My pandemic project was to find, restore and organize scattered and archived remnants of Palm/HP's mobile webOS platform to help keep these delightful little devices alive.
Seems like several others, my actual development career began on WebOS. In high school, I was intrigued by the idea of a web-based, multitasking capable smartphone and begged my parents to buy me one.
Ultimately I learned a ton and have great stories such as staying up all night re-architecting Weatherman (https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?&a...) because of the popularity (and this was before it was on the WebOS store, at this time it was invite-only so I had to post it on a forum!). Weatherman was just a hack on top of a hack on top of a hack. There was no Canvas API on the device so I had to generate the weather images on a server and then send them to the device, for example.
The highlight for me was winning one of the top spots in the Palm Hot Apps competition for the "free apps" category with Pixi Dust (https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?ca...). The physics weren't accurate by any means, but it was the first time I had seriously used C++ (I think it was, it was so long ago!).
I miss having platforms like these with innovative ideas and small communities. I learned so much by having to hack my way around the limitations of the operating system, and really miss WebOS overall. I think I might still have an old Palm Pre sitting a drawer somewhere.
Hey! I ran the Hot Apps competition when I was the lead developer advocate. I remember Pixi Dust. I was amazed you could get it so fast.
Fun story: there was no internal API for app stats so every morning I had to manually extract data via Excel, then run scripts to generate the JSON that powered the Hot Apps dashboard. Fun times.
That's so cool! Of course with so many prizes on the line, I spent quite a bit of time (when I was visiting my grandparents in California none the less) over a weekend hacking together all of the ideas I could think of. It was a really great experience overall, and I'm glad you still remember Pixi Dust :)
I do have a zip archive of (I think all) my source code. Maybe I'll try and post it on Github this weekend and send you a link!
Edit: Yep, I just checked and have both the app client and backend code. I will post everything I can this weekend and ping you via email if I can find it in your profiles or I see you have your Discord alias.
Wow! The Pre was the reason I got into development, because I wanted to be able to run through flashcards on the bus to school. So I built Study Buddy[1]. The joke is by the time I figured out how to really build it, I had a car so it wasn't quite as personally useful as it could have been. It was a small community but there was a decent amount of teenage developers, maybe 8 or so of us, and I think 10 years later we're all still in the engineering space, basically because of webOS.
This makes me so, so happy! I put so much work into WebOS apps, and your site lists five of them. Sadly it's missing a few, like "My WebOS Apps", the developer dashboard app I wrote for WebOS app developers that let developers see their download stats on the phone, get notifications of when their app was accepted or rejected and more - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U4bVq_VIhs&list=PL792FA4594...
I'm getting so nostalgic, even tearing up a little :-)
There was a thread this week about calendars, and it made me miss the unified calendar that webOS gave us. I'm excited (and slightly paranoid) to see this now, and can't wait to play with it! I wonder if I still have my old Pre lying around anywhere, and if it still boots. I love my iPhone, but I sure loved that Pre when it was new.
As a random second anecdote, I really miss the hacker community around it. I can't remember the name of the forum, but there was a super active thread the day we got root on the device, and it was unbelievably cool to see some Palm employees show up in it and pointing folks in the right direction. Such a fun device.
FWIW you can have a unified calendar today with Google Calendar. Ever since the Sunrise Calendar app [1] was discontinued, I switched to a workflow where I have everything centralized in my personal Google Calendar. How it works:
* I have a personal gmail account with my events and apointments.
* Shared a URL from my work calendar (it helps that they use google workspace), and added that to my personal calendar. Especially useful if you don't want to add a work profile in your personal device. Personally the work calendar is all I need to check on my phone when I'm not on my work laptop.
* Added the Facebook Events calendar URL.
* Added the Songkick Events calendar URL for keeping track of concert dates.
* You can also subcribe to anything else you need, e.g. TV shows feed, Garmin's calendar feed, Formula One or other sports' calendars, holidays calendar...
I thought FB no longer let you share your personal events calendar? I know I used to have mine shared to Google Calendar a long time ago but haven’t looked into it since it stopped working.
Probably forums.webosnation.com -- its still there, although its slowed down a lot. The last of us diehard users are on Discord now: webosarchive.com/discord
webOS had something called "Synergy" which was essentially a set of databases/schemas/services to provide a unified view on things. I don't fully remember whether this was actually supported, but an app like Facebook could have "its" calendar events (birthdays, events, etc.) stored in one of these and they would seamlessly show up in the main calendar app, without additional setup or sync required. Same held for messaging (SMS, gtalk, Facebook, all in the one app) and probably a few other things.
