[clue] Open WebOS

[Dan Kulinski]

WebOS is the mobile OS Palm created for the Palm Pre products.  Palm
was developing a tablet when HP purchased the division.  HP gutted the
division just before the tablet went on sale and sold the tablets at a
huge discount.  In fact I have a 32GB Touchpad that can dual boot
WebOS and Android ICS.  There was a lot of attention given to the
Touchpad at first by Cyanogen team members but that quickly dived
after the Nexus 7 showed up on the scene.

WebOS had a great multitasking system.  You would hit a button and you
would be presented with a bunch of cards.  Each card was a task.  To
close a task you could simply drag it away.  Google did something
similar with Android Honeycomb.

WebOS apps were mostly HTML5 (including WebGL support) and Javascript
making the barrier to entry very low.

OpenWebOS is HP fulfilling its promise to release WebOS to the public
as there was a pretty large user following.  Sadly Touchpad owners
found out that OpenWebOS will not support the device and the
proprietary drivers for the sound chip and camera were not cleared to
be open sourced.  In this same vein the Camera doesn't work under
Android ICS either, but I find I haven't ever really missed it.

Dan

On Sun, Sep 30, 2012 at 9:05 AM, Sean LeBlanc <seanleblanc at comcast.net> wrote:
> So, I was on Diaspora, and noticed there was a hashtag for this thing
> called OpenWebOS. Took a quick look at the site for it, and it seems to
> be something HP is sponsoring, and Linux is in the mix.
>
> Anyone else know much about this?
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