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The webOS Features Other OSes Should Steal
New submitter egparedes points out a post dissecting webOS and highlighting the things it did right, in the hopes that developers for other mobile operating systems will use them as inspiration. Quoting:
"webOS isn't quite dead yet. It's just being open-sourced, which, when it happens to commercial software, often turns out to be the digital equivalent of being reanimated as a walking corpse in a George Romero movie. ... Of course, it's not assured that this is the end of webOS. Maybe open-sourcing it will be the best thing that ever happened to webOS. But maybe it just means that HP doesn't care anymore, and that webOS won't receive much attention anymore. This would be unfortunate, because webOS is one of the few current mobile operating systems that are actually a joy to use. It's been hurt by HP's incompetent management, rather than any egregious faults of its own. The least we can do now is to keep its best ideas alive, even if webOS itself won't make it."
The $99 pricetag.
After I got over the paragraph about how certainly things "constantly happen" to the poor guy who deletes emails right before replying to them, I calmed down and read. And it turns out webOS really did invent something: the uninvented the crippled "it's not a desktop" desktop. It really looks like they got over some of the stupid bullshit that makes phones/tablets suck so much. Look at the features this guy is excited about.
The uninvented getting rid of windows. That's what the cards and screens and task-switching and (part of) the notifications points are about. When you have windows, all the problems that arise from taking away windows, go away.
The uninvented not-using-filesystems. (Drastically oversimplifying) This guy mounts whatever network filesystems he wants to, and the apps can save to and load from them.
They didn't uninvent not-having-a-keyboard or uninvent counter-productive auto-correction, but the webOS team tried the hardest of all, to have a keyboard despite the lack of having a keyboard, and to make autocorrection the least destructive to entering what you want. Of course, it "works best with a hardware keyboard" (that's a verbatim quota from TFA).
If this sounds mocking, I don't mean it that way (at least not completely -- the TFA's style makes it hard to not mock). This is serious. It sounds like webOS is the least phone/tablet-like phone/tablet OS, which really is why it sucks the least -- it has thrown away the fewest proven ideas replacing them with Jobsian reality distortion.
Running android on the touchpad is not the point. the point is running webOS on other HW.
-- no sig today