11 ms·

Show HN: I restored Palm's webOS App Catalog, SDK and online help system

439 points by codepoet80 4y ago

My pandemic project was to find, restore and organize scattered and archived remnants of Palm/HP's mobile webOS platform to help keep these delightful little devices alive.

codezero 4y ago
I don’t see my old app in there but it was for a now defunct social network so not too surprising. Great work putting this all together. I still boot up my Palm Pre for some nostalgia kicks from time to time.
- codepoet80 4y ago
  If you still have the IPK (or source code) I'd love to add to the Museum! I'll message you over on Twitter.
vincentleeuwen 4y ago
Very cool!
pisspiss 4y ago
codyogden 4y ago
Incredible! I'm a big fan this type of archival work. Great job!
shitshitshit 4y ago
molbioguy 4y ago
Great work and many thanks! I was just ranting recently about abandoned hardware and what a waste it is (gTar, Glass, Aibo, iPods, and more). I still have a couple of TPs (new!) in the basement that will benefit from this archive. I really liked WebOS - it seemed ahead of its time.
miguelrochefort 4y ago
Thanks for putting this together. webOS was way ahead of its time, and I really liked the HP Veer at the time.
- codepoet80 4y ago
  I still use a Veer daily!
- i80and 4y ago
  The Veer was such an amazing device. I have no idea how HP got that keyboard to work so well! It absolutely sucks that we can't have something like the Veer today :(
haubey 4y ago
Wow! The Pre was the reason I got into development, because I wanted to be able to run through flashcards on the bus to school. So I built Study Buddy[1]. The joke is by the time I figured out how to really build it, I had a car so it wasn't quite as personally useful as it could have been. It was a small community but there was a decent amount of teenage developers, maybe 8 or so of us, and I think 10 years later we're all still in the engineering space, basically because of webOS. [1]: https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?category=Education&count=111&app=5033 https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?ca...
- codepoet80 4y ago
  Well you did good -- Study Buddy still works, all these years later!
myvoiceismypass 4y ago
Is it crazy that I still think webOS is the best mobile OS of all time? The pre and pixi were just... underpowered
- noman-land 4y ago
  I agree wholeheartedly. If it was able to be fully baked it could have been revolutionary. The unified chat view that showed your conversation history across multiple chat platforms was amazing.
- zeroego 4y ago
  Not crazy in my opinion. So many of the things webOS did back in like 2008 the iPhone just recently implemented. It was way ahead of its time. I really wish it was still around.
- hajile 4y ago
  We're getting close to 13 years since webOS launched and we still don't have anything that comes close to the UI functionality it offered.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    I really thought it would be the future... Just goes to show that the best doesn't always win.
  - justusthane 4y ago
    As someone who never used it, what made it better than today’s mobile OSs?
    - explorigin 4y ago
      In design, they paid a lot of attention to making common actions available with your free thumb so you could navigate most apps with one hand. App-switching, context menus, device operations were all swipe operations. Having a hardware keyboard made it a bit chunky but didn't feel bad in your pocket because it was so smooth. Also the hardware keyboard provided a true tactile feel so you could even type out some messages without looking at your screen nearly as much as you need to with on-screen keyboards.
DeathArrow 4y ago
webOS still lives on LG's TV sets, fridges and smart watches.
- wincy 4y ago
  Wow I was about to ask if they licensed the name similar to how Apple licenses the iOS/IOS name from Cisco. That’s an interesting bit of trivia that LG is actually using the same OS as Palm!
  - protomyth 4y ago
    https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/webos-lives-lg-to-resurrect-it-for-smart-tvs/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/webos-lives-lg-to-resurrect... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5278015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5278015
- codepoet80 4y ago
  There are still many remnants of Palm in LG's TV OS -- but like many smart TVs, they're getting cluttered with ads. There's an open source re-implementation of mobile webOS using LG bits called LuneOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuneOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuneOS
- pjmlp 4y ago
  So much better than Android TV crap.
eddieroger 4y ago
There was a thread this week about calendars, and it made me miss the unified calendar that webOS gave us. I'm excited (and slightly paranoid) to see this now, and can't wait to play with it! I wonder if I still have my old Pre lying around anywhere, and if it still boots. I love my iPhone, but I sure loved that Pre when it was new. As a random second anecdote, I really miss the hacker community around it. I can't remember the name of the forum, but there was a super active thread the day we got root on the device, and it was unbelievably cool to see some Palm employees show up in it and pointing folks in the right direction. Such a fun device.
- codepoet80 4y ago
  Probably forums.webosnation.com -- its still there, although its slowed down a lot. The last of us diehard users are on Discord now: webosarchive.com/discord
  - andrewmunsell 4y ago
    It was originally called PreCentral :)
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > it made me miss the unified calendar that webOS gave us What did it do that CalDAV doesn't permit?
  - eddieroger 4y ago
    It wasn't competing with CalDAV, so there is no answer to this question. What it did was present multiple sources, like CalDAV, in a single view.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      I never saw webOS's calendar. I'm familiar with CalDAV. Was trying to understand what made it memorably fun to you.
  - 4y ago
