Open webOS 1.0 is here | Hacker News Reader

Open webOS 1.0 is here

webosnation.com

95 pointsfreshrap630 comments

The GitHub repository is at https://github.com/openwebos/ for anyone who is interested.

I'm tentatively excited by this. webOS was my 'first love' in modern mobile operating systems. Though it lacked the polish of iOS and was limited by the hardware both Palm and HP chose to pair with it, it was ahead of its time in many respects.

Just think, before the original Droid launched on Verizon, webOS had more marketshare and mindshare than Android. Imagine what could have been.

Do you have any reference to the webOs marketshare statement? I don't remember this being true.

You're correct, sir. My fond memories of webOS must have clouded my judgment. :-) I'll be back with figures in a sec.

If those are U.S. numbers it's pretty comparable. Android had been out almost a year by August '09 while WebOS only a few months. Verizon was originally planning to launch the Pre as its premiere smartphone but then got in bed with Google, launched the Droid, and the rest is history. I don't think WebOS would be in Android's position if things had gone differently; the ability to customize Android was always its biggest selling factor... but maybe, just maybe, Verizon customers would have loved their WebOS phones enough to give it a longer life than it had. It was a much better OS than Android at the time. As someone who owned Android 1.0, 1.5, and 1.6 devices I can definitely say that.

I like the approaches of both webOS and Firefox Mobile OS. For sure Javascript might not be the language one would choose to start with if one was re envisioning the web today with all the last decades learnings. And perhaps a fresh start could see lots of the incidental and accidental complexity dropped from CSS and HTML. But they are what we have today, and perhaps in time Javascript can align itself more closely to Scheme and a WebCPU element can come along to allow near native code where needed.

I have difficulty seeing a strategy underlying Google's effort with Java/Android - I dont see where it fits for a web company. The App / App Store centric distribution model is a step away from open exchange of information, and the whole App updating model seems very pre- web. Building up yet another Java ecosystem for UI seems another miss step like the original MIDP/J2ME disaster - what is it with Java encouraging non domain experts to implement libraries and frameworks?. Particularly as the web seems to move farther each day from Java in the browser.

Also iOS is quite uninteresting to me from an application development perspective. It has a very 80's feel to it with hard coded apps encouraging fragile pixel precise layouts. It seems primarily about building a money pump around a closed eco system. Some elements of the system are beautiful executed - the whole CoreAnimation / CALayer giving fluid graphics composition for example. But for the vast majority of throwaway apps the level of effort needed to implement native Apps - which for the most part are a gluing together of OS APIs seems like overkill.

Yes. It seems like you could reuse a lot of work from your web application with something like WebOS.

("It seems" == totally unfounded guesswork).

iOS development seems like more of a temporary stopgap to the eventual rise a great standardized mobile web platform. Well, temporary meaning "probably 4-5 years or so".

Agreed. While I totally understand the reasons for going native, it depresses me to see so many people so enthusiastic about it. We only just got out of an era where you had to recode significant parts of a web site to satisfy all the browers.

We can at last write once and use (almost) anywhere... so now we go straight back to boxed off proprietary solutions.

As cleverjake points out, I was wrong about webOS having more marketshare than Android prior to the Droid's launch on Verizon. In my defense, it did have respectably competitive OS share going into the fall of 2009. ;-)

Looking at AdMob's figures on worldwide mobile OS share for August 2009 (http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2009/09/30/admob-the-iphones-sha...), Android reportedly had 7% global share to 4% for webOS.

US figures from AdMob for the same time frame (http://www.prethinking.com/home/2009/9/30/webos-web-market-s...) also revealed Android had a healthy 13% share to webOS' 9%.

I still think that's mighty impressive (though certainly not more) since the Sprint Pre was the only webOS phone until it hit Bell in Canada late that August. The GSM Pre didn't hit until mid-October right around the debut of the 'Droid Does' campaign on October 17, 2009. The rest is history.

Hold the phone. It's Linux based, open source, and apps are written in Javascript, not Java?

Down with Android. Long live webOS!

After the "death" of webos, I watched the developers videos and wondered why the whole web community wasnt building apps. The dev tools seemed to be everything that the common web dev wanted.

I was digging into webOS development back when the Pre came out and was hoping for a pretty upbeat development community _because_ of the use of web languages. Looking back, however, it felt like webOS (as a mobile OS) seemed too early for its time. The push for more web stuff didn't surface until way after Palm/webOS was deemed toxic to the touch.

It was a pity, but I hope the open source efforts end up redeeming itself. I'm definitely rooting it on and supporting it.

