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codezero
I don’t see my old app in there but it was for a now defunct social network so not too surprising. Great work putting this all together. I still boot up my Palm Pre for some nostalgia kicks from time to time.
codepoet80
If you still have the IPK (or source code) I'd love to add to the Museum! I'll message you over on Twitter.
codyogden
Incredible! I'm a big fan this type of archival work. Great job!
molbioguy
Great work and many thanks! I was just ranting recently about abandoned hardware and what a waste it is (gTar, Glass, Aibo, iPods, and more). I still have a couple of TPs (new!) in the basement that will benefit from this archive. I really liked WebOS - it seemed ahead of its time.
miguelrochefort
Thanks for putting this together. webOS was way ahead of its time, and I really liked the HP Veer at the time.
i80and
The Veer was such an amazing device. I have no idea how HP got that keyboard to work so well! It absolutely sucks that we can't have something like the Veer today :(
haubey
Wow! The Pre was the reason I got into development, because I wanted to be able to run through flashcards on the bus to school. So I built Study Buddy[1]. The joke is by the time I figured out how to really build it, I had a car so it wasn't quite as personally useful as it could have been. It was a small community but there was a decent amount of teenage developers, maybe 8 or so of us, and I think 10 years later we're all still in the engineering space, basically because of webOS.

[1]: https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?ca...

codepoet80
Well you did good -- Study Buddy still works, all these years later!
myvoiceismypass
Is it crazy that I still think webOS is the best mobile OS of all time? The pre and pixi were just... underpowered
zeroego
Not crazy in my opinion. So many of the things webOS did back in like 2008 the iPhone just recently implemented. It was way ahead of its time. I really wish it was still around.
hajile
We're getting close to 13 years since webOS launched and we still don't have anything that comes close to the UI functionality it offered.
justusthane
As someone who never used it, what made it better than today’s mobile OSs?
explorigin
In design, they paid a lot of attention to making common actions available with your free thumb so you could navigate most apps with one hand. App-switching, context menus, device operations were all swipe operations.

Having a hardware keyboard made it a bit chunky but didn't feel bad in your pocket because it was so smooth. Also the hardware keyboard provided a true tactile feel so you could even type out some messages without looking at your screen nearly as much as you need to with on-screen keyboards.

rozap
Man, I miss phones that were designed for human hands. Everything now is way too big to use one handed.
astrange
When phone designers read posts like this, they try selling small phones again, and then nobody buys them.

(A variant is saying smaller phones are better for women who have smaller hands. They care even less because they have purses.)

rozap
I would buy it. Sure, it wouldn't sell like the next iPhone Whatever, but I think there is a healthy niche.
codepoet80
A lot of what's in today's mobile OSes came from webOS. Cards for multi-tasking. The full-screen gestures introduced with the iPhone X basically came exactly from webOS. Samsung copied its Touch2Share years later. It even had some advanced sync features that no one has yet to properly copy. Now-a-days, Android and iOS kinda take turns copying each other and mobile webOS is mostly a relic -- but it was from a time when phones didn't exist to suck up your data for advertisers, so it remains charming and delightful.
cmrdporcupine
A lot of the WebOS UI/UX DNA ended up in Android generally and in Material Design specifically because Matías Duarte went to Google as Palm imploded. He was a VP at Palm and is now VP of design at Google.
dylan-m
Or that was the hope, but unfortunately a lot of what made WebOS good was the synergy between his team's excellent design thinking and the clean, practical, well designed platform underlying it. Android is a mess because it tried to reinvent the wheel everywhere from day one, and then Google took over. Which means barely 15 years later it carries multiple Windows' worth of legacy garbage. They've done some lovely UI design, but they have been unsuccessful making that type of work anything more than skin deep.
cmrdporcupine
Oh sure, I agree in general. Though I think I'd have a hard time going back to WebOS now. The memory is likely better than the reality.
hajile
It was revolutionary in how it was just the modern OSX UI on your phone.