I worked at Palm during the development of webOS, both before the Pre was launched, then again in developer relations and framework development after it came out. I'm very happy to see this archive of the great work the community created around these devices.
If you want to archive my old Twitter feed, https://twitter.com/webostips, that might be useful for the help section. It really only ran in 2009-2010, as I got too busy after returning to Palm from my stint at Mozilla.
A lot of what's in today's mobile OSes came from webOS. Cards for multi-tasking. The full-screen gestures introduced with the iPhone X basically came exactly from webOS. Samsung copied its Touch2Share years later. It even had some advanced sync features that no one has yet to properly copy.
Now-a-days, Android and iOS kinda take turns copying each other and mobile webOS is mostly a relic -- but it was from a time when phones didn't exist to suck up your data for advertisers, so it remains charming and delightful.
A lot of the WebOS UI/UX DNA ended up in Android generally and in Material Design specifically because Matías Duarte went to Google as Palm imploded. He was a VP at Palm and is now VP of design at Google.
Or that was the hope, but unfortunately a lot of what made WebOS good was the synergy between his team's excellent design thinking and the clean, practical, well designed platform underlying it. Android is a mess because it tried to reinvent the wheel everywhere from day one, and then Google took over. Which means barely 15 years later it carries multiple Windows' worth of legacy garbage. They've done some lovely UI design, but they have been unsuccessful making that type of work anything more than skin deep.
It was revolutionary in how it was just the modern OSX UI on your phone.
App menu was always on the upper-left side. Settings were on the upper-left. There was a dock at the bottom for most-used applications and an app drawer to hold the rest sorted into tabs.
CMD+Space to search your system was "Just Type" from the "home screen". Their unified notification feed is something I haven't really seen iOS or Android even attempt.
I once heard the iOS app paradigm was the equivalent of having a house with only doors facing to the outside. Going from your master bedroom to the master bath requires leaving the bedroom entirely, walking around the outside until you find the master bath and then going in.
When you multitask on OSX, do you switch applications by minimizing your app and opening it again from a desktop icon or from the app drawer? Nope. You use expose/mission control to see what's open on your current screen. You can also swipe left/right to view other virtual desktops. Your running applications (rather than your desktop) is your default view.
Same thing with webOS. Swipe up for expose where you'd see your current fanned out set of cards (one per app). Swiping left/right would show different sets of cards that you could create/rearrange based on whatever task. Just like OSX, those tabs would be LIVE rather than paused background stuff.
The default view with webOS was also application-first rather than desktop first. iOS and Android encourage having EVERYTHING "open" even though anything past the last handful of apps will probably have to reload anyway. The result is that finding anything useful in that deck of cards is very hard. webOS encouraged sorting that list and keeping it limited to what you were actually using.
While all the differences may seem small, but together, the overall experience feels much different.
HP's second (third?) CEO of the year killed the whole palm division when an investment and licensing webOS could have made HP/webOS into what Google/Android is today. They were finally coming out with decent hardware designs with bigger screens and without the dedicated keyboard.
Their in-progress Mochi design would be around a decade old today, but when you look at it, it has an aesthetic that I think most people would find very refreshing today.
To think that HP was once a well respected company making quality products (test equipment, ICs, medical devices etc.) & known for good management ("HP Way").
All flushed down the toilet in a span of ~10 years in the 00s, now known as a purveyor of subpar laptops and printers.
A shame that the HP brand didn't stay with what turned in to Agilent and Keysight.
In design, they paid a lot of attention to making common actions available with your free thumb so you could navigate most apps with one hand. App-switching, context menus, device operations were all swipe operations.
Having a hardware keyboard made it a bit chunky but didn't feel bad in your pocket because it was so smooth. Also the hardware keyboard provided a true tactile feel so you could even type out some messages without looking at your screen nearly as much as you need to with on-screen keyboards.
Not crazy in my opinion. So many of the things webOS did back in like 2008 the iPhone just recently implemented. It was way ahead of its time. I really wish it was still around.
I picked up an HP Touchpad during the fire sale and remember being surprised by how good the keyboard was at the time compared to an ipad or android tablet -- especially given how those had been on the market so much longer.
I bought a pixi the moment it came out... the OS was incredible for the time. And it was so pretty. Unfortunately, the battery lasted less than half a day and it almost burn a hole in my pocket with how hot it constantly was. The hardware was absolute crap.
I agree wholeheartedly. If it was able to be fully baked it could have been revolutionary. The unified chat view that showed your conversation history across multiple chat platforms was amazing.
Wow.. you've done a lot thanks for resurrecting this!
Like many of the others, WebOS kicked off my career into software development and was my first endeavor building software larger then a simple website.
I created GetMeVino as a simple wine resource for myself as there were similar apps on IOS and I wanted one to use on WebOS. I remember posting it on precentral forums and actually got interest from Palm themselves to build it out further and release it on their catalog. I was blown away, inspired by the possibilities and that really lit a fire in me to want to continue creating even outside WebOS.
Definitely wouldn't have been here today without WebOS.
Some other highlights, the browser based IDE Ares way ahead of its time, WebOS at CES2010 and the Palm developer relations, getting invited to Mozilla for Firefox OS.
Hi there! I'm working on a platform/framework for making retro-compatible websites, and was wondering if you'd have a few minutes to test it with webOS?
I've already tested with older BlackBerry, IE3, and as far back as Netscape 2.x, but I don't have a webOS device.
Is it possible you could spend just a few minutes on it and send me some feedback? Ideally, you should be able to register in one click (no email), write a post, and vote and reply to your own post.
Edit: tried it out. When I posted, I got a message that said "No Cookie"
It wasn't obvious what to do next... I tried registering and a message posted, but seemed to disappear. Anyway, I appreciate the effort -- the more retro-friendly web platforms, the better!
Wow what a throwback, amazing work. Those WebOS times were really a unique little slice of history sort of nestled after blackberry was cemented and the dawn of iPhone era and social media but before those had really really taken off. The influence of WebOS via concepts maybe ahead of its time, and moreso the people who worked on it that went out into industry in many areas, was large.
I never hear people mention the Palm Treo. Apple gets all the credit for inventing smartphones with the iPhone 1st gen, but the Treo preceded it by years. Is it not the first smartphone?
One of my first startups was based on Treos, they were awesome devices. Very snappy.
There were tons of "smartphones" before Apple - Blackberries were very common and famous - Apple, if anything, took the lead in designing a workable "touchscreen only" interface.
I'd argue that Apple's big "innovation" was the capacitive touch screen, that made the UI so much more fluid and responsive. Palm almost shipped a webOS device with a resistive touch screen, but pivoted away after Rubenstein took the reigns. The Treo was a great device for its time, but suddenly felt old fashioned after the iPhone came out -- even though iOS was significantly less capable in its initial implementation (modal notifications, no copy/paste, no apps, etc...)
The capacitive touch screen was necessary but alone wouldn’t have meant much without the revolutionizing software stack. You may think “revolutionizing” seems hyperbolic here but a lot of people forget or don't realize how truly far behind the competition was.
Software keyboards were considered a complete no-go, even by folks within Apple (Ken Kocienda's “Creative Selection” is a great read on the development of the keyboard). Dragging / flinging / pinch to zoom didn’t exist anywhere else or if it did, only in prototype or proof-of-concept form. The capacitive screen unlocked these features but no one else knew how to build them.
I was working at Sony Ericsson when the first iPhone was released. I distinctly remember holding it in my hand and using mobile Safari for the first time and thinking... “we’re fucked”. The company simply didn’t have the engineering chops needed to catch up. Later on Android would provide a possible solution but we managed to screw things up even with a full OS handed to us.
Yeah the touchscreen was the first that "worked" like you expected it to - before the best screens were the ones with styluses which could work well, but was a piece to lose/harder to use at a glance.
They also had the first browser that wasn’t severely crippled by compromises based on d-pad and extremely inaccurate touch input. Before iphone, the mobile web was a sad joke.
Opera Mobile (not Mini) for Symbian S60 with its d-pad bag of tricks was surprisingly usable with desktop websites, just crippled by a very low-res screen. Too bad it seems to have fallen off the face of the Earth even before Presto was abandoned.
I had some amazingly expensive Nokia 900 series phone that had WebKit on it for testing something for work (no way I was going to carry that monstrosity) and I remember it being impressive that it could actually faithfully render real pages. Still had garbage d-pad interaction.
I remember that - a huge advantage of the original Safari is it would show desktop versions of many websites; back then mobile sites were absolute trash. And it was usable because you could pinch + zoom.
Yeah, the touchscreen was the biggest innovation. But the mobile web experience was also head-and-shoulders above anything that came before it, and it was also able to leverage the success it had with iPod and iTunes to make things smoother on the software/syncing side.
