New Year's wishes 17

Happy new year to my fellow webOS users! While 2012 is certainly not starting as hopefully for our platform as did 2011, given how that year worked out, perhaps that's for the best. Rather than coming up with webOS resolutions (hard to keep, after all, especially with the uncertainty surrounding the platform), I've decided to go about listing my wishes for webOS. Hopefully, unlike most sets of new year's resolutions, these wishes will come true and quickly.

First are my wishes for HP:

Follow through on open source: HP has promised to release all of webOS as open source, but we don't yet have a schedule, nor has the effort gone beyond a promise. As we have seen too often, promises, especially when they involve webOS, are not always kept. My wish is that HP will put deeds to its words, and push out webOS as an open source platform as soon as feasible in 2012. And, speaking of open source...

Re-release Classic. Now: Back in October 2010, MotionApps ended its support of the PalmOS emulator Classic, stating that it was handing the code for the app over to Palm to do whatever it wanted with it. What Palm has done since then is...nothing. While heroic efforts by Arthur Thornton got Classic running for a time under webOS 2.1, the emulator no longer works either under webOS 2.2 or 3.x. When Classic was first cancelled, Palm's decision not to continue it made some sense; after all, some developers that had existing PalmOS products might feel less inclined to port them over to webOS if they could still be run in emulation mode. In 2012, though, the likelihood that vendors such as Epocrates or Audible (whose PalmOS applications still remain functional and supported) or smaller developers that had popular PalmOS apps would devote any resources to webOS development is minimal at best, especially while there is essentially no new webOS hardware for sale. Classic can still fill that gap, and could be immediately made available as open source software by HP even while it begins work on converting webOS overall. Once the actual code for Classic is available, I have little doubt that our stellar developer community will quickly figure out how to get it up and running on webOS 2.2 if not 3.x, re-opening access to thousands of entertainment, game and productivity applications that may not be as fancy as modern equivalents but are still very usable.

Fix the bugs and close the gaps: There are still some glaring problems with the different versions of webOS. On the TouchPad, webOS 3.0.4 still will not allow reordering of browser bookmarks, and the 3.0.4 update itself changed accelerometer response in such a way that some top games (notably Asphalt 6 and other driving/flying apps) are now unplayable. On the phone side, webOS 2.2 is still unavailable for the HP Veer (at least the AT&T version), meaning that while the hardware supports Touch-to-Share, the Veer can neither do that nor share text messages with a TouchPad. The webOS backup servers have gone down a few times recently, and TouchPad owners still encounter occasional sound fuzziness that forces a reboot. In short, whatever HP wants us to believe about webOS software development continuing, evidence to the contrary is mounting. Some timely fixes and updates would really help.

Remember the enterprise: webOS is still the best choice for numerous businesses, due to its flexibility, ease of setup and management, information control (no mandatory Google info dump), platform neutrality and the still-unparalleled Synergy. With the rapid decline of RIM and the dissatisfaction among many IT professionals with either iOS or Android, there is a real opportunity for HP to offer webOS as a convincing next OS for its enterprise customers. That opportunity, though, is not going to last very long; if HP is going to bother keeping webOS going, it needs to truly get behind it on the business side.

I have a few wishes for the rest of the webOS community and the tech world overall too:

New hardware please: This one is obvious, but it's so critical to everything else that it bears saying. If we don't see releases, or at the very least announcements, of new hardware running webOS, and quickly, nothing else is going to matter. The hardware itself doesn't have to be webOS-specific, of course: just as the Cyanogen mod breathed some potential additional life into the TouchPad as an Android device, so too would getting webOS running for real on a non-HP device, whether phone or tablet, pump some serious energy into our flagging community. Given how Google is going out of its way to compete with Android licensees, the time seems ripe for some official defection, or at least unofficial support of webOS on other hardware.

Bring real Bluetooth GPS support to webOS: The TouchPad's lack of true GPS hardware (which was to be added to the TouchPad Go) means that location-based applications are partially useful at best; they only can utilize the imperfect, Google-dependent list of hotspot locations, and cannot use velocity, altitude or other true GPS data. While it's true that MetaViewSoft added Bluetooth GPS support to its MapTools Pro application, that was done as a one-off that only works within the application. Enyo can support custom services, Bluetooth GPS receivers use standardized data formats, and since both the TouchPad and the latest webOS phones support the needed Bluetooth Serial Port protocol, all the pieces are in place for some creative developer (or HP itself, after it gets done fulfilling all my other wishes!) to combine them and release the resulting custom service to the rest of the community.

Expand the phone-to-TouchPad universe: Between the Bluetooth connectivity and Touch-to-Share hardware, webOS 2.2 and 3.x devices should be able to work much better together than they actually do. There are so many unexploited ways to use those connections, from a phone-based remote to control the TouchPad's media players (please!), to easy file transfers, to multiplayer games, to VoIP like intercom applications, and beyond. The more we can do with two paired devices, the better for existing users and the greater the likelihood that some phone manufacturer may see potential in the platform.

One final wish, that is as true for myself as for the rest of our community: let's stay connected. webOS users and developers have evolved into a solid, supportive and powerful group whose impact far outstrips its numbers. We won user survey after user survey, got the attention of world-class application developers (special hat tip to Rovio Mobile), and continue to push hard for the survival and growth of our preferred, and objectively superior, mobile OS. Whatever 2012 and future years bring for webOS, I hope that the connections we have established will remain positive and vibrant, and will continue being a shining example to the rest of the mobile tech world.