HP releases more Open webOS code, including System Manager and core apps | Hacker News Reader

HP releases more Open webOS code, including System Manager and core apps

arstechnica.com

86 pointsllambda19 comments

There are so many things to love about WebOS; in some aspects it offers such a wonderful user experience(cards, gestures - like others have mentioned, notifications are so simple and non invasive.). Too bad it was not as widely adopted as other mobile OSes out there. It's frustrating to build something nice then get disappointed later when no one uses it.

I know webOS is far from being relevant in the world of mobile operating systems but it will always be my favorite. Open sourcing really was the right way to go, and I applaud HP for choosing that route.

Open sourcing it makes it effectively a dead-end as a platform. At least closed source it might have been worthwhile as an alternative platform for someone. Hell, maybe RIM could have bought it and been further along than the current Blackberry OS.

Yes, we all get pick at the pieces like buzzards now but that's not a good end for the platform.

Incorrect. There are now two upcoming distributions of webOS - the Community Edition of webOS (WOCE, http://webos-ports.org/) which is still only suitable for devs, and Open webOS (http://openwebosproject.org/) which will appear on future HP devices. Open webOS will not be made available for existing HP devices (like the Touchpad or Pre).

There really is a need for some "legacy phone" OS. There soon will be plenty of pretty powerful phones out there out of support, and something a bit low on resources would be very useful for that. Is the hardware really that splintered?

I've got a Pre and a Nexus One sitting around idly myself. Sure, no multiple cores, but they're not exactly 8 bit computers without MMUs...

I think the problem for Open webOS preventing them from backporting it to older hardware is the proprietary drivers. There was quite a bit of disappointment with HP when it was announced that Open webOS wouldn't be available for the Touchpad. I can understand their reasons but it does put more pressure on the community edition now. They are doing great things though, so theres little doubt a stable Touchpad version will be available soonish. I don't own a Pre but there seems to be a lot of love for it. I personally think webOS on the Touchpad has a beautiful and elegant user experience but is a bit of an arse to develop for so I'm going to wait until a stable Open webOS release to seriously look at its internals.

I think it was going to a dead end anyway, at least people now get to play with it.

Jelly Bean is a pretty good phone platform, but I like knowing that webOS is an option if Android falters.

I love Jelly Bean as well, especially that card based multitasking system ;)

I hope that some of the ideas (namely the cards view and gesture area) come to other mobile OSs. Those are my favourite features by far.

One question - have they relesed enough to enable somebody to compile a full OS that you can run or is that down the line?

QT, really? Using a framework for a must-be-power-efficient device on a much-slower-than-desktop cpu. I'm not a QT or C++ expert and wondering outcomes of using QT for webOS. There is absolutely a hit on power and speed but how much?

Actually Qt is in use on several low-power boards and it shows excellent performance. Just google a bit and you'll find some examples.

Qt is about as low level as iOS's Objective-C runtime (both are compiled to native code and offer semi-manual memory management.) Meanwhile Android is based on full-blown virtual machine (Dalvik) with garbage collection.

HTML5 on the other hand is an elephant in the room. Promoting it as THE way to write apps for WebOS was a huge mistake. It's terrible inefficiency lead to stuttering ui and godawful memory consumption.

Also Qt has been used for graphical embedded projects for years (e.g. it doesn't require X11 on linux and can be compiled on many different architectures.)

<quote>HTML5 on the other hand is an elephant in the room. Promoting it as THE way to write apps for WebOS was a huge mistake. It's terrible inefficiency lead to stuttering ui and godawful memory consumption.</quote>

Agreed. Applications can be written in Javascript using the Enyo framework (Enyo 2 for Open WebOS) so you don't see much html5, but applications can also be written in c++ and their performance is excellent.

Enyo v2 is really superb and you get an awful lot of gui magic for very little: http://enyojs.com/ It recently released it's first stable 1.0 but even their pre-stable versions were really quite comprehensive.

Purely anecdotal, but in Android (Cyanogenmod) vs webOS power management I've found webOS beats it hands down. I just turned my Touchpad on now for the first time in a few days and the meter is reading as 43%. I don't use it heavily, usually just in hour or two sessions and charge it about once every four or five days.

It's closer to the metal than Dalvik

Do you think we are going to see webOS ported some day to more tablets, such as the very cheap (<$100) Allwinner-based ones? That'd be cool

webOS will be the next WebKit, everyone will use portions of the code.

I really had big hopes for webOS, it looked very promising when it was announced. Too bad it never made it.

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