HP webOS Developer Blog

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!

Do you have questions about best practices for using buttons in your app? Maybe you’d like advice on the best way to use buttons in a dialog box. Well, our own Tomomi Imura, webOS Developer Relations’ in-house UI wizard is here to help with her new tutorial, “Creating Usable UI—Buttons and Interactive Dialogs”, available now on the webOS Developer Portal. She’ll walk you through button setup, the proper use of color and text, and how best to use buttons in intuitive, consistent user dialogs.

Consistent user interaction is one of the keys to happy users. So, check out Tomomi’s tutorial and get coding!

“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 week we chat with Ben Combee, our developer advocate and API czar from the webOS engineering group. After you check out his interview, you can follow him on Twitter @unwiredben and check out his infrequently-updated personal blog at http://thelifeunwired.com.

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“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 Donald Kirker, who specializes in App Review for the webOS team.

Read more ‣