've reduced the window for that until cache-invalidation is solved :D
I did see the message you posted, which says:
>checking in from a webOS Touchpad!
I was also able to recover the message you first sent, reading:
>Quickly checking in from a webOS Touchpad. Looks good from here!
Thank you again for testing!
One of my first startups was based on Treos, they were awesome devices. Very snappy.
Software keyboards were considered a complete no-go, even by folks within Apple (Ken Kocienda's “Creative Selection” is a great read on the development of the keyboard). Dragging / flinging / pinch to zoom didn’t exist anywhere else or if it did, only in prototype or proof-of-concept form. The capacitive screen unlocked these features but no one else knew how to build them.
I was working at Sony Ericsson when the first iPhone was released. I distinctly remember holding it in my hand and using mobile Safari for the first time and thinking... “we’re fucked”. The company simply didn’t have the engineering chops needed to catch up. Later on Android would provide a possible solution but we managed to screw things up even with a full OS handed to us.
You can pretty easily draw a line and see stuff designed before the iPhone largely looked like the Treo or the Blackberry. Things designed after largely looked like the iPhone.
The Treo was more of a Palm Pilot with a cell phone built in, or the same but Windows Mobile PDA. The Blackberry was a two-way pager expanded into a cell phone.
The iPhone was sort of designed from the ground up to be a smart phone (the Sidekick may fit this too).
The Treo was nice (never got to have one) but it’s kind of a different generation. The iPhone generation (along with Android) is when smartphones exploded in popularity.
Thanks for bringing this back to life, memory lane and all. I miss my Pre and Touchpad. That mirror on the back of the Pre was such a delightful little touch.
I also love the idea that a screenshot I took on my computer years ago is still kicking around on the internet.
Anyway thanks again!
It's just not as much fun to use the devices without it being loaded with all sorts of fun programs.
I also recently scored a HP Laserjet 2200, which has an IrDA port on the front, which was a nice bonus for me in particular. I remember dreaming of being able to print from them and thinking how cool that would be. Funny how you only appreciate something when it's not possible.
Edit: I just realized this isn't about that Palm era, but yes, for the same reason I of course had to get a Palm Pre the second it came out. It was my first smartphone, and I remember it fondly.
Because I'm fairly certain it has to be some internal database, or someone scraped it and there were fields HP was providing in the API that weren't visible publicly.
Which means there its possible that the actual author's emails shared with HP during app submission are in there too. In which case, it would be nice if someone made an attempt to contact the authors and get their permission.
In my case I would give it, and maybe provide a few things that appear to be missing. Along with maybe cleaning up the code a bit and posting it on github/etc. My touchpad did the whole battery to rundown refuse to boot when plugged in thing a few years ago, and its been on my list of things to recover, but.. sigh.
I did reach out to some of the big name publishers, but was generally ignored. Because the content is for archival purposes, and there are some provisions for this in US copyright law, I decided to take the approach of removing content upon request, rather than trying to get affirmative responses from people who are either unreachable, or uninterested. To date, I've had one (very polite) take-down request, which I responded to immediately, and removed their content entirely from the archive. Today's post blew up a little more than I expected, so I may get more -- I'll respond to each appropriately.
Everything I've published is on GitHub or archive.org, and while I don't have as much spare time for it now, I'll do my best to keep it curated and within fair use. If you'd like to add some of your content to the archive (or have some of your content removed) I've posted my email a couple of times in this thread, or you can find it on the website.
Who are you, BTW? Were you on the webOS engineering team? I was in devrel.
I actually didn't work on webOS, but for a competing mobile platform, but was always a huge fan of webOS, and ended up licensing its printing subsystem from HP for our platform (after HP gave up!)
I love connecting with its original community, and I think I found you on Twitter. Drop me a line if you'd like to swap war stories!
Version after the switched to a more flat with a little larger screen. Not as nice but I guess they had to compete with Android.
I made an app and its satisfying to see it in the Museum catalog.
How did you find everything and put it together?
It's nice to see it again. I always thought webOS and the palm pre were pretty rad, I really thought it catch on.
edit: like, by a lot.
Curious how did you back all this up?
The other part is the community. People who had backed up their libraries. Devices found on eBay that still had a bunch of apps on them. People who had hoarded IPKs and had them saved on hard drives and were willing to share. That and lots of scraping Google by filename...
I should finish that Gopher client I was writing ...