Palm pulls back the curtain on webOS technical details (ars technica) [LWN.net]

Ars technica shares some advance information on Palm's Linux-based webOS platform. "The platform supports headless background services that interact with the user through passive notifications and interactive dashboard elements. Persistent data storage in webOS is facilitated by the HTML 5 database features. The platform's integrated media server supports audio and video playback through the open source GStreamer media engine."

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Palm pulls back the curtain on webOS technical details (ars technica)

Posted Feb 18, 2009 17:36 UTC (Wed) by xav (guest, #18536) [Link] (1 responses)

At least it looks like it's fully buzzwords-compliant :)

Palm pulls back the curtain on webOS technical details (ars technica)

Posted Feb 18, 2009 18:03 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

Heh. Looks like a game alright: "describe 1998 GUI technology without using the words desktop, icon, and click".

Palm pulls back the curtain on webOS technical details (ars technica)

Posted Feb 18, 2009 18:17 UTC (Wed) by endecotp (guest, #36428) [Link] (4 responses)

"webOS significantly lowers the barriers to entry for new developers" [by using technologies like Javascript that are already well-known].

In contrast, iPhone development requires you to learn a complex language (obj-C) and toolkit that's used nowhere except on Apple systems. Yet that hasn't stopped thousands of developers churning out more apps in a year than there are packages in Debian, presumably in something of a "goldrush" hope that they can sell enough at $0.99 a time to retire on. Yet Palm, who I think will also have an "App Store" and a product that sells in quantity, feel the need to "lower the barrier". Why?

The App Store economics interests me. If history had taken a slightly different course and we were now paying $0.99 each for Linux apps, how different would things be?

Palm pulls back the curtain on webOS technical details (ars technica)

Posted Feb 18, 2009 19:04 UTC (Wed) by leoc (guest, #39773) [Link] (1 responses)

thousands of developers churning out more apps in a year than there are packages in Debian

Yeah but how many of those are "fart" apps?

Palm pulls back the curtain on webOS technical details (ars technica)

Posted Feb 19, 2009 0:19 UTC (Thu) by syspig (guest, #41889) [Link]

I kid you not...

bob@nob:/tmp# apt-cache search fart
debian-history - A Short History of the Debian Project
bob@nob:/tmp#

Palm pulls back the curtain on webOS technical details (ars technica)

Posted Feb 20, 2009 4:05 UTC (Fri) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link]

Actually there were a very large number of low priced applications
available for the Palm. Among the behemoths, it was a way for a developer
to make a living from their skills. Debian had packages for
compiling/building applications, and the emulator was GPL.

Their problem was their subsystem and OS was very limited, and once network
aware applications, additional storage schemes and the like showed up, they
needed a new one. Which we are seeing, what, 5 years later?

Quite useful apps for $10-20. When MS gained traction, most were ported. I
suspect that many of the iphone apps are from the same people. There was
also a vigorous community active in breaking the limited use demos that you
could fully enable with a purchase/key arrangement.

If Palm sells some hardware, they will regain the developers. Not a trivial
if however.

Derek

Dev tools

Posted Feb 20, 2009 19:40 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Apple developer tools had a very good reputation even before they were incorporated to Mac OS X; objective C is a C derivative which should be almost trivial to learn for C/C++ developers. Similarly, their toolkit has been fine-tuned for ease of development over decades. Apple is not an easy target to beat in developer friendliness, in fact it is a big selling point for iPhone developers.