HP webOS Developer Blog

When you see a news item on your newsfeed and it has “4 comments” tagged right there, do you sometimes wish you could just see them inline? We do too. Often the conversation provides much of the entertainment around a post, and that is why we have implemented “inline comments” for you as a major feature to test in our latest Facebook beta client for webOS.

We care about customizability, so you can turn that feature on or off in the preferences.

The other major user facing feature is the ability to change which feeds you want to view. You will notice a new drop down label in the middle of the screen (probably says “NEWS FEED” right now). Tap right there to see the list of available feeds.

You will also find the following features:

• Revised photo tagging. Users can now tag both themselves and their friends in photos. To tag someone, simply upload a photo, then view it on your profile. Tap on the photo, then tap on the tagging icon that appears below it. Begin typing someone’s name to select them from your friends list, then tap Done.
• Clearing multiple notifications. To clear all of your existing notifications, tap on the notification globe at the top-left corner of the app, then tap See All Notifications, then perform a back gesture (by swiping from right to left below your screen).
• Support for landscape viewing. Just tilt your Palm webOS phone to the side and Facebook for Palm webOS will switch orientations accordingly.

Finally, there is also a major refactoring as part of this release. We found that the original list implementation wasn’t holding up great as we added more and more data into the list (e.g. comment info). With the number of HTML elements created for a given list feed we were having trouble using the swap on scroll implementation that the Mojo list uses due to the HTML parsing, styling and reflows that were required. The net result was choppy scrolling performance.

The custom list implementation fixed this through custom paging buttons that require the user to manually page, but reduce the number of HTML rendering cycles, while also providing a limit to the number of HTML elements that are placed in the document.

We are really excited to add these major features, as well as a slew of other bug fixes and small improvements. As always, the beta channel isn’t fully bug free, and we are asking you the community, to help us. Give us feedback and let us know what we can do to continue to improve on the app.

We also have some exciting new features in the works, and can’t wait to show these to you in the future!