App menu was always on the upper-left side. Settings were on the upper-left. There was a dock at the bottom for most-used applications and an app drawer to hold the rest sorted into tabs.

CMD+Space to search your system was "Just Type" from the "home screen". Their unified notification feed is something I haven't really seen iOS or Android even attempt.

I once heard the iOS app paradigm was the equivalent of having a house with only doors facing to the outside. Going from your master bedroom to the master bath requires leaving the bedroom entirely, walking around the outside until you find the master bath and then going in.

When you multitask on OSX, do you switch applications by minimizing your app and opening it again from a desktop icon or from the app drawer? Nope. You use expose/mission control to see what's open on your current screen. You can also swipe left/right to view other virtual desktops. Your running applications (rather than your desktop) is your default view.

Same thing with webOS. Swipe up for expose where you'd see your current fanned out set of cards (one per app). Swiping left/right would show different sets of cards that you could create/rearrange based on whatever task. Just like OSX, those tabs would be LIVE rather than paused background stuff.

The default view with webOS was also application-first rather than desktop first. iOS and Android encourage having EVERYTHING "open" even though anything past the last handful of apps will probably have to reload anyway. The result is that finding anything useful in that deck of cards is very hard. webOS encouraged sorting that list and keeping it limited to what you were actually using.

While all the differences may seem small, but together, the overall experience feels much different.

HP's second (third?) CEO of the year killed the whole palm division when an investment and licensing webOS could have made HP/webOS into what Google/Android is today. They were finally coming out with decent hardware designs with bigger screens and without the dedicated keyboard.

Their in-progress Mochi design would be around a decade old today, but when you look at it, it has an aesthetic that I think most people would find very refreshing today.

https://www.theverge.com/2014/4/5/5585216/team-behind-webos-...

elzbardico
HP is the quintessential example of death by Harvard Business School thinking.
scrlk
To think that HP was once a well respected company making quality products (test equipment, ICs, medical devices etc.) & known for good management ("HP Way").

All flushed down the toilet in a span of ~10 years in the 00s, now known as a purveyor of subpar laptops and printers.

A shame that the HP brand didn't stay with what turned in to Agilent and Keysight.

guerrilla
I really thought it would be the future... Just goes to show that the best doesn't always win.
elteto
I bought a pixi the moment it came out... the OS was incredible for the time. And it was so pretty. Unfortunately, the battery lasted less than half a day and it almost burn a hole in my pocket with how hot it constantly was. The hardware was absolute crap.

I returned it after a few days.

codepoet80
The Pixi was poorly spec'ed. The Pixi Plus was a winner (for the time)
lhball
To this day nobody does notifications as well as WebOS did.

IMO the hard-headed refusal to make a touch keyboard even optionally available also contributed to their demise.

qiller
In the phone land at least, TouchPad was a nice tablet
hajile
That dual-core 1.2/1.5GHz Scorpio was blazing fast and the 128-bit NEON unit kept them going quite a bit longer than the competing A8 systems.
heavyset_go
I'm eternally bitter that webOS died and that we're stuck with Android and iOS now.
noman-land
I agree wholeheartedly. If it was able to be fully baked it could have been revolutionary. The unified chat view that showed your conversation history across multiple chat platforms was amazing.
DeathArrow
webOS still lives on LG's TV sets, fridges and smart watches.
codepoet80
There are still many remnants of Palm in LG's TV OS -- but like many smart TVs, they're getting cluttered with ads. There's an open source re-implementation of mobile webOS using LG bits called LuneOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuneOS
pjmlp
So much better than Android TV crap.
eddieroger
There was a thread this week about calendars, and it made me miss the unified calendar that webOS gave us. I'm excited (and slightly paranoid) to see this now, and can't wait to play with it! I wonder if I still have my old Pre lying around anywhere, and if it still boots. I love my iPhone, but I sure loved that Pre when it was new.

