Hacker News Reader

Comment by megaduck | Hacker News Reader

This is fantastic news. WebOS has always been full of great ideas, but held back by shaky underpinnings. It's like the inverse of most open-source projects. Great UI, not-so-hot implementation.

There's a lot of folks (myself included) that would have been happy to jump in and assist, but couldn't due to the closed-source nature of the platform.

The real prize, however, is Enyo. It's a great Javascript framework, and works in virtually any webkit-based browser. The biggest problem was the licensing terms: You could only use it on WebOS phones. Now that barrier's being removed.

I'm really looking forward to this. Can't wait to dive into the code. :)

View on HN

Seconding the excitement about Enyo. This could/should be absolutely huge. Speaks to the level of disorganisation in HP that the blog they link to has no mention of the open sourcing, though. Woops.

There's a blog post on it now. I don't know how much disorganization that speaks to: Maybe the PR person jumped the gun by a few minutes, maybe the blogger was a few minutes late, or maybe they posted simultaneously and then discovered that their blogging platform has a longer cache than the PR wire. :-)

I will check out Enyo, thanks (and megaduck too) for the tip!

They do mention it in their press release: "HP also will contribute ENYO, the application framework for webOS, to the community in the near future along with a plan for the remaining components of the user space."

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/111209xa.html?m...

Enyo is most definitely the best mobile development I've ever done. Clean & simple implementation, and I can use the Chrome dev tools to debug.

megaduck, you can already dive into parts (well the non-compiled bits) by taking the webOS doctor apart (it's just a jar).

The WebOS Internals team is happy to accept any patches which are then made available to users with Preware.

So you don't have to wait to get started and we would love more hackers joining the effort. We are also usually available on #wosi-dev on IRC.

If you are interested in assisting an open source mobile project, why not to give a hand to Mer and Nemo Mobile?

http://merproject.org/

http://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Nemo

I'd love to see Enyo apps on Mer. Probably something we also need to think about in the context of http://apps.formeego.org

Honest answer, subjective of course:

- Because WebOS has more real devices out there, and for cheap. - Development for the platform is ~solved~ and nice (including nice emulator images) - I prefer the card view / just type experience to what I know from MeeGo []

: I was a huge Maemo fanboy in the past, got a couple of their shirts and went to their summits. Still own a N810, but it's mostly a clunky music player now. For me Maemo & MeeGo died by now, WebOS is in a state between worlds and might survive (after this announcement) with some support.

I guess that I'm kind of worried this won't be a good thing (at least for Web OS). Without any concrete plans for upcoming Web OS devices, it is unclear whether HP will actually continue to develop the OS. There aren't all that many devices that can run the current version of Web OS - just the Touchpad and Pre3 AFAIK, and the Pre3 was barely released). It doesn't appear that these are being currently produced or sold. I guess it is possible that Web OS will be ported to Android devices, but the lack of an official development platform is definitely a roadblock.

I'm not sure whether Web OS can survive without both current devices and active development by HP. I'm fairly certain that Open Source developers alone won't be able to advance the platform to the next level, although I'm sure that there is a lot that they can contribute.

With that said, I'm sure there is a lot of interesting technology that can be mined out of Web OS and integrated into other devices.

Fantastic news.

WebOS > Android

If they had done this before Nokia bought in to Windows Phone 7 then we might actually have seen a great user interface on Nokia's excellent hardware.

Maybe RIM could adopt it instead? They could really use a better UI, plus a platform that actually scales well to tablets. Plus they have a large enough install base that once they get rid of their disastrous programming environment developers might actually start writing good apps for their phones.

RIM has already settled on QNX for its next-generation OS (their tablet runs on it), and I think they just don't have the software/UI chops to handle it either way.

I can see WebOS being concurrence/counterbalance to Android and W7P (mostly Android) for other phonemakers than Samsung (who already has bada)

QNX is the underlying RTOS. Application UI is done in Adobe AIR, which is a dead platform. JS/HTML5 on top of QNX would capitalize on their strengths (more responsiveness over Android) and patch over their weaknesses.

>The UI is done in Adobe AIR

I don't think that's true. Adobe AIR is supported for apps but the actual UI is native.

> JS/HTML5 on top of QNX would capitalize on their strengths (more responsiveness over Android) and patch over their weaknesses.

We're talking about RIM here, how would web technologies (a game they are still late at) "capitalize on their streights"? Let alone "patch over their weaknesses"?

I'm guessing that nailer is referring to the fact that QNX is a realtime OS, which could provide decreased UI latency compared to Android. QNX is a "strength" of RIM, so using it to their advantage would "capitalize on their strengths."

As an aside, I always thought it was weird that QNX was owned by Harman for a while...

