The lost secrets of Palm webOS (2014) | Hacker News Reader

The lost secrets of Palm webOS (2014)

theverge.com

50 pointsmichalpleban31 comments

I bought an HP Touchpad in the $99 fire sale and I still have it. The UX was so far ahead of its time that I was blown away by it. It’s still chugging along without hiccups. I miss the days of such lovely and unique devices.

A decade later, LG's version of webOS continues to ship on TVs, based on OpenEmbedded/Yocto, https://www.webosose.org

And a much better user experience than using Android TV.

I loved my Handspring Visor and PalmOS Treo phones - they had every smartphone feature, back in 2004.

My Prē 2 and Veer are still going strong, and I still really love the Veer's size.

How are you still using it? I still have my Pixi+.

I still miss my HP Pre3, it was a great phone for that time...

Likewise for the Centro.

The best thing about Palm Prē [for non owners] was their Tamara Hope spokeslady/ad campaign by Modernista!

https://youtu.be/q3OfYkJbyLw

It's too bad that nobody's figured out notifications as great as the Pre had

The entire experience (other than the peed issues you sometimes got) was so much better, but it did also much less(which is not a negative thing)

They rather ridiculously discuss an OS as if all that mattered was the UI.

It matters a lot, it's one of the reasons we're still waiting for the year of Linux on the desktop?

And on small screen devices with the sole input a fat finger it matters even more if you ask me.

UI is a layer on top of the OS.

It is not the OS.

Only on the UNIX world.

On the desktop world, the UI is a component of the OS, and is responsible of the whole OS experience.

Hence why the successful OSes that happen to have UNIX internals, those internals are not exposed to the users, and are not optional for most development scenarios.

Hence why GNU/Linux on the desktop failed, while Linux kernel on the mobile and TVs with prescribed user and developer experience has succeed.

"UNIX" should be "Posix", I think.

Not sure I agree with the last sentence, but an interesting point.

Also, to what extent is the UI part of, for example, Windows 11 ? I think Windows can run headless ?

Yes as the Server Core configuration it can, but you don't get to replace Win32 puzzle piece that goes on top with something else, you might augment it with alternative UI frameworks, but ultimately it is Win32 at the bottom layer.

Just like on macOS, while UNIX on the bottom layer, you don't get to plug something else instead of WindowServer and related low level APIs. Even with XQuartz, it builds on top of it, just like they build on top of Win32 on Windows.

> On the desktop world, the UI is a component of the OS, and is responsible of the whole OS experience.

You mean iOS when the UI sucks ? Or Android ? Or Windows ? /s

Compared with the fragmented way of UI/UX on traditional UNIX clones with special snowflakes on top of Xlib and whatever is the sound stack of the month, with exception of NeWS/NeXTSTEP/OS X, they suck less.

Linux works perfectly fine on my desktop.

Just by being in this comment section our experiences are outliers.

> we're still waiting for the year of Linux on the desktop ?

Speak for yourself. We use linux as a desktop since 1997.

Speak for yourself :)

I used linux as a desktop until about 2013, then switched to Mac OS. My linux boxes are headless now.

It's discussing and product, and that's all the customer actually cares about. When tech news outlets discuss Google Android versus MIUI versus OneUI versus iOS versus iPadOS, they don't care about the way the kernel implements multithreading or what interrupt mechanisms the USB drivers use.

Given its similarity, webOS and Android could be considered the same OS if you're looking at it from an OS designer point of view, but that's meaningless to the readers of this article.

But they surely must care about how fast the OS is, what it can connect to, what protocols it supports. That is all about OS-without-UI.

They should call sites like The Verge '"Tech" News'. Technical news for people who don't actually understand any of the actual technology involved.

> But they surely must care about how fast the OS is,

And how do you measure it ? iOS is fast to start but some functions need some time.

What it can connect to and what protocols it supports all depends on the software you run on it. As long as there is supports for basic I/O, you can run a modern copy of Chrome on it. That's why Android 7 and Windows XP can still be used for day-to-day browsing just fine, even though the OS itself stopped being supported and maintained years ago.

You can sort of see some of the motifs in the original material design.

(2014)

Added. Thanks!

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