One year ago, today...
One year ago today, Universe was published to the HP webOS App Catalog.
It has been a LONG and crazy year, I might add. We saw the launch of the TouchPad. We also saw the TouchPad and all webOS hardware become discontinued products. We saw HP dispose of a CEO, and gain another. Mrs. Whitman has changed course for webOS, and as a result, we saw plans to (and progress in) release webOS source code. My, what a year!
I had decided to take an unannounced break from webOS programming. In part it was because of what happened to webOS (and partially because of what had happened to me), but I also needed to get my career in order, and work sort of sucked up a lot of my time.
But now... But now I am jumping back into the pool, and ready to do more laps! I am working on the 2.0 release of Universe (not going to drop a date, but a lot of work will likely end up in GitHub before the App Catalog). I am also working continuing development of the tablet version of Universe. I am quite excited for this! One of the reasons for my excitement is because I can now develop certain features that I could not before.
I have been asked many times for features, not limited to: User Agent spoofing, disabling images, text reflow, as well as many reported rendering bugs. I could not offer most of these because I was not using my own WebKit engine. Instead, Universe was built on top of the WebKit engine in webOS (which was dated). I had considered writing my own implementation, but this would have required A LOT of man power. Too much for just one person (Historical Note: There were a couple of people working on the WebKit implementation at Palm to ready it for webOS -- I got to work with them! :D ). But now that webOS is becoming open source, HP is releasing the source code to their WebKit implementation as well as their Enyo web browser, and calling it Project Isis.
This leads me to my second announcement (which you may or may not have read before)...
As you may have read a while back from webOS Nation, I will be working as part of webOS-Internals to lead up the effort from the community side to get Isis working and in Preware, as well as to help to bring community contributions back to HP.
I am looking forward to the coming months! (Haha! Did you see what I did there?? :D ) I hope that you will continue on this journey with me.
Long live webOS!
It has been a LONG and crazy year, I might add. We saw the launch of the TouchPad. We also saw the TouchPad and all webOS hardware become discontinued products. We saw HP dispose of a CEO, and gain another. Mrs. Whitman has changed course for webOS, and as a result, we saw plans to (and progress in) release webOS source code. My, what a year!
I had decided to take an unannounced break from webOS programming. In part it was because of what happened to webOS (and partially because of what had happened to me), but I also needed to get my career in order, and work sort of sucked up a lot of my time.
But now... But now I am jumping back into the pool, and ready to do more laps! I am working on the 2.0 release of Universe (not going to drop a date, but a lot of work will likely end up in GitHub before the App Catalog). I am also working continuing development of the tablet version of Universe. I am quite excited for this! One of the reasons for my excitement is because I can now develop certain features that I could not before.
I have been asked many times for features, not limited to: User Agent spoofing, disabling images, text reflow, as well as many reported rendering bugs. I could not offer most of these because I was not using my own WebKit engine. Instead, Universe was built on top of the WebKit engine in webOS (which was dated). I had considered writing my own implementation, but this would have required A LOT of man power. Too much for just one person (Historical Note: There were a couple of people working on the WebKit implementation at Palm to ready it for webOS -- I got to work with them! :D ). But now that webOS is becoming open source, HP is releasing the source code to their WebKit implementation as well as their Enyo web browser, and calling it Project Isis.
This leads me to my second announcement (which you may or may not have read before)...
As you may have read a while back from webOS Nation, I will be working as part of webOS-Internals to lead up the effort from the community side to get Isis working and in Preware, as well as to help to bring community contributions back to HP.
I am looking forward to the coming months! (Haha! Did you see what I did there?? :D ) I hope that you will continue on this journey with me.
Long live webOS!
posted by Donald C. Kirker at 1:25 AM
2 comments
