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

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/08/hp-releases-more-open-webos-code-including-system-manager-and-core-apps/

by llambda • 14 years ago

86 19 14 years ago

arstechnica.com

Xyzodiac2• 14 years ago

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.

wvenable• 14 years ago

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.

LandoCalrissian• 14 years ago

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

lsh3• 14 years ago

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).

Scene_Cast2• 14 years ago

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.

plainOldText• 14 years ago

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.

lucianm• 14 years ago

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

Zenst• 14 years ago

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

jetz• 14 years ago

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?

moondowner• 14 years ago

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.

VMG• 14 years ago

It's closer to the metal than Dalvik

densh• 14 years ago

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.)

lsh3• 14 years ago

<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.

zokier• 14 years ago

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

mikerice• 14 years ago

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

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

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