The Open webOS project has reached an important milestone, it is now out of beta and has released its first version.
Open webOS 1.0 gives developers a foundation for building webOS-based devices, and simplifies porting the OS to different platforms. In fact, it has already been ported to run on the Google Nexus phone. You can see a video of it running on the Google Nexus below:
HP has also ported the OS for TouchSmart PC and has posted a video demonstration of it running on a touch-based desktop device. The video explains how this could be useful for kiosks. You can see the video embedded below:
Open webOS comes with extensive instructions that enable one to build it for desktops (on Ubuntu Linux) as a standard application, or as an image for ARM or x86-based devices. As before the projects are available on GitHub
The 1.0 release is notable for a number of reasons. For one this build adds core applications such as email and browser. It also adds support for the new Enyo 2 JavaScript library for application development. Unlike Enyo 1 which was not cross-browser compatible, Enyo 2 works on all platforms making webOS applications easy to port.
A roadmap for the future has also been highlighted, which includes support for Qt5 and WebKit2, open sourcing the media components, the BlueZ Bluetooth stack, ConnMan network management, and an “Optimized SysMgr rendering architecture”.
webOS was an operating system that had some quite novel ideas for multitasking, and embraced it instead of adding it as an afterthought. Hopefully with the community’s involvement and support it will find new life, if only as an alternative mobile and tablet OS.