user3939382 4y ago
I never hear people mention the Palm Treo. Apple gets all the credit for inventing smartphones with the iPhone 1st gen, but the Treo preceded it by years. Is it not the first smartphone? One of my first startups was based on Treos, they were awesome devices. Very snappy.
- bombcar 4y ago
  There were tons of "smartphones" before Apple - Blackberries were very common and famous - Apple, if anything, took the lead in designing a workable "touchscreen only" interface.
  - codepoet80 4y ago
    I'd argue that Apple's big "innovation" was the capacitive touch screen, that made the UI so much more fluid and responsive. Palm almost shipped a webOS device with a resistive touch screen, but pivoted away after Rubenstein took the reigns. The Treo was a great device for its time, but suddenly felt old fashioned after the iPhone came out -- even though iOS was significantly less capable in its initial implementation (modal notifications, no copy/paste, no apps, etc...)
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Yeah the touchscreen was the first that "worked" like you expected it to - before the best screens were the ones with styluses which could work well, but was a piece to lose/harder to use at a glance.
      - hamburglar 4y ago
        They also had the first browser that wasn’t severely crippled by compromises based on d-pad and extremely inaccurate touch input. Before iphone, the mobile web was a sad joke.
        bombcar 4y ago
hajile 4y ago
Now if we could just get LG to introduce a new WebOS phone. Add android support and native Qt in addition to web apps while switching to the proposed Mochi style would make for a very nice device.
- codepoet80 4y ago
  I'd buy that in a heartbeat!
  - pcdoodle 4y ago
    Same!
    - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
      99k users to go
qiller 4y ago
This is awesome, found all of my apps. Ah the nostalgia. Mojo and Enyo were great platforms for their time
nkotov 4y ago
I think the Palm Pre was one of the prettiest designs and I really liked how webOS looked back then. It's a shame that it died in the mobile space.
- larrywright 4y ago
  My LG television runs WebOS and it’s easily the best of the television OSes.
  - codepoet80 4y ago
    The newer versions apparently got very heavily ad-laden, but I agree - my webOS 4 TV is great!
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  It was also a very comfortable feeling device. The whole thing was rounded and felt like a smooth pebble in your pocket, not some sharp slab like phones today.
bni 4y ago
I still have my webOS Palm Pre, this was the last version that was round like a stone pebble. It still starts up. It is a very nice design that is satisfying to hold. Version after the switched to a more flat with a little larger screen. Not as nice but I guess they had to compete with Android. I made an app and its satisfying to see it in the Museum catalog.
classichasclass 4y ago
Got a Prē 2 and a Veer here. Sounds like this will make a fun weekend.
- codepoet80 4y ago
  Yay! The community is still around -- drop us a line if you need any help! Link is on the website.
  - classichasclass 4y ago
    I'm already reading your Classic tips. I loved the PalmOS and have a lot of old school devices. Wish we could do something about the 7-day timer, but at least it will run on webOS 2! I should finish that Gopher client I was writing ...
    - codepoet80 4y ago
      There's a file you can delete every 7 days to re-arm the timer.
      - classichasclass 4y ago
        No, I got that. It's just kind of a pain is all.
        codepoet80 4y ago
        Agreed. Since its Linux under the hood, I was thinking a little cron job could fix that. Just haven't got around to trying
meremortals 4y ago
long live webOS!!
pcdoodle 4y ago
I was still on the palm centro when this was released so I never got any hands on with WebOS. I do miss the software and hardware design language used by the palm team. What was under the hood? Linux?
- codepoet80 4y ago
  Yes, a real Linux with a web-based UI on top. They added a PDK for running Linux apps later, and it still works. I (fairly) recently compiled SCUMMVM for webOS, and it "just works"
  - pcdoodle 4y ago
    Very Cool!
- qball 4y ago
  It was Linux to the point where you could run a full X11 server (and LXDE desktop) as an app: it was what Windows 8 could have been, if it was done right.
andrewmunsell 4y ago
This is amazing, thank you. Seems like several others, my actual development career began on WebOS. In high school, I was intrigued by the idea of a web-based, multitasking capable smartphone and begged my parents to buy me one. Ultimately I learned a ton and have great stories such as staying up all night re-architecting Weatherman (https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?&app=247 https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?&a...) because of the popularity (and this was before it was on the WebOS store, at this time it was invite-only so I had to post it on a forum!). Weatherman was just a hack on top of a hack on top of a hack. There was no Canvas API on the device so I had to generate the weather images on a server and then send them to the device, for example. The highlight for me was winning one of the top spots in the Palm Hot Apps competition for the "free apps" category with Pixi Dust (https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?category=Games&count=1009&app=4196 https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?ca...). The physics weren't accurate by any means, but it was the first time I had seriously used C++ (I think it was, it was so long ago!). I miss having platforms like these with innovative ideas and small communities. I learned so much by having to hack my way around the limitations of the operating system, and really miss WebOS overall. I think I might still have an old Palm Pre sitting a drawer somewhere.
- codepoet80 4y ago
  If you've still got your back-end code, it'd be fun to restore your app -- I could help host it!
  - andrewmunsell 4y ago
    I do have a zip archive of (I think all) my source code. Maybe I'