Thanks once again to the people who submitted apps for the weekly App Hack! We continue to be amazed by the creative ways that webOS developers find to turn webOS technologies into fantastic apps in only a week’s time!
This week’s winner goes to a great new app that is sure to find a home on many a TouchPad: Read more
For this week’s app hack we are going to focus on a feature that has always been a passion of mine: multi-touch. Having the ability to get multiple touch points from the hardware lets you do many interesting things. The most common use is to let the user do an action with multiple fingers, such as a pinch to zoom gesture or a two fingered swipe. However, there is another use: letting the user do multiple actions at the same time! Consider a multi-player air hockey game. Each user has a finger on the screen at the same time. While their actions are independent, they are also simultaneous, so we need multi-touch events to make it work.
Editor’s note: This week we are featuring a guest challenge from rockstar webOS developer Doug Reeder. He has pioneered an app interface that he calls Desk Accessories. Your challenge this week is to create an app that uses this kind of interface. Take it away, Doug!
Psychological research shows that humans cannot efficiently concentrate on more than one activity at a time. However, there are single activities that require two apps on the screen at once. For example, one might want to compose an e-mail while reading figures from a spreadsheet, or calculate price comparisons while shopping on-line.
This week’s App Hack will take a look at an API common across all webOS devices: the accelerometer. Generally, it is used to flip the screen around when the user rotates their device, but it can be used for so much more than that.
The accelerometer can be accessed by listening for two different events: orientation and acceleration. Orientation does the hard work of determining when the user has flipped their device to one of the standard orientations. It also gives you the pitch and roll relative to the current orientation. You can also set the orientation using the setWindowOrientation function. This takes a named orientation of ‘up’, ‘down’, ‘left’, ‘right’, ‘landscape’, ‘portrait’, and ‘free’. The directions like ‘up’ disable rotation and fix the device to one orientation. The ‘landscape’ mode will let the screen flip 180 degrees but always be in wide screen. The portrait mode is similar. And finally ‘free’ will let the user rotate however they choose.
We hope you’re having fun with Text-to-speech for this week’s App Hack. We did make a mistake with the library we sent out, and forgot to strip the binaries, which makes it…ahem…difficult to submit your app. We were very pleased to see that one developer not only figured out the problem, but posted the stripped binaries on his blog, along with a couple of handy updates (including making the library useable by multiple apps). So, we’re pointing everybody to http://fahhem.com/blog/2011/10/weboss-weekly-app-hack-10-05-11/ to get the updated binaries. They’re at the bottom of the post, and include versions for the emulator as well as for devices.
Thanks Fahhem! And thanks to those of you have already submitted apps. Great work! If you need to re-submit using Fahhem’s updates, no problem.
As explained in yesterday’s post, we are starting a weekly App Hack Challenge. Each week we will post a code sample or explain how to use a particular API. You will have just seven days to use that code or API to build a cool app. The app doesn’t have to be huge or complex, just something fun and interesting. We will be accepting both new apps as well as incorporation of the theme into your existing apps as an improvement.
You have to submit it to the app catalog by October 11th at 11:59pm Pacific Daylight Time to enter. (Submitting to the Beta catalog is fine.) You must then notify us of your entry by email us a link to the app at apphack@palm.com.
The developer of the best app will earn a glory and adulation and the right to call themselves an App Hack Ninja. And to kick off the series, this week’s winner will receive a 32GB TouchPad!
Looking for an opportunity to flex your webOS skills on a new app, but need a bit of inspiration to get your creative juices flowing? We’ve got the answer for you. For the next few weeks, we’re going to hold weekly, virtual, mini-hackathons around some cool aspects of webOS development you may not be familiar with yet.
Interested? Here’s how it works: