PDK application are compiled C++, so you only have object code. Most of the apps HP ships on device are JS apps, so source is there. A developer can choose to only ship minified/obfuscated source code if they want, but there still has to be something for V8 to parse and execute.
Right, I understand that but what I'm getting at is: if I create an application that is purely JS/HTML/CSS based, will my source be available to other developers that put their phone into "developer mode"?
If so, is there any way to make it not publicly available?
No, there's no way to completely hide the source. However, we do have a key manager API that can be used to hide encryption keys so they're not exposed in your source.
Just tap on the “Just Type” search bar and enter “upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart” (the classic NES Konami code!); an icon appears that lets you toggle this mode on and off.
Wait, really? If that's not a joke, then it's kind of cool.
Yep, the konami code to get into dev mode has been in webos since the very beginning. I am talking webos 1.0.
Also, WebOs is great. I really like it and the UI but so far the devices have been fairly unimpressive. The original Palm Pre was good for about 3 months. After which android and iphone have gotten so many updates.
If the Palm Pre 3 lives up to it's ideal, it would definitely be worth a look but unfortunately, as cool as the OS is, the hardware just doesn't match.
I am quite happy with my Pre 2 (a gift by the developer program - they aren't sold in Brazil). There are a couple issues, as it appears to have never been tested here - GPS seems slow and may have a bug in its software, various reception weirdnesses (hard to get it to use 3G), but, overall, it's a very solid and responsive phone.
I expect the 3 to up that a notch. Right now, I prefer it over iPhone and Android, as actually doing things (as opposed as to opening programs) happens more fluidly.
I was deeply in love with WebOS on my 1st gen Pre. But - like you noted - the hardware was disappointing, and the Pre 2 should have been the Pre 1.5.
Even a year after switching to the iPhone 4 - there are still things I miss about my Pre's UI. If I could get WebOS on iPhone quality hardware, I'd be there in a second.
Wow, I hadn't seen Ares before. An in-browser SDK. Sweet.
Honestly, WebOS itself is way better than android or iOS, it's just that Palm sucked at marketing it, the Pre was only available on Sprint, they didn't attract many app developers, and they only sold 2 WebOS phones. I hope it's not too late for HP to fix it.
Between the gestures, notifications, card-based multitasking, and JS/CSS/HTML apps I'm in heaven.
Not only can you design and code your app from the browser, you have full debugging support in the browser that can remote debug on a physical device that's plugged in to the computer.
I love iOS and its SDK, but Ares sure beats 4 GB Xcode updates.
if only there was a good (and hopefully cheap) hardware device to go with webOS, it would definitely be cool to hack with. The Palm Pre, however, in my opinion did not function as a useful device, mostly because of the hardware (and lack of applications compared to iOS and android devices).
Care to elaborate on the hardware? Speed seemed decent enough (compared with e.g. the first iPhone) and I personally really liked the "pebble" form factor. Sad that it'll never see webOS 2...
You want to be working on current-gen hardware if you're baselining future development efforts at 2.x going forward.
What you don't want to be using as your sole dev/test unit is a two year-old device using an unofficial workaround to get an OS version installed that was never intended to be used on it.
It's fine if you want to support those people that decided to use the workaround by having one of these franken-units around as a secondary edge-case device to test on, but it should never be the only device you use to develop and test with. I have a 1Ghz overclocked Sprint Pre at 1.4.5 as my "daily driver" and another Sprint Pre I've upgraded to 2.0 for testing such cases.
One of my main issues with WebOS from day one has been the lack of what I would regard as decent hardware.
Another issue in the past, which I hope has much improved since is the developer outreach which really sucked when I tried to engage. This was pre-HP acquisition. The fact that @unwiredben is active in this discussion is a good sign.
The Pre actually had decent hardware except for being light on mem. The OMAP chip was particularly overclock friendly and once overclocked along with some additional tweaks was nice and fast.
The problem was the earlier webOS versions had no GPU acceleration at all and ended seeming sluggish sometimes.
