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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."
You can't fucking steal an idea. Stop purporting this nonsensical line that the intangible can be stolen. Fuck.
The $99 pricetag.
I've used iOS for years, and have dabbled with Android. webOS beats them both hands down (for me!). iOS isn't so bad to run, but only if I want to run the way Apple decided was best, so it's a pain to get it the way *I* want it, in typical Linux user fashion. Android is just a confusing mess of non-intuitive menus and settings.
webOS just _gets out of the way_! It's a doggone shame it doesn't seem to be going anywhere, because there's no way I'd trade my Touchpad for an iOS or Android tablet.
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
It's been hurt by HP's incompetent management, rather than any egregious faults of its own.
Palm had it for a whole year and a half before HP.. they released Palm Pre and Palm Pixi using it -- both phones DOA. The Palm Pre had 0.2% market share after nearly a year on the market (source).
HP didn't do it any favors.. but it's hard to say everyone would have loved WebOS if it wasn't for HP. No one wanted it from the very beginning.
There was a waiting list for the original phones when they first came out and they sold out quickly. And WebOS was fantastic. But...
- the phones themselves had battery problems (if you slid the phone closed too quickly the phone would job the battery out and the phone would cut off)
- as cool as the phone was, it was too damn small. Slab phones were becoming the preferred interface for smartphones.
- as cool as the OS was, the user base wanted it built on, with extra features added, and Palm decided for whatever reason that it was going to focus on incremental things instead of sweeping new feature sets.
- battery life was not good. Seriously. It was freaking horrible. Worse than your standard android phone.
All these things worked against it, plus Sprint decided it was more in love with HTC, so Palm didn't get the kind of backing it was hoping for. But Palm did fumble a few times before HP took it over, so you're right that HP can't shoulder all the blame.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
That's right, I said it.
... right, I hope that WebOS finds itself a firm footing somewhere, truly I do.
No complaints apart from hardware and the lack of a tide app.
Contrary to popular spouting off a smartphone doesn't need the Internet except when you need the Internet. How you choose to draw that line should be your choice, not your phone's.
There's no such thing as "rooting". Got root.
Tweaking the thing can bring easy and quick rewards with a tiny bit of css and a tiny bit of html.
I didn't get the fire sale pad but not for the lack of trying.
I had an ipad once - it was a gift - it wanted iTunes on my computer - then it wanted the correct version of iTunes - then it wanted an OSX upgrade - then I lost interest - I traded it for a new suspension kit for my ride. Couldn't be happier. iWhat? Nothing.
What was I
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He seem to never heard of Maemo or the N900. If well not successful (for some values of successful, at least) had a lot of ideas other OSes should copy. In front of Android i felt crippled after more than a year with Maemo, mainly because how natural was for me to be really running several applications at once, even with that hardware. Maemo development diverted to Meego, that ended losing ground by the 2 companies backing it, and now could be in the horizon Tizen, Meltemi or whatever ends being the flavor of the semester.
WebOS is good anyway, even when the environment seemed to be with less community push than Maemo. A lot of its features, joined with maemo/meego/whatever ones, could make an interesting portable device OS. But the handset makers and carriers had already picked their alternatives, and there is little room for others (specially, without big enough backers), what is a shame,
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.
Hands down BEST WebOS feature which absolutely MUST be ported to all other mobile OS's = Card style app MULTI-TASKING, with wipe to close. After using WebOS for 10 minutes, that's the absolute biggest pain in the ass you recognize that exists with every mobile phone OS. Why is task management such a god damn process (no pun) for the competition? Why do I need to start another app just to kill something?
Card style app management is just so intuitive, all the way down to the gestures in controlling them.
Palm sucked at some things for sure... but when that company got something right, they nailed it.
Document management on iOS is a mess. Every application implements its own scheme.
This is probably one of the best notes he makes. While hiding document management from the user initially may simplify things, the reality is that every single user needs sophisticated document management in the long run. iOS's biggest mistake was here; simpler document management should equate to more elegant, more usable document management, not more naieve management.
Its saddening to me today that Windows 7 search / OSX's Spotlight still don't meet the level of sophistication that zsh's globbing syntax does. Where are the document systems that automatically cross reference, sort by category etc? The filesystem on my PC is less sophisticated than google search by orders of magnitude, and slower too. Whats worse is that the iOS act of simply removing it from the users view is trying to creep back into the PC world.
Ipads dont have rotation lock like the Galaxy Tab.
If you ever get a chance to use a real tablet, check the sides. That's where the iPad keeps the rotation lock. It'll probably be really easy for you to find as I'm sure Samsung just put it in exactly the same place.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have to admit some of this stuff had me absolutely drooling - particularly the app and multi-window management. Damn - it's much better than what Apple is doing right now.
They should absolutely use some of these ideas. Unfortunately I'm afraid Apple wouldn't even look at this stuff. They've got the NIH mentality bad.
WebOS has the ability to stack and organize cards. CM9 has the "recently used" apps list that you can swipe away, but as far as I know that's all you can do with them. On WebOS you can get to the task cards by swiping up from the bottom bezel anywhere along the bottom. With CM9 you have to hit a specific button.
If I could have android apps on WebOS, I'd be a happy man.