HP webOS Developer Blog

Editor’s note: Today’s blog post comes from Sam Greenblatt, the chief technology officer and head of technical strategy for the open webOS project. He guides the project’s strategy around open collaboration and is responsible for technical engineering. His focus is on the practice of developing webOS with the community, and his approach is founded on the belief that the open source development model produces great software and web technology. Sam has many years of open source experience, including being on the board of OSDL (Linux Foundation). His long career in software development includes being a CTO at HP, Chief Innovation Officer at CA Technology, and CTO at Candle Corporation (IBM).

In December, HP announced that webOS would be made available under an open source license, with continued support from HP. We’re proud of webOS and its potential to harness web standards to improve the next generation of applications, web services, and devices.
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Now that webOS 3.0.5 is in the wild, we can start playing with some of the new functions that arrived with it. One of these features is a new sensor API, and that is the subject of this week’s App Hack.

The sensor API can be used with PDK (details in the PDK documentation), but is also available to the SDK, as webOS 3.0.5 implements the DeviceOrientation and DeviceMotion Event Specification. Let’s see what we can do in a simple Enyo app.

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We have just released webOS 3.0.5 as an over-the-air update for TouchPads, and the 3.0.5 SDK is now out of Early Access. Get the latest and greatest here.

Highlights include a new Sensor API, the ability to have plug-ins use both processor cores, and improvements to audio and video playback, plus various updates to Enyo we think you’ll like. We’ve also incorporated a homebrew patch to the Bluetooth SPP service to support binary data, so we expect to see some hardware hacks soon. (Hmm—new App Hack theme?)

Enjoy!

Thanks to all of you who made “Got Game?” our best App Hack yet. We had a ton of entries, which made judging a challenge, but also a blast! We saw imaginative designs and control concepts, some great kids apps, and a few nicely rendered game clones. The winner, by a whisker, is…

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From all of us in webOS Developer Relations, we want to wish you a very Happy New Year. We start this new year with a continued flow of new apps coming in, a healthy population of TouchPads and other webOS devices in the field, and lots of folks with new Christmas TouchPads waiting to load them up with apps.We’ve been having a lot of fun with the community with our Weekly webOS App Hack contests, and are looking forward to more fun in the future. (Yes, we’ll be posting the results of the last Hack soon.)

We also start this year looking forward to the Open Sourcing of webOS. We are very excited about the promise of this new direction, and are working hard to make it a reality. No, it’s not going to happen immediately. While there are those who would like us just to post the source on Github, it’s not that simple. We need to work out issues of governance, licensing, contributions, non-open source components, etc. However, we are committed to making it happen, and to taking an active role in the future of webOS.

While we are working on these details, we are interested in your thoughts and opinions. Are you interested in or planning on contributing to webOS? What areas would you like to focus on (core OS, apps, etc.)? Let us know in the forums—we’re listening.

Again, Happy New Year. Let’s make it a good one!

The App Hack-meisters of webOS Developer Relations will be taking a little break for the holidays.

Big thanks to all of you who submitted entries for the “Got Game” App Hack. Keep an eye out for the results. See you in the New Year!

Well, it’s been a pretty exciting week, and we wanted to end on a high note, by announcing the winner of the Mapping App Hack. As you may remember, the challenge was to map data published by the Liquid Robotics PacX Wave Gliders project. So, without further ado, we are pleased to announce that the winner of the challenge and the 16GB TouchPad is…

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We know a lot of you are looking forward to a new edition of Pivot. As we continue to look ahead at the direction webOS will be heading under the new Open Source strategy, we have decided to put Pivot on hold.

We also know that featuring apps is useful both to consumers and developers. Today, customers in the US will find an update to the “Featured” section of the App Catalog to help consumers find great apps for the holidays.

We are committed to growing the app ecosystem (there are a lot of webOS devices out there, after all), and will continue to use a variety of means to promote the best apps we can find. So keep your eye out for upcoming promos, discounts, and showcases!

Well, yes we’re a bit late getting this week’s challenge out, but we think you’ll like the challenge anyway, and in the spirit of holiday generosity, we’ll even give you a little extra time to work on it.

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Well, you’ve been waiting for the big webOS announcement, and today we’ve made it. This morning, HP announced that webOS will be going open source with the resources of HP behind it. The Developer Relations team is very excited by this announcement and what it means for the future of webOS, and for you, our developer community.

With this announcement, Meg Whitman has reiterated HP’s commitment to webOS as a cloud-connected, scalable platform, while opening up new possibilities for platform expansion and improvement. She has also committed HP to a course of continued improvement to webOS, which means we’re in it for the long haul. Finally, we are committed to good, transparent and inclusive governance to avoid fragmentation of the platform.

Here in Developer Relations, we have the deepest appreciation for you, our developer community. You have helped to bring this announcement about through your passion and commitment, through periods of both promise and uncertainty.

We are committed to you as not only contributors to our app ecosystem, but now to webOS itself. We recognize that there’s a larger open source community of which we will now be a part, and are excited by the future now open to us.

We also know you’ll have a lot of questions, and we don’t have all the answers right now. We will keep you up-to-date on the latest developments, both in the forums and here on the developer blog.

We hope you’ll join us for the next leg of this journey!