It needs a bigger form factor in slicker package - CPU/GPU matter but not as much as form factor for the Pre atm. Having the tiny Pre screen does little justice to webOS.
If they could get a SGS2 or Atrix type device out with GPU accelerated webOS UI and may be ship Android compatibility until webOS apps catch up - it would become a really credible player.
Yes, I should have been more precise. I've never liked the form factor and packaging of the WebOS devices. TouchPad looks like it might be up to scratch, but still nothing that looks good to me on the horizon in terms of the handset.
I have an old Sprint Pre and a Pre2. Even with the it clocked to 1.1GHz and an increase in the compcache the difference is quite noticeable. The Pre2 absolutely trounces it in performance. That extra 256MB makes a big difference.
Running native C/C++ code is pretty cutting-edge stuff. It's essentially the Chrome Native Client, on mobile. I've developed a pretty nice app using a native plugin. Unfortunately, most current webOS users won't get to use it because, although the PDK was released last year and, at least for my app, hybrids work perfectly on all webOS devices running at least webOS 1.4.5, Palm (and now HP) has decided to restrict hybrid apps in the app catalog only to webOS 2.1 users, which are very few and far between right now.
The fact is, I am a webos developer and have been asking for this feature since 2009. It's been in webkit for the longest time and Palm have said they'll add it in, many times and never have. Major let down.
As a fellow webOS developer, I understand your frustration. I'm just as frustrated with them over hybrid apps. I was already deep into development with my hybrid when they pulled the rug out from under all of us and announced that so-called legacy devices would not be receiving the 2.1 upgrade, and since hybrids would only be officially allowed in the app catalog for 2.1 devices, that meant most of my target audience would not be allowed to download the app through the catalog. I had hoped that if the "legacy" devices wouldn't get the upgrade, at least they would now allow the same devices to download hybrids off the catalog, since hybrids work on ALL devices (despite what their PDK documentation might say). Turns out, they won't allow hybrids on all devices, since they all but abandoned users of 1.4.5.
I think WebOS is great. But all the Palm devices are sliders which kinda sucks. I wish they'd come up with something comparable with Nexus S or iPhone 4. A simple, but cool nice little piece of smartphone. But, that's just me.
I loved my Pre when I was still with Sprint. By far the most enjoyable to use out of all the phones I've had. My biggest complaint was (and still is) the lack of applications. If HP is able increase their app library, they will quite possibly find me buying another WebOS device.
I really hope they succeed if only because of the openness of their phones. It feels amazing to have full access to your device out of the box without having to jump through 1.5 million jailbreak hoops.
Only one recent device (at the moment) and it is carrier exclusive in most countries (for me, in germany). I like the new devices and the operating system, but sadly, I also have a good contract with a different carrier.
So: sorry HP, but i'll pass. I never bought a locked phone and I will not start because of your hypergeeky operating system.
I said recent device. I am not interested in buying last years model if all they push at the moment is the new line of products. How should I develop applications for their new and shiny line, if I cannot even get a fully working device on my contract?
You surely haven't missed the fact that the current advertisement push of HP is not about the Pre 2 though, but about the new lineup which starts to be on sale from next sunday on (starting with the HP Veer, followed by the Pre 3 and the Tablet which integrates with those two).
So yes: technically, it is the most recent. Practically, only for 3 more days.
..yet they haven't actually optimized the site properly for a small display, meaning it's not actually possible to scroll/zoom to see any full line of text (tested on iPhone).
I've passed this on to our dev portal design team. I hope we can get a fix for the blog theme soon; the scaling broke as part of a portal redesign back in March.
Tested again, seems yes I can pan sideways (not sure why I couldn't before) but still can't zoom which makes no sense when the doc is wider than the viewport.
Why haven't they made a tool/framework for porting WebOS apps (non-native) to iOS & android? This would be a great way to leverage their superior developer experience to get more apps on their platform.
A compatibility layer on top of say PhoneGap could do the job. There would be a bit of a performance hit I imagine though. I doubt that V8 is any faster on Android than it is on WebOS, but the added layer of abstraction would slow things down a bit on non-WebOS platforms.
