It’s time once again to announce the winner of the webOS Weekly App Hack! The theme of the week was multi-touch, and some of the entries decided to help us celebrate Thanksgiving in the US as well. Well played!
Without further ado, this week’s winner is (imagine trumpet fanfare now)…
In each previous week we’ve used a particular API or technique as the central theme of the hack. This week I thought it would be fun to do something more open ended. This means you can use any technology or APIs you want. It’s entirely up to you how you want to interpret it, so I expect we will have some very creative entries.
The theme this week is “Three”. That could mean the number three, a book named Three, a trilogy of things, or a game with three legged aliens. It’s entirely up to you. Use your imagination to it’s fullest.
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
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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.
Once again, a big thanks to everybody who submitted apps for the Weekly App Hack. This week’s theme was “Accelerometer”, and we received some very interesting entries. It’s amazing how many different ways you can use such a seemingly simple feature.
Without further ado, we are pleased to announce that this week’s winner of the contest and an HP TouchPad is…
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.
One benefit of developing for a JavaScript framework like Enyo is being able to take advantage of existing 3rd party JavaScript libraries. Using these add-on libraries allows us to quickly implement tools, controls, and animations to our applications with minimal effort.
If you’ve been wondering how to start using other libraries with Enyo, webOS Developer Relations Engineer Jeremy Thomas has a new tutorial on the Developer Portal just for you. Check it out here.
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.