As a random second anecdote, I really miss the hacker community around it. I can't remember the name of the forum, but there was a super active thread the day we got root on the device, and it was unbelievably cool to see some Palm employees show up in it and pointing folks in the right direction. Such a fun device.

codepoet80
Probably forums.webosnation.com -- its still there, although its slowed down a lot. The last of us diehard users are on Discord now: webosarchive.com/discord
JumpCrisscross
> it made me miss the unified calendar that webOS gave us

What did it do that CalDAV doesn't permit?

eddieroger
It wasn't competing with CalDAV, so there is no answer to this question. What it did was present multiple sources, like CalDAV, in a single view.
JumpCrisscross
I never saw webOS's calendar. I'm familiar with CalDAV. Was trying to understand what made it memorably fun to you.
filmor
webOS had something called "Synergy" which was essentially a set of databases/schemas/services to provide a unified view on things. I don't fully remember whether this was actually supported, but an app like Facebook could have "its" calendar events (birthdays, events, etc.) stored in one of these and they would seamlessly show up in the main calendar app, without additional setup or sync required. Same held for messaging (SMS, gtalk, Facebook, all in the one app) and probably a few other things.
avel
FWIW you can have a unified calendar today with Google Calendar. Ever since the Sunrise Calendar app [1] was discontinued, I switched to a workflow where I have everything centralized in my personal Google Calendar. How it works:

  * I have a personal gmail account with my events and apointments.
  * Shared a URL from my work calendar (it helps that they use google workspace), and added that to my personal calendar. Especially useful if you don't want to add a work profile in your personal device. Personally the work calendar is all I need to check on my phone when I'm not on my work laptop.
  * Added the Facebook Events calendar URL.
  * Added the Songkick Events calendar URL for keeping track of concert dates.
  * You can also subcribe to anything else you need, e.g. TV shows feed, Garmin's calendar feed, Formula One or other sports' calendars, holidays calendar...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise_Calendar
pimlottc
I thought FB no longer let you share your personal events calendar? I know I used to have mine shared to Google Calendar a long time ago but haven’t looked into it since it stopped working.
avel
It seems to work now. Perhaps you need to get an updated URL.
user3939382
I never hear people mention the Palm Treo. Apple gets all the credit for inventing smartphones with the iPhone 1st gen, but the Treo preceded it by years. Is it not the first smartphone?

One of my first startups was based on Treos, they were awesome devices. Very snappy.

bombcar
There were tons of "smartphones" before Apple - Blackberries were very common and famous - Apple, if anything, took the lead in designing a workable "touchscreen only" interface.
codepoet80
I'd argue that Apple's big "innovation" was the capacitive touch screen, that made the UI so much more fluid and responsive. Palm almost shipped a webOS device with a resistive touch screen, but pivoted away after Rubenstein took the reigns. The Treo was a great device for its time, but suddenly felt old fashioned after the iPhone came out -- even though iOS was significantly less capable in its initial implementation (modal notifications, no copy/paste, no apps, etc...)
bombcar
Yeah the touchscreen was the first that "worked" like you expected it to - before the best screens were the ones with styluses which could work well, but was a piece to lose/harder to use at a glance.
hamburglar
They also had the first browser that wasn’t severely crippled by compromises based on d-pad and extremely inaccurate touch input. Before iphone, the mobile web was a sad joke.
bombcar
I remember that - a huge advantage of the original Safari is it would show desktop versions of many websites; back then mobile sites were absolute trash. And it was usable because you could pinch + zoom.
mananaysiempre
Opera Mobile (not Mini) for Symbian S60 with its d-pad bag of tricks was surprisingly usable with desktop websites, just crippled by a very low-res screen. Too bad it seems to have fallen off the face of the Earth even before Presto was abandoned.
hamburglar
I had some amazingly expensive Nokia 900 series phone that had WebKit on it for testing something for work (no way I was going to carry that monstrosity) and I remember it being impressive that it could actually faithfully render real pages. Still had garbage d-pad interaction.
autoconfig
The capacitive touch screen was necessary but alone wouldn’t have meant much without the revolutionizing software stack. You may think “revolutionizing” seems hyperbolic here but a lot of people forget or don't realize how truly far behind the competition was.