Their next app (web?) framework, Enyo, does exactly this (in fact, apps are developed in Chrome). They haven't announced the licensing options (i.e. if it will be legal to use on other platforms), but I've run the betas of it on my iPad and they work quite well.
When webOS 3.0 comes out, it's really up to HP Palm if they want to allow this.
I doubt WebOS can overtake Android or iOS at this point, but it should be a solid third place in this market (I don't think other competitors like WP7 or Bada can make it).
Nokia makes WP7 #3 by default. A respectable #4 by volume would be fine if WebOS has a shot at #2 in quality.
#1 in quality is, I trust, sewn up for practically everyone reading this, though with disagreements at great length and volume on which name to fill in.
I don't get this argument. Nokia is big now, but why would it still be big with a completely different product, some time in the future, and after the market has changed quite a bit?
I love it simply because its the best SSH experience of all of the smartphones. One click gets me the phones real terminal and then "ssh -l me whereever.com". No bogus setup screens, with each server requiring a 5 minute fill in the blank session to connect to, no menus full of special keys to transmit (most covered with the orange key), just pure .ssh/id_dsa public key in my home-dir win.
Its 10x easier than the best thing on my ipad and its with me 24/7 because it also happens to be my phone. Other problems with WebOS and Pre? Sure there are. This makes up for all of them. Smartphone makers: rent-seek my terminal, you lose.
Have you tried Maemo? With Maemo, I can just launch an xterm and ssh to my heart's content. For that matter, I can also set up an SSH server and ssh into the device. I'm guessing Meego probably has the same support.
In my experience, it's the closest experience to have a full Linux box that I can stick in my pocket.
What's wrong with a dead end? Isn't SSH a dead end, since we haven't seen any major modifications ina while? Maemo still has SSH, it's still linux, and it's still debian. There are community projects to update software and fix bugs.
I didn't know webOS could do that. Maybe webOS could replace my Maemo N900. I have a Debian chroot on my N900 (with OpenOffice, GIMP & Apache) but don't use it that much.
Other Linuxy things that I use my N900 for that I'd like to know if webOS could do:
- vnc server
- all the usual ssh port tunnelling / forwarding stuff
- bash
- cron
- git
- curl / wget / nmap
- software repositories (Maemo uses apt)
- python / ruby / php
(Not trying to say mine's better than yours, I'd just like to know if webOS might be for me as my N900 is getting old)
Yes, you can do a lot of those things, but over homebrew. You can install ipkg-opt, which will give you access to the nslu2-linux optware packages. It's no apt, but you can still use it to install packages. From the optware packages, you can install python/ruby/php, install a vnc server (although I think there are some homebrew apps for that), install git, cron, and a lot of the standard programs you would expect in a standard linux installation.
I'm not sure on ssh port tunneling/forwarding, but curl/wget come installed on webOS.
Tunneling has worked like a champ for me. With a linux box at home and a linux phone in my pocket, corporate blockers are a thing of the past and all of my work is only ever an ssh away. =]
WebOS is looking really good. Can anyone point me to an architecture diagram along the lines of [1]? The best one I could find was [2], which doesnmt give many details.
Bluetooth keyboards work on webOS 2.0 and later. The webOS emulator runs as x86 virtual machine and uses your keyboard and mouse from the host PC. Some people have boot that image directly on PC hardware with varying degrees of success.
Is Prompt already the best thing on your iPad? If not, I'd be curious to know how it stacks up. (Prompt costs US$5 for an iPad/iPhone version. Nobody get the vapors.)
I use prompt allmost everyday. Its THE best ssh app I have tried on a smartphone. I dont know webos/maemo, but in my time on palmos, symbian, windows mobile, android and ios I have not met a ssh app this good.
When I setup an Android phone I am asked if I want to sink my configuration and data with Google, and that this information includes things like wifi psks.
Are ssh keys stored in an area that is separate from what Google syncs?
As I understand it, it's up to each app to decide what exactly it will back up. After a quick glance at the code, it seems to me that it backs up preferences, host keys, and public/private keys.
I would love it but I can't make myself like an HP product because HP has been selling thousands frozen WindowsXP + IE6 computers to the universities in my country.
Considering how many management changes ago it was and the number of different divisions in HP, that's almost like not liking Germany today for WWII. How many years ago that happened? (IE6? must've been ~2004)
I wish it had been ~2004 but it has been happening since 2008. They sold that crappy computers to one of the biggest and newest university libraries in Europe.
So, I have a real reason to ignore HP products even if they have great platform.
Where's your proof that this behavior was unethical? I know nonprofits and educational institutions that still require IE6 today due to various reasons, and some on XP because they haven't okayed an upgrade cycle even if they're not using it. No offense intended, but your claims are difficult to take seriously. This sounds significantly more like "I don't like that they use Microsoft" than anything to do with what kind of Microsoft software they sold.
In the overwhelming majority of these cases that I've seen, there is much more going on than "derp, we're gonna give them IE6 because we're eeeeeevil."
(And if that "ethical behavior" is really so important to you, you might as well just stop using computers because each and every one of them are, on one level or another, not fundamentally opposed to screwing the next guy to get ahead. Don't use Google or Yahoo. Don't use Twitter or Facebook. Don't send network packets over Cisco hardware. Don't buy Intel hardware. Don't buy AMD hardware. Don't buy nVidia graphics cards. The list goes on.
Even everybody's favorite guys over at Canonical have demonstrated a willingness to screw people over, viz. the Banshee project.)
There's nothing "frozen" about a computer that has IE6.
I would respectfully suggest that you look and see if you're upset because they've got IE6 on them or because they've got Microsoft software on them. Your phrasing and behavior suggests the latter.
- freedom
- freedom
- freedom
- wtf public license
- good software
- user friendly business models
You're right, I'm an upset linux fanboy. I'm upset about the time we've lost because of recent internet explorer versions and the companies supporting junk software instead of the modern ones.
If HP made an iPod Touch competitor, I would buy one in a heartbeat. I don't want to buy another phone, but I'd love to have a WebOS device to play with.
I get the feeling that HP does not care about the phone market too much. However, the table market is something they are scared will eat into their PC business. So, I expect HP to push the TouchPad with all its might. If that happens, an iPod touch device seems the next thing they will release. I am looking forward to that too!
It's not that they don't care but I get the feeling that they have conceeded the phone market to Apple and Android. All the information I've been getting lately is they are going to push into the tablet market really hard. It's still relatively untapped and (except Apple) the competition has been very slim.
Agreed - been saying for years that Palm screwed themselves over by trying to get in to the phone market with the Pre. They should have gone after reinventing the "PDA" market which they'd invented years earlier. Something like ipod touch with webOS 2 years ago would have, imo, allowed Palm to be a much different beast today.
Agreed agreed! I don't care for a smartphone, and don't need a tablet- bring back the PDA! Palm needs to find its roots, not try to compete with Apple and Google/HTC head-on. If HP was smart, they'd step out of the fray and let Microsoft/Nokia/RIM try to deal with it.
If you wanna go the "official" route, you can pay VZW (and AT&T?) to have it act like a MiFi and connect up to five devices to it over WiFi. So awesome. But it does burn through batteries. The good news is...the Pre has REPLACEABLE BATTERIES! And they're cheap as hell on Amazon.
Even the new Veer has tethering available from AT&T. All webOS phones are capable of tethering, the older models being capable of wifi, bluetooth, and usb tethering.
Maybe if they made a good device that was available for my carrier of choice I'd be more willing to consider it.
As it stands I have half a dozen android phones to possibly choose from and the venerable iphone. I'd love to have a webos phone if it was closer to the iphone in terms of form factor, resolution, speed, battery life etc but from what I've seen its not even close.
Top it off with the fact that it seems like HP hasn't advertised a penny for the thing compared to verizon's droid adverts plastered everywhere.
Honestly HP needs to team up with a carrier and make it happen in terms of marketing. Windows Phone 7 might beat out webos in terms of mindshare at this point.
