The announcement says: "The Beta release is comprised of 54 webOS components available as opensource. This brings over 450,000 lines of code released under the Apache 2.0 license, which is one of the most liberal and accepted in the open source community." Now it's time to get this stuff up and running on modern devices. I suggest the Galaxy SII. Not out of self-interest or anything, by the way.
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Member since:
2006-01-23
Member since:2006-06-12
As far as I know, if it run Linux it can run WebOS, if your tablet can run Linux, then go ahead and install it.
As for the GS2/GS3/GNexus, the issue is Xorg. Android use its own graphic layer. The solutions are to run X in android graphic layer (a la Mac OS X) or wait for the OSS drivers to be mature enough. The last solution may be Qt for Android, but once there, it will still probably take quite a lot of effort to go the last mile and make WebOS run on top of it.
Member since:
2009-02-09
I wish I was a little more technically inclined (and/or had the time to really invest to become more technically inclined) to be able to install webOS on a device. I don't know if it was because WebOS was my first smart phone OS or what, but between iOS and Android, I am one of those freaks that still feel WebOS was/is superior. The original WebOS hardware was subpar and the app market was dismal compared to the competition, but the OS itself has always made more sense to me than anything else. The cards, the multitasking, etc.
Anyway. Sorry for spamming the comments with unproductive things like this. I just miss WebOS. I hope this gets on a device.
Member since:2007-03-26
Don't apologise (your comment was far more worthy than the comment that preceded it).
Anyhow, I do fully agree with you. WebOS was a very nice platform. It wasn't without it's issues though:
* no up-scaling for apps written in different resolutions, nor an option for overlapping Windows. This resulted in mobile apps almost entirely filling the screen with white space, which was so fugly that (shamefully) ruined all mobile apps for me 
* poor performance compared to Android; or to be more precise, compared to stock Android or cyanogenmod. I'd imagine comparisons between TouchWiz or HTC Sense would be more even.
* poor defaults on the HP Touchpad. The Palm devices might have been better in this department, but HP had heavy logging and such like in place. The amount of overhead this generated was phenomenal
* stock browser was pretty poor; it was hit and miss whether some websites would even work. I think Palm used their own engine though, and if that's the case then I'd much preferred to have something based on Gecko or Webkit.
* better multi-user support as logging in and out of the Facebook app (for example) was bloody painful. What compounded things was how well all the user profiles were linked into each other; which made the OS work beautifully when being operated by a single user, but made logging out of apps almost vital when using shared hardware.
However these criticisms are all pretty minor tweaks in the grand scheme of things; and the last point is an issue with all mobile platforms (though, as I'd also stated, WebOS did have a nicer way of organising profiles). There certainly wasn't much wrong with the core of the platform: it looked beautiful (in my opinion it's easily the prettiest mobile / tablet OS released), was one of the most intuitive OSs to use and yet still offered a unique perspective on UIs which differed far more extensively than the iOS, Android or even other Linux platforms do
In my honest opinion, development on Meego / Tizen / or whatever the latest donkey is called, should be refocused on WebOS now that Palm / HP have open sourced it.
Member since:
2007-04-13