Continuing to use QNX's RTOS would capitalize on their strengths.

Having a application development platform that has actual developers and a growing community would path over the weakness of Adobe AIR, which has neither.

The PlayBook ships with a recent version of WebKit and all Blackberry 7.X phones contain a WebKit based browser. Starting with the Torch last summer most BB phones shipped with WebKit. The days of the Java based browser on BlackBerry's are over.

Disclaimer: I am part of the WebKit team at RIM.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but that is not the main benefit of WebOS. I believe the main benefit of WebOS is that it supports HTML5/JS applications natively in the OS, and they are not bound by a browser frame.

Nobody wants to have to open a browser and load a bookmark to get to an application that has browser widgets taking up space at the top, bottom, and side of the screen. They want a home screen icon they can tap once and get an application with native look and feel. If developers can write that app in HTML5/JS then it's a win/win for both developers and users. Developers get a highly portable framework that allows them to rapidly develop software and users get a native app experience.

When the Playbook was launched, you could develop both AIR and HTML5 apps. All their other SDKs have been in beta ever since.

HTML5 apps are apparently wrapped in AIR internally, and maybe that's what made my app more laggy than in iPad Safari. But HTML5 app dev is nothing new for RIM.

QNX is a micro kernel, theoretically they could support multiple application programming environments at the same time on the same phone, and they should. Ie they could now chirn out a phone that can support webos, rim and android apps simultaneously

I agree that Nokia would have been a nice fit for WebOS, but people who don't think Windows Phone is has a great interface for a phone are squarely in the minority.

I see what you did there.

But yes, it's great that two things came out of Nokia+Microsoft: Microsoft finally has a really solid mobile hardware partner, and Nokia finally has a well-designed operating system.*

*That they care about. Shed a tear for MeeGo Harmattan.

Ha, I didn't see what I did there until you pointed out what I did there.

squares/tiles

Why hate on Mango? Windows 7.5 has a fantastic UI -- I prefer it to every flavor of Android I've ever seen!

I've been an iPhone user since 2007 and have had every model with the exception of the 4s. I fully intended on moving to Android, specifically the Galaxy Nexus, but after playing with the Mango UI I bought the Samsung Focus S and I'm glad I did. It is by far the best OS I've used on a phone yet! It makes the iOS UI simply look dated (which in all honesty it hasn't changed much since 2007).

Unfortunately, the app ecosystem has not caught up to the system UX yet. A lot of the apps are slower and have fewer features than their iOS/Android counterparts. That seems to be the case with webOS as well. Hopefully, these platforms catch on a little bit to provide a refreshing counterbalance to the app grid UX of iOS/Android.

There are definitely far fewer apps in their app marketplace. However, the core apps that I use quite frequently are there and are just as good as their iOS counterparts (if not better...both Spotify and Twitter I prefer on Mango). There are a few exceptions here for me like 1Password which is not near as good as the iOS version but to be fair they offer it for free on Mango compared to the 15.00 price tag on iOS.

The one thing I'm really excited about though is that the developer tools are second to none. Microsoft has made it very simple to build very nice looking applications very quickly. As a developer that just moved to this platform I see the limited apps as great opportunity to help improve this platform even further and I plan on doing just that!

So you're saying you're a "developer" that was using iOS, planned on going to the Nexus and then you just decided to go to windows phone after playing with a Focus S and now after getting your new phone suddenly you're going to start developing for windows phone. Sure.

What's wrong with that? If the SDK is easy enough to jump in, why not?

I started my career as a developer working on the Microsoft platform. In fact, I'm probably still most comfortable in C# more than any other languages. My current job I work in a mixed environment of C#, Java, and Ruby. I'm not sure why the sarcastic comment without knowing my history as a developer?

Nokia switching to an open-sourced WebOS would never have happened. They already had a beautiful, slick and usable operating system, and at least some kind of a strategy of bootstrapping it into a viable ecosystem (using QT on Symbian as the incentive to develop for QT on Meego).

It's still hard to say whether the decision to basically can Meego and bet everything on WP7 was the right one. But at least there was some kind of a case to be made on WP7 having a larger potential ecosystem, and Microsoft being willing to give Nokia huge bags of money. For WebOS it would have been a case of downgrading in every important sense. No real eco-system, no in-house experience, no other company backing it, no real technical advantages over Meego.

While I agree I really don't see hardware manufacturers adopting webOS. Since webOS is now Open Source it would be much easier for them to adopt the innovations of webOS (particularly interface wise) and use it as a shell on top of Android. That way you get the Android marketplace and the advantages of webOS.

I guess HP could enforce the patents to keep those innovations locked to webOS but it's kind of hard to do that AND promote webOS as an open solution for people to use.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com