In many ways the iPhone was the first modern smartphone.
You can pretty easily draw a line and see stuff designed before the iPhone largely looked like the Treo or the Blackberry. Things designed after largely looked like the iPhone.
The Treo was more of a Palm Pilot with a cell phone built in, or the same but Windows Mobile PDA. The Blackberry was a two-way pager expanded into a cell phone.
The iPhone was sort of designed from the ground up to be a smart phone (the Sidekick may fit this too).
The Treo was nice (never got to have one) but it’s kind of a different generation. The iPhone generation (along with Android) is when smartphones exploded in popularity.
Now if we could just get LG to introduce a new WebOS phone. Add android support and native Qt in addition to web apps while switching to the proposed Mochi style would make for a very nice device.
I wrote one of those apps (I'm not going to say which one for anon reasons)! It was the first (and last) JS app I ever wrote. Its been over a decade, but I remember liking the SDK.
Thanks for bringing this back to life, memory lane and all. I miss my Pre and Touchpad. That mirror on the back of the Pre was such a delightful little touch.
I also love the idea that a screenshot I took on my computer years ago is still kicking around on the internet.
Enyo was a very cool framework for WebOS and it had a web based IDE, which was crazy innovative at the time. Nothing like it. A shame it was gutted by HP.
I loved my Palm Pre, still have it lying around, and it still powers up just fine. A lot of the features that were innovative and new at the time were quickly co-opted into Android and iOS platforms.
Thank you! This means a lot to me. I collect Palm and Pocket PC handhelds, and remember how it seemed every independent developer had their own website with fun little creations on them and how easy it was to get software.
It's just not as much fun to use the devices without it being loaded with all sorts of fun programs.
I also recently scored a HP Laserjet 2200, which has an IrDA port on the front, which was a nice bonus for me in particular. I remember dreaming of being able to print from them and thinking how cool that would be. Funny how you only appreciate something when it's not possible.
Edit: I just realized this isn't about that Palm era, but yes, for the same reason I of course had to get a Palm Pre the second it came out. It was my first smartphone, and I remember it fondly.
It was also a very comfortable feeling device. The whole thing was rounded and felt like a smooth pebble in your pocket, not some sharp slab like phones today.
Because I'm fairly certain it has to be some internal database, or someone scraped it and there were fields HP was providing in the API that weren't visible publicly.
Which means there its possible that the actual author's emails shared with HP during app submission are in there too. In which case, it would be nice if someone made an attempt to contact the authors and get their permission.
In my case I would give it, and maybe provide a few things that appear to be missing. Along with maybe cleaning up the code a bit and posting it on github/etc. My touchpad did the whole battery to rundown refuse to boot when plugged in thing a few years ago, and its been on my list of things to recover, but.. sigh.
Fair questions! Long before my time, but just before the shutdown, the community scraped the catalog metadata -- its been available in a well-known IPK since at least 2012. Because of how apps were built for webOS, and the amazing community around it, lots of sources are on GitHub or SourceForge. Many of the IPKs similarly came from community archives. Most of the media and SDK material came from the Wayback Machine, although some is still available on HP's servers. In the end, I drew from multiple sources, then had to write tools to compile it all together into a usable fashion.
I did reach out to some of the big name publishers, but was generally ignored. Because the content is for archival purposes, and there are some provisions for this in US copyright law, I decided to take the approach of removing content upon request, rather than trying to get affirmative responses from people who are either unreachable, or uninterested. To date, I've had one (very polite) take-down request, which I responded to immediately, and removed their content entirely from the archive. Today's post blew up a little more than I expected, so I may get more -- I'll respond to each appropriately.
Everything I've published is on GitHub or archive.org, and while I don't have as much spare time for it now, I'll do my best to keep it curated and within fair use. If you'd like to add some of your content to the archive (or have some of your content removed) I've posted my email a couple of times in this thread, or you can find it on the website.
Thank you for doing this. Is it possible to use the dev tools to setup a phone that’s been reset? My original Pre is stuck waiting for auth from an HP server that no longer exists.
Who are you, BTW? Were you on the webOS engineering team? I was in devrel.
I actually didn't work on webOS, but for a competing mobile platform, but was always a huge fan of webOS, and ended up licensing its printing subsystem from HP for our platform (after HP gave up!)
I love connecting with its original community, and I think I found you on Twitter. Drop me a line if you'd like to swap war stories!
Holy moly, this has the Newsweek RSS app I built a long time ago. It was the first time I had access to localStorage and other HTML5 features. PalmOS was really revolutionary at release, such a shame it didn't succeed.