  The dev tools seemed to be everything that the common web dev wanted.

The dev tools are useless if the platform is a failure. Had HP not prematurely aborted the platform, and a Phonegap port been maintained, then I can hardly see what would have stopped WebOS from being at least modestly successful.

The problem was timing. Palm didn't make a webOS SDK generally available until something like two months after the first webOS phone (the Pre) was launched. This meant that they couldn't tap into developer interest during the big pre-launch hype cycle, which in the case of the Pre was massive, thanks to a hugely successful introduction of the device at CES earlier that year (see http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2338482,00.asp, http://www.cnet.com/8301-19167_1-10139851-100.html for a sample of the reception it got there).

Then by the time the SDK was available, the Pre had already proven less successful in the marketplace than Palm had hoped it would be, so developer interest had cooled. Nobody wants to write apps for a phone that's a flop.

I don't understand the hatred of Java and love of JS. Is Java not open source? And isn't Android open source as well? Note that Google apps are not part of the core of Android.

From my perspective, JS is more more enjoyable to use when writing UIs. Java's strictness is not nearly as useful for UI work than it might be for other domains, and Javascript's first-class functions greatly simplify event-based work (which is much of what happens in a UI). Also, JSON is painless to use in JS, while Java will again get bogged down in its type system -- if you use JSON as a transport format then yet another plus for JS. Java is great for the server, but I would never want to write a UI using it.

Java is not under a fully free license, as it is restricted on mobile platforms, hence the whole legal action between Oracle and Google.

> I don't understand the hatred of Java and love of JS.

I don't hate Java, but I hate to write the same application over and over again, one for every platform out there:

- the desktop web

- the mobile web

- iOS

- Android

- Windows Phone

- ...

With JS there is a little hope that we well be able someday to write the app once, and make it work on every device out there, if it is from Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung or whoever wants to enter the market next.

We are almost there, but we need hacks like PhoneGap/appMobi to make it work, and it's not optimal at the moment.

I wonder if a better approach would be to rebuild WebOS on top of an Android base instead? It seems like they are choosing to fight a war they cannot possibly win. If they want to run on other people's hardware why not build on top of a very well supported platform? Any rooted phone would have 100% driver support. Could be easier than installing a custom ROM. At least they would be able to get a foothold in the market. If my Galaxy Nexus could run the WebOS UI and continue to run legacy Android apps I would switch over right now. I know this isn't really the original goal of this project and maybe there are good technical reasons this would not be possible. It just seems like it would achieve the same thing in a more practical way. Perhaps they could maintain both a standalone WebOS and a WebOS/Android version?

Someone can probably build an app player for android apps, but architecture wise, what you just described sounds kind of like a custom UI for android.

The rationale for not doing something like this philosophically is that the underlying point of webos is that it shouldn't feel like a 'whole new platform' to a web developer, but rather the platform they are already most familiar with, even more than android, i.e the web.

Would it be that hard? It looks like people already have webOS running on Android device(s?). I thought that the Android kernel and main linux kernel have merged. Thus, the changes they've made should increase the ability to use it on Android devices.

Might have some pretty major security flaws...

https://github.com/openwebos/core-apps/tree/master/com.palm....

I loved WebOS, but part of the key to the gestures, on my Pixi at least, was the touch sensitive area beneath the screen. I didn't expect that to translate well to the tablet form factor, though I never tried a touchpad running WebOS.

If (usable) builds come for the Galaxy Nexus, I will be forced to try this out :)

Here you go: http://blog.openwebosproject.org/post/32477144913/news-flash

Well, about that "usable" part...

Need to be patient, porting is a laborious task. This is nothing more than an early alpha.

WebOS could do something different and allow for apps to be loaded on the fly via a URL. Oh wait, that's what a web browser does..Why isn't WebOS aiming to be a web browser with the ability to cache apps using standardized (or maybe non-standard if needed) technologies? Then, you wouldn't need a marketplace or app store necessarily, because users have access to the apps directly off the web. Not to mention, this will save storage and move towards cloud computing more nicely. Oh, and think about how easy it would be to transfer an application from device to another device. WebOS should focus on being just that, a web OS. This means URLs; DNS is the backbone of the web after all.

Curious, is this helpful to people building web apps or ios/android mobile apps ?

These mobile platforms that use web tech(boot to gecko, webOS, etc) really aught to wait till ES.Next becomes implemented before they go 1.0. If they have C++ code extensions, they aught to wait till C++11 is full implemented in their compiler of choice.

Why?

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