HP webOS Developer Blog

One of the great unsung webOS tools is Ares. The Ares visual IDE lets you build and test webOS apps quickly. So quickly in fact, that it can be used to catch cats…

A couple of weeks ago, I attended the Civicwebs Hackathon in Portland. This is an all day event where local hackers get together to build code for the benefit of the city. Mostly, these revolve around producing or consuming local government data in interesting ways that will benefit the populace. One of their most intriguing projects is the CatMapper.

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This post is the second in the series describing the usage and implementation of the preview image widget developed for the Featured Apps app. The first post can be found here.

Today’s posts covers the general implementation details of the widget as well as the movement and animation implementation.

Layout

Implementation of this widget is fairly straightforward from an HTML standpoint, consisting of a series of divs, with the associated JavaScript and CSS performing most of the heavy lifting.

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[Editor's note: After reviewing X-Plane, your intrepid editor's son discovered MiniSquadron, and asked if we would let him write another review. Who are we to turn down such willing help? Enjoy!]

As you can probably tell from my last review, I love planes. I also love arcade games. When you combine the two, you have me hooked. In MiniSquadron, you pilot a fighter plane in a cartoon world filled with ducks, seagulls, and enemy fighters of all varieties. Your job is to defeat the waves of enemies as they come in, collecting power-ups and unlocking new planes along the way.

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A few weeks ago, while jamming out to some tunes on my Palm Pre, I started thinking how great it would be to stream the MP3′s located on my home computer. Instead of constantly updating my music over USB, it would be much more convenient to have access to my entire music collection regardless of location. Additionally, I wanted to set up my own server running at home so I wouldn’t have to use a third-party service. (The great advantage of streaming is that you don’t have to decide what music to upload to a device ahead of time.)

With these goals in mind, I set out on the Internet and found the Ampache project and Ampache Mobile, the associated webOS client. Combined, these software packages allow webOS to stream and manage music from home computers equipped with the appropriate software.

A small warning ahead of time: the Ampache software is well suited to developers and hobbyists, but probably not for an average user. A good knowledge of Apache web servers and MySQL is helpful, especially if you plan to serve this content securely over the web. However I had no problems installing the software, and the instructions were clear and easy to follow.

Once installed, the server interface of Ampache can manage users, music, videos, and playlists. There are other capabilities I have yet to explore like Localplay and transcoding. I found the server-side software to be a bit cumbersome, but after some fiddling and reading instructions (gasp!), I had my music collection scanned and ready for use!

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Editor’s note: Today, we’re featuring a guest blogger – your intrepid editor’s son Rick,  who is 14 and almost as big a flight simulator buff as his dad. When I mentioned that I intended to do an”Interesting Apps” post on X-Plane, he quickly volunteered to do it for me!

We’re both big fans—I was probably one of the very first purchasers of X-Plane for webOS—and we’ve both had a blast playing the many versions of X-Plane that are available. Take it away, Rick!

I’ve played flight simulators for a long time, and when I first played X-Plane for webOS, I was amazed how well it compared to the desktop versions of X-Plane and other simulators. While most of the game apps I’ve played focus on making either the environment, characters, or gameplay beautiful, X-Plane was able to combine all of those characteristics into one amazing package.

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For Featured Apps we wanted to provide an attractive means for users to view the application preview images. Initially we investigated attempting to scale the ImageView widget to provide this functionality but its logic is tuned for displaying a single image and did not fit this design well, thus the creation of the new widget.

This UI displays up to three images to the user at a single time with one image being the focal point and portions of the next and previous images displayed for the user on either side of the focused image. The user is able to swipe between each of these images, allowing them to display an entire list of images without taking up significant screen space or resources.
Since this sort of UI may be a common need we have decided to open source its implementation as well a highlight some of the challenges that we ran into during it’s implementation. Today I will be covering just the usage of this widget, but future posts will highlight some of the nitty gritty details of the implementation.

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