So it seems the cool thing to do in the webOS dev community is to write a blog post about their view on the webOS announcement this week…so here’s mine.
History
The first time I ever used a Palm device was around April of 2010, so I’m not a Palm lifer. The company I was working for at the time was building mobile apps and a webOS app was one of them. I was skeptical at first, but since I had quite a bit of history with Prototype I decided to help out. I was hooked from then on. I started writing Reboxed shortly after, with 1Reader, Spare Time, and Feeder to follow.
Hardware
I’ve never been a big fan of physical keyboards or sliders or flippers or anything like that. My phone of choice is a slab device (like the iPhone). That being said I was a little more than disappointed when no slab device was announced and HP was staying with the slider type. It may sound trivial, but that’s the main reason I will no longer being using a webOS device.
As for tablets? I don’t really care about tablets so it was a non-announcement for me as a user. I had an iPad for a few weeks when it first came out and I felt myself using it just because I had it…not because it helped me get anything done better or faster. I’m a little interested in tablets as a developer just because the small device apps don’t scale up to the tablet form factor very well and I would need to do some tweaking on my apps. I really doubt that HP will make much headway in the tablet market with a “me too” device like they announced.
webOS on PCs? Really? This blows my mind…not because it’s really cool, but because it’s really unnecessary. HP needs to check their WIP and focus on making 1 thing really cool first before throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks.
Enyo
One of the major draws to webOS that Palm pushed was it’s just like web development…html, js, css and that’s true…with mojo. Enyo changes that quite a bit, at first glance it looks they’re extracting the html and css away from developers. I happen to like html and css so I’m not really excited about this. Maybe I’m missing something, but the last thing I want to do is learn yet another framework, especially for so low of a market share. Now if they do something with enyo like make it a general web application framework then that may be something to keep your eye on.
Future Developement
The way it is looking now, I will no longer be doing any webOS development. I will fix bugs in my current apps as they appear and if they completely break then I will pull them from the market. I love javascript development, but I have too many other things up in the air right now to focus on.