HP webOS Developer Blog

We’re continuing to provide developers with more opportunities to distribute their apps. Here are some updates we’d like to share:

Paid apps for Australia and New Zealand App Catalogs
Building on the recent addition of HP webOS App Catalogs for Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong, we’re excited to announce that developers will be able to offer paid apps in the App Catalogs for Australia and New Zealand as well.

To make your paid app available in these countries, you will need to select the Australia and New Zealand App Catalogs and designate the price of your app in the My Apps tab. Read our help article for more details.

Submit TouchPad and smartphone apps in a single package
We have also implemented an update to our developer portal that lets you submit a smartphone app and TouchPad app as a single package to the App Catalog. Now developers can offer their apps across multiple webOS devices in a more seamless way. For more information, check out our help article.

“Meet the Team” is a series to help you get to know your webOS Developer Relations team. It’s a friendly and fun behind-the-scenes look at the people whose main mission is to serve and champion webOS developers everywhere.

This time, we chat with Jag Wood, Director of Evangelism, who talks about the mission of her growing team, what she hears from developers and a little bit of the lighter side at HP.

Q: First off, what’s your title and what does that really mean?

I joined the webOS team as the Director of Evangelism and Worldwide Developer Relations.  At a high level, my team has a dual role.  Externally – the Evangelists speak to the values, key features and benefits of developing on webOS and provide technical deep dives on the platform.  Internally – we become the voices for the developer communities around current and future product input.  We take what we see, hear and feel from our developers and bring that feedback in-house for all to hear.  The feedback is used in planning for future enhancements and updates to the platform.

Q: We’ve been building out the Developer Relations team and I know there are a lot of new faces on your team in particular. What are some things developers can expect as your team grows?

Our goals in their simplest forms are to have more direct contact and 1:1 interactions with our developers, help them see success on webOS and be their “voice” on ideas around evolving the platform in meaningful ways.  We’re here to support and grow our relationships with the developer community that will bring amazing content to webOS.

We’re always looking for great people to join the team, locally and abroad, so if anyone out there is interested, referrals are welcome!

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As you know, we’re big fans of web standards. The Canvas API is a crucial part of HTML 5 web standards, letting you draw complex 2D graphics in the middle of your web content without any plugins. All it takes is some simple JavaScript. I just wanted to go over some of the improvements we’ve made to the Canvas API for webOS 3.0.

Here are some of the highlights:

• - The Canvas.toDataURL function is now supported – you can manipulate pixels to your heart’s content, getting the results out as a Base64 encoded PNG. From there you can use it as the source to an IMG tag, upload it to a web service, or save it locally.
• - Line caps and Line Joins are fully implemented. This makes charts and graphs a lot prettier.
• - More composite modes.
• - Multi-touch events: While this isn’t specific to Canvas, it’s common for Canvas apps to use multi-touch events.  Now webOS can join the fun.
• - Bug fixes: Lots and lots of bug fixes, including some around transforms and arc drawing.

Beyond features and bug fixes, one of the biggest changes is speed. We’ve been working hard to improve HTML Canvas performance and I think the results speak for themselves. As a frame of reference, my particle demo previously would reach around 90 or 100 particles before dropping below 20 frames per second. Now, I can get to 200 particles in the same demo, which is a significant bump in basic drawing performance.

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By now, you’re probably familiar with the series of webOS workshops and webOS CONNECT developer events we’ve been hosting around the world. They’ve been incredibly popular and we’ve had awesome turnout everywhere we’ve been. But lots of developers have been asking, “When are you headed to my city?” You asked for more events – and we’ve got them.

We’re hosting webOS workshops and webOS CONNECT events in the following cities. These events are free, but we encourage you to register now to secure your spot:

- September 7, 2011: Sydney, Australia
- September 12, 2011: Singapore
- September 15, 2011: Hong Kong
- October 4, 2011: Milan, Italy
- October 6, 2011: Madrid, Spain
- October 11, 2011: Beijing, China

As we mentioned in a previous post, we’re excited about expanding the HP webOS App Catalog to four new countries and we look forward to meeting developers there and the other cities we have scheduled in the coming months. We hope to see lots of you soon!

Register today