Palm webOS Chapter Seven is Live 27
Ladies and Gentleman, chapter 7 of Mitch Allen's programming guide for the webOS is now live. This time around we're getting nitty gritty with Application Services - namely what applications and services you can access from your app. This is basically where the Pre gets a chance to shine when compared to the iPhone -- there appear to be plenty of hooks here for helping your app reach out to the rest of the data on the phone.
You can, for exampe: launch the browser, dial a number, turn on the camera and take photos (in-app), browse photos, pull up the map application with driving directions, add information to contacts and calendar, pull information from conacts, launch the email app with specific messages, open a specific file (but there is not a built-in file browser that we're aware of yet), launch the music player and the video player, and -- finally -- use the applicaiton manager service to launch any other app that's been opened to it (i.e. other third party apps).
If you're a user - your takeaway is that the apps are able to talk to each other and that's a good thing. If you're a developer - your takeaway is that you should go read this chapter and see how easily it's done.
Thanks to mahootzki for the tip!
27 Comments
352 pages. I'd guess it's probably 10-12 chapters or so.
Correct. It's also what makes McNamee's statements so true. Remember the whole "I can send an email letting your meeting attendees know that you're running late" thing?
The Fandango app's feature to cross reference that Informed described is so cool!
> There is no true in-device Synergy
Actually, there is.
> What's happening here is that Palm is enabling other apps
> access to the Contacts and Calendar databases
It goes beyond access to their databases. You actually "talk" to the other apps via services. You can literally ask the the phone app to call a specific number or tell the browser to navigate to a particular site, etc. In fact, you'd likely want to avoid direct access to another app's database when services are exposed.
I think Synergy is fitting considering the overall user experience this can provide is greater than the sum of the individual applications.
Hopefully there will be some sort of app certification/approval process that may catch some of these. But this is no different from what you have now on your home computer right? I mean, you still have to be careful what you install. So this is not an issue unique to the pre. It's part of the reason why Mac and Windows prompts the user when certain actions occur. I hope there will be something like this in WebOS.
On a positive note, access to other applications are done via web service calls. So it should be trivial for the OS to log such calls which should help in identifying the bad apples (no pun intended).
Update: So I took another look at this chapter and I don't think you need to worry about rouge apps taking your picture and sending it off into cyberspace. Yes you can talk to other apps. Yes you can add contacts, etc. However, with the phone and camera apps, the user must click "go" to carry out the process. For example, you can launch the phone app with a phone number to be dialed, but the user must click the send button to carry out the call. Same with the camera.
So this seems like a good compromise between functionality and security. Maybe down the line we may see an OS enhancement that allows users to "trust" an app. This way, trusted apps can use features without the need for user confirmation.
Hey Daniel,
Why even bother entertaining those types of people. They post here just to get a rise out of PreCentral.net's readers. Ignore them and they'll go away.
I wish we had a way to "low-rank" comments like some of the other sites do. Oh well.