Is there any way that WebOS could be ported to Android? If they're both linux then the drivers should be fairly compatible with the respected kernel mods, right?
WP7's suffering from its own developer adoption woes. The only problem with webOS' adoption, from my perspective as a webOS dev, has been marketing and hardware. Developing for webOS has been fun from Day One and continues to be nearly two years later.
The hardware part they look to have taken care of based on the Pre 3, Veer, and Touchpad I got to see and mess with back at their Dev Reception in February, and I'm pretty sure they have the money to market the product line now.
While the entry point is low, there are still many API's lacking which has prevented a lot of applications from being on webOS (for example, there was no mic API for the longest time).
I have the first Palm WebOS device. I also paid to be a developer. Thanks to my early adoption, I no longer receive WebOS updates so I can't really even develop for WebOS 2.0. So... I'll be switching to android.
On a lighter note, I think WebOS is innovative in many ways but it hasn't quite gotten enough traction for it to be competitive to the bigger smartphones unfortunately.
179 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] threadDoes this mean that all apps' source is accessible, or just Palm namespaced applications?
If so, is there any way to make it not publicly available?
Wait, really? If that's not a joke, then it's kind of cool.
Also, WebOs is great. I really like it and the UI but so far the devices have been fairly unimpressive. The original Palm Pre was good for about 3 months. After which android and iphone have gotten so many updates.
If the Palm Pre 3 lives up to it's ideal, it would definitely be worth a look but unfortunately, as cool as the OS is, the hardware just doesn't match.
I expect the 3 to up that a notch. Right now, I prefer it over iPhone and Android, as actually doing things (as opposed as to opening programs) happens more fluidly.
Even a year after switching to the iPhone 4 - there are still things I miss about my Pre's UI. If I could get WebOS on iPhone quality hardware, I'd be there in a second.
Honestly, WebOS itself is way better than android or iOS, it's just that Palm sucked at marketing it, the Pre was only available on Sprint, they didn't attract many app developers, and they only sold 2 WebOS phones. I hope it's not too late for HP to fix it.
Between the gestures, notifications, card-based multitasking, and JS/CSS/HTML apps I'm in heaven.
I love iOS and its SDK, but Ares sure beats 4 GB Xcode updates.
Some additional hoops to jump through but it's entirely doable along with overclocking, you end up with a pretty snappy device.
http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/WebOS_2_Upgrade
What you don't want to be using as your sole dev/test unit is a two year-old device using an unofficial workaround to get an OS version installed that was never intended to be used on it.
It's fine if you want to support those people that decided to use the workaround by having one of these franken-units around as a secondary edge-case device to test on, but it should never be the only device you use to develop and test with. I have a 1Ghz overclocked Sprint Pre at 1.4.5 as my "daily driver" and another Sprint Pre I've upgraded to 2.0 for testing such cases.
Another issue in the past, which I hope has much improved since is the developer outreach which really sucked when I tried to engage. This was pre-HP acquisition. The fact that @unwiredben is active in this discussion is a good sign.
The problem was the earlier webOS versions had no GPU acceleration at all and ended seeming sluggish sometimes.
If they could get a SGS2 or Atrix type device out with GPU accelerated webOS UI and may be ship Android compatibility until webOS apps catch up - it would become a really credible player.
Yet you can't even do css background gradients. Real cutting edge.
The fact is, I am a webos developer and have been asking for this feature since 2009. It's been in webkit for the longest time and Palm have said they'll add it in, many times and never have. Major let down.
I know others who loved the form factor and feel of the Pixi; I'm hoping HP decides to throw them a bone in the future to get them back.
I really hope they succeed if only because of the openness of their phones. It feels amazing to have full access to your device out of the box without having to jump through 1.5 million jailbreak hoops.
Only one recent device (at the moment) and it is carrier exclusive in most countries (for me, in germany). I like the new devices and the operating system, but sadly, I also have a good contract with a different carrier.