Software keyboards were considered a complete no-go, even by folks within Apple (Ken Kocienda's “Creative Selection” is a great read on the development of the keyboard). Dragging / flinging / pinch to zoom didn’t exist anywhere else or if it did, only in prototype or proof-of-concept form. The capacitive screen unlocked these features but no one else knew how to build them.

I was working at Sony Ericsson when the first iPhone was released. I distinctly remember holding it in my hand and using mobile Safari for the first time and thinking... “we’re fucked”. The company simply didn’t have the engineering chops needed to catch up. Later on Android would provide a possible solution but we managed to screw things up even with a full OS handed to us.

Brendinooo
Yeah, the touchscreen was the biggest innovation. But the mobile web experience was also head-and-shoulders above anything that came before it, and it was also able to leverage the success it had with iPod and iTunes to make things smoother on the software/syncing side.
MBCook
In many ways the iPhone was the first modern smartphone.

You can pretty easily draw a line and see stuff designed before the iPhone largely looked like the Treo or the Blackberry. Things designed after largely looked like the iPhone.

The Treo was more of a Palm Pilot with a cell phone built in, or the same but Windows Mobile PDA. The Blackberry was a two-way pager expanded into a cell phone.

The iPhone was sort of designed from the ground up to be a smart phone (the Sidekick may fit this too).

The Treo was nice (never got to have one) but it’s kind of a different generation. The iPhone generation (along with Android) is when smartphones exploded in popularity.

[deleted]
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hajile
Now if we could just get LG to introduce a new WebOS phone. Add android support and native Qt in addition to web apps while switching to the proposed Mochi style would make for a very nice device.
qiller
This is awesome, found all of my apps. Ah the nostalgia. Mojo and Enyo were great platforms for their time
nkotov
I think the Palm Pre was one of the prettiest designs and I really liked how webOS looked back then. It's a shame that it died in the mobile space.
larrywright
My LG television runs WebOS and it’s easily the best of the television OSes.
codepoet80
The newer versions apparently got very heavily ad-laden, but I agree - my webOS 4 TV is great!
qbasic_forever
It was also a very comfortable feeling device. The whole thing was rounded and felt like a smooth pebble in your pocket, not some sharp slab like phones today.
bni
I still have my webOS Palm Pre, this was the last version that was round like a stone pebble. It still starts up. It is a very nice design that is satisfying to hold.

Version after the switched to a more flat with a little larger screen. Not as nice but I guess they had to compete with Android.

I made an app and its satisfying to see it in the Museum catalog.

classichasclass
Got a Prē 2 and a Veer here. Sounds like this will make a fun weekend.
codepoet80
Yay! The community is still around -- drop us a line if you need any help! Link is on the website.
classichasclass
I'm already reading your Classic tips. I loved the PalmOS and have a lot of old school devices. Wish we could do something about the 7-day timer, but at least it will run on webOS 2!

I should finish that Gopher client I was writing ...

codepoet80
There's a file you can delete every 7 days to re-arm the timer.
classichasclass
No, I got that. It's just kind of a pain is all.
codepoet80
Agreed. Since its Linux under the hood, I was thinking a little cron job could fix that. Just haven't got around to trying
pcdoodle
I was still on the palm centro when this was released so I never got any hands on with WebOS. I do miss the software and hardware design language used by the palm team. What was under the hood? Linux?
codepoet80
Yes, a real Linux with a web-based UI on top. They added a PDK for running Linux apps later, and it still works. I (fairly) recently compiled SCUMMVM for webOS, and it "just works"
qball
It was Linux to the point where you could run a full X11 server (and LXDE desktop) as an app: it was what Windows 8 could have been, if it was done right.
andrewmunsell
This is amazing, thank you.

