webOS Exhibition Mode Preview 23
One of the top tier features for webOS 2.0 is Exhibition - a feature that allows your device to display the app of your choice when it's set down on the Touchstone for charging. Unfortunately, it's not ready yet (it's coming in that OTA update), but we did just get a quick preview at the Palm Developer Day here in New York.
Basically when you set your Pre down on the Touchstone your Exhibition app Zooms in from the distance with a very cool animation. At that point it's just running, displaying whatever information you'd like it to. Palm recommends you don't clutter up your Exhibition mode with multiple screens from your app - keep it simple. Palm also recommends you use a snazzy horizontal scroll-in animation that's almost Windows Phone-eque in how it handles moving text around the screen.
The basic interaction is that you have your app taking up the full screen, hiding the status bar. There is a semi-transparent black bar on the top that displays the time - you can tap or swipe down from the top of the device to switch between different Exhibition modes. There is also another semi-transparent bar at the bottom for showing notifications. Finally, there will be an Exhibition Preferences App where you can choose your default Exhibition mode and also configure which other modes will be in your drop-down selection list when you're in Exhibition.
Palm showed a simple clock, an Agenda view, and a photo slideshow. There was also the beginnings of a Facebook Exhibition mode, but it doesn't look fully baked yet.
Speaking of not fully baked - Exhibition itself isn't, this was just an early preview. The interface may change a bit before launch, so don't go judging just yet. Now that we've laid down the caveats, head on after the break for the gallery of slides!
23 Comments
one. (i've never been that person before. go me.)
Your first, and that was the best you could do?
Damn virgins.
........meh.
Looks good
we'll have to see how she turns out when complete
Whoa, what's up with that Google icon in the notification in the third picture? Different icons for different e-mail accounts?
I thought this was already the case... my gmail notifications all look different from my other emails.
Ah, you're right. I forward everything to Gmail, so it hadn't even occurred to me that the red M symbol is Google specific. However, it still isn't the same as the "g" symbol in the picture in this article...
like it alot hey don't mess with the virgin hahaha
it seems that exhibition mode provides the type of at a glance info we would get from widgets. It's kind of a shame that it has to be on the touchstone to acces it...
riiiiiigt. If it's accessible on the touchstone, can't wait to see what the Internals crew will have in store to make it accessible without it.
Possibilties abound. Competition is gonna be tough in February. Glad I decided to wait till CES. Gonna be some crazy phones coming out.
It will be interesting to see how developers handle exhibition mode. For it to be a win, developers will need to come up with very nice ways of visualizing data.
Looks like the kids are getting all excited about the new screen saver capabilities. Yeehawwwwww. Seriously, guys, how much crap are you going to beg for.
How about while the phone was docked, we had a modern OS that we could actually speak to and ASK to display the weather, our schedule, our emails, etc? Or, maybe even control or activate another WebOS device elsewhere. Surely, any OS maker with any vision and hope to survive would have created the system resources to allow you to speak (and get a response) to a phone.
Flying toasters for everyone. The tail continues to wag the dog.
I've seen voice command used on android devices and unless it's in a dead silent room, it typically takes a user multiple tries to get it to take important info... Wait a couple more years for the technology to mature... And quit complaining so hard... Lots of new underpinnings coming.
even if you don't like exhibition, just chill and use the other new stuff (db8, flash, feature complete apis etc)
Agreed.
That and voice is nice while driving but in a room with other people, they don't need to know what you're doing with your phone.
Interesting...
I'm know nothing of what it takes to write an app, but wouldn't it be possible to write one app that could pull news, pics, weather and info from multiple websites (possibly even your Palm calendar) and scroll it all through your exhibition mode? That way you can view multiple pieces of info without having to change views, so to say.
So, all this fancy stuff and all I want is the ability to turn the screen off while it is on the touchstone ... did they think of including that?
According to webOSroundup, that is available in webOS 2.0.
Neat! That sounds perfect, I can have it wake up at 7AM so I can see information while I get ready for work :)
Can this be taken as supportive of the rumor that current touchstones will work with future devices?
I think it's interesting to see the hint here of an official agenda app (even though it's great the only one we have so far is homebrew).
Neat, but was it able to switch views by swiping (or long gesture swipe), a la Card View? Using a menu seems a bit of a step back.