So: sorry HP, but i'll pass. I never bought a locked phone and I will not start because of your hypergeeky operating system.
There are lots of reasons to avoid webos; but this is not one.
So yes: technically, it is the most recent. Practically, only for 3 more days.
When webOS 3.0 comes out, it's really up to HP Palm if they want to allow this.
I doubt WebOS can overtake Android or iOS at this point, but it should be a solid third place in this market (I don't think other competitors like WP7 or Bada can make it).
#1 in quality is, I trust, sewn up for practically everyone reading this, though with disagreements at great length and volume on which name to fill in.
I don't get this argument. Nokia is big now, but why would it still be big with a completely different product, some time in the future, and after the market has changed quite a bit?
Its 10x easier than the best thing on my ipad and its with me 24/7 because it also happens to be my phone. Other problems with WebOS and Pre? Sure there are. This makes up for all of them. Smartphone makers: rent-seek my terminal, you lose.
In my experience, it's the closest experience to have a full Linux box that I can stick in my pocket.
No new phones, obviously.
Heck, with xterm on my Pre 2, I can run a Debian or Ubuntu ARM rootfs and actually have a full Linux experience in my pocket.
Other Linuxy things that I use my N900 for that I'd like to know if webOS could do: - vnc server - all the usual ssh port tunnelling / forwarding stuff - bash - cron - git - curl / wget / nmap - software repositories (Maemo uses apt) - python / ruby / php
(Not trying to say mine's better than yours, I'd just like to know if webOS might be for me as my N900 is getting old)
I'm not sure on ssh port tunneling/forwarding, but curl/wget come installed on webOS.
[1] http://www.99bits.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/meego-archi...
[2] http://www.palminfocenter.com/images/webos-architecture-dev....
There's no background sync of your Android phone's contents to Google, just things like Contacts and Email (which are optional)
Are ssh keys stored in an area that is separate from what Google syncs?
I want backup to Google, for everything apart from that.
So, I have a real reason to ignore HP products even if they have great platform.
In the overwhelming majority of these cases that I've seen, there is much more going on than "derp, we're gonna give them IE6 because we're eeeeeevil."
(And if that "ethical behavior" is really so important to you, you might as well just stop using computers because each and every one of them are, on one level or another, not fundamentally opposed to screwing the next guy to get ahead. Don't use Google or Yahoo. Don't use Twitter or Facebook. Don't send network packets over Cisco hardware. Don't buy Intel hardware. Don't buy AMD hardware. Don't buy nVidia graphics cards. The list goes on.
Even everybody's favorite guys over at Canonical have demonstrated a willingness to screw people over, viz. the Banshee project.)
I would respectfully suggest that you look and see if you're upset because they've got IE6 on them or because they've got Microsoft software on them. Your phrasing and behavior suggests the latter.
You are doing little to change the impression of "upset Linux fanboy" that you created in your first post and have strengthened since.
- freedom - freedom - freedom - wtf public license - good software - user friendly business models
You're right, I'm an upset linux fanboy. I'm upset about the time we've lost because of recent internet explorer versions and the companies supporting junk software instead of the modern ones.
There is even a free tethering solution. Install via Preware.
As it stands I have half a dozen android phones to possibly choose from and the venerable iphone. I'd love to have a webos phone if it was closer to the iphone in terms of form factor, resolution, speed, battery life etc but from what I've seen its not even close.
Top it off with the fact that it seems like HP hasn't advertised a penny for the thing compared to verizon's droid adverts plastered everywhere.
Honestly HP needs to team up with a carrier and make it happen in terms of marketing. Windows Phone 7 might beat out webos in terms of mindshare at this point.
edit: I actually think wp7/silverlight might fare well too from a dev perspective, but i haven't spent time with it yet.
The hardware part they look to have taken care of based on the Pre 3, Veer, and Touchpad I got to see and mess with back at their Dev Reception in February, and I'm pretty sure they have the money to market the product line now.
On a lighter note, I think WebOS is innovative in many ways but it hasn't quite gotten enough traction for it to be competitive to the bigger smartphones unfortunately.