Seems like several others, my actual development career began on WebOS. In high school, I was intrigued by the idea of a web-based, multitasking capable smartphone and begged my parents to buy me one.

Ultimately I learned a ton and have great stories such as staying up all night re-architecting Weatherman (https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?&a...) because of the popularity (and this was before it was on the WebOS store, at this time it was invite-only so I had to post it on a forum!). Weatherman was just a hack on top of a hack on top of a hack. There was no Canvas API on the device so I had to generate the weather images on a server and then send them to the device, for example.

The highlight for me was winning one of the top spots in the Palm Hot Apps competition for the "free apps" category with Pixi Dust (https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?ca...). The physics weren't accurate by any means, but it was the first time I had seriously used C++ (I think it was, it was so long ago!).

I miss having platforms like these with innovative ideas and small communities. I learned so much by having to hack my way around the limitations of the operating system, and really miss WebOS overall. I think I might still have an old Palm Pre sitting a drawer somewhere.

codepoet80
If you've still got your back-end code, it'd be fun to restore your app -- I could help host it!
andrewmunsell
I do have a zip archive of (I think all) my source code. Maybe I'll try and post it on Github this weekend and send you a link!

Edit: Yep, I just checked and have both the app client and backend code. I will post everything I can this weekend and ping you via email if I can find it in your profiles or I see you have your Discord alias.

codepoet80
If you can't get me there, I have an email alias: curator@<the website posted in this story>
zymhan
I'd love to dig out my Pixi to give this a try
joshmarinacci
Hey! I ran the Hot Apps competition when I was the lead developer advocate. I remember Pixi Dust. I was amazed you could get it so fast.

Fun story: there was no internal API for app stats so every morning I had to manually extract data via Excel, then run scripts to generate the JSON that powered the Hot Apps dashboard. Fun times.

andrewmunsell
That's so cool! Of course with so many prizes on the line, I spent quite a bit of time (when I was visiting my grandparents in California none the less) over a weekend hacking together all of the ideas I could think of. It was a really great experience overall, and I'm glad you still remember Pixi Dust :)
alexk307
I loved my Palm Pre, still have it lying around, and it still powers up just fine. A lot of the features that were innovative and new at the time were quickly co-opted into Android and iOS platforms.
forgotmypw17
Hi there! I'm working on a platform/framework for making retro-compatible websites, and was wondering if you'd have a few minutes to test it with webOS?

I've already tested with older BlackBerry, IE3, and as far back as Netscape 2.x, but I don't have a webOS device.

Is it possible you could spend just a few minutes on it and send me some feedback? Ideally, you should be able to register in one click (no email), write a post, and vote and reply to your own post.

The URL is in my profile...

codepoet80
Edit: tried it out. When I posted, I got a message that said "No Cookie" It wasn't obvious what to do next... I tried registering and a message posted, but seemed to disappear. Anyway, I appreciate the effort -- the more retro-friendly web platforms, the better!
forgotmypw17
Thank you!

Those two issues are resolved for now.

The first one is due to a feature designed to reduce the impact of crawler bots, which I'm still testing, so it's off for now.

The second is due to a caching issue, so I've reduced the window for that until cache-invalidation is solved :D

I did see the message you posted, which says:

>checking in from a webOS Touchpad!

I was also able to recover the message you first sent, reading:

>Quickly checking in from a webOS Touchpad. Looks good from here!

Thank you again for testing!

shortformblog
The HP TouchPad that I use as a digital clock was very happy to see this. The page loaded up right away!
prmoustache
As underpowered as it was I somehow miss my pixi. It was just so tiny and the keyboard was surprisingly practical. The convex shape of the keys made sure you wouldn't press 2 keys at the same time. I did much less typing errors than I do know.