The Veer was such an amazing device. I have no idea how HP got that keyboard to work so well! It absolutely sucks that we can't have something like the Veer today :(
I've built Flixi dashboard while back (https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?ap...). My last TouchPad died some time ago, and then I couldn't get the SDK going on a new workstation but a few users were running that thing still even not that long ago!
WebOS is still; to this day, my favourite mobile OS. When it was open sourced - I’d actually hoped it could be a serious open source competitor in the field. Quite a sad disappointment.
The Palm Pre was always a phone I lusted after but never got to actually use. Is there a good emulator or way to experience what WebOS used to be like?
It takes a little work, but the restored SDK has info on getting the official emulator up and running on VirtualBox (you'll need an older version to create the VM, which is linked)
I still have my webOS Palm Pre, this was the last version that was round like a stone pebble. It still starts up. It is a very nice design that is satisfying to hold.
Version after the switched to a more flat with a little larger screen. Not as nice but I guess they had to compete with Android.
I made an app and its satisfying to see it in the Museum catalog.
Great work and many thanks! I was just ranting recently about abandoned hardware and what a waste it is (gTar, Glass, Aibo, iPods, and more). I still have a couple of TPs (new!) in the basement that will benefit from this archive. I really liked WebOS - it seemed ahead of its time.
Nice to see this project on HN, and nice so many familiar webOS names on this board. I worked on Word Ace and the Card Ace games back in the day, and got back into playing around with my Pre and TouchPad a few years ago, thanks in part to codepoet80's work.
As underpowered as it was I somehow miss my pixi. It was just so tiny and the keyboard was surprisingly practical. The convex shape of the keys made sure you wouldn't press 2 keys at the same time. I did much less typing errors than I do know.
It’s crazy to me that WebOS is still the future all these years later. Love ios but it still doesn’t come close to webos in actual functionality. Who could forget notifications? Still the best way I have seen them handled in a mobile UI to date.
I was still on the palm centro when this was released so I never got any hands on with WebOS. I do miss the software and hardware design language used by the palm team. What was under the hood? Linux?
Yes, a real Linux with a web-based UI on top. They added a PDK for running Linux apps later, and it still works. I (fairly) recently compiled SCUMMVM for webOS, and it "just works"
It was Linux to the point where you could run a full X11 server (and LXDE desktop) as an app: it was what Windows 8 could have been, if it was done right.
This is great!! Last week I took out my old Pre 2 and Pixi to show my kids. It brought up great memories. I can’t wait to spend the weekend going through this.
I don’t see my old app in there but it was for a now defunct social network so not too surprising. Great work putting this all together. I still boot up my Palm Pre for some nostalgia kicks from time to time.
There are still many remnants of Palm in LG's TV OS -- but like many smart TVs, they're getting cluttered with ads.
There's an open source re-implementation of mobile webOS using LG bits called LuneOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuneOS
Wow I was about to ask if they licensed the name similar to how Apple licenses the iOS/IOS name from Cisco. That’s an interesting bit of trivia that LG is actually using the same OS as Palm!
The other part is the community. People who had backed up their libraries. Devices found on eBay that still had a bunch of apps on them. People who had hoarded IPKs and had them saved on hard drives and were willing to share. That and lots of scraping Google by filename...
I'm already reading your Classic tips. I loved the PalmOS and have a lot of old school devices. Wish we could do something about the 7-day timer, but at least it will run on webOS 2!
I should finish that Gopher client I was writing ...
Seems like several others, my actual development career began on WebOS. In high school, I was intrigued by the idea of a web-based, multitasking capable smartphone and begged my parents to buy me one.
Ultimately I learned a ton and have great stories such as staying up all night re-architecting Weatherman (https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?&a...) because of the popularity (and this was before it was on the WebOS store, at this time it was invite-only so I had to post it on a forum!). Weatherman was just a hack on top of a hack on top of a hack. There was no Canvas API on the device so I had to generate the weather images on a server and then send them to the device, for example.
The highlight for me was winning one of the top spots in the Palm Hot Apps competition for the "free apps" category with Pixi Dust (https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?ca...). The physics weren't accurate by any means, but it was the first time I had seriously used C++ (I think it was, it was so long ago!).
I miss having platforms like these with innovative ideas and small communities. I learned so much by having to hack my way around the limitations of the operating system, and really miss WebOS overall. I think I might still have an old Palm Pre sitting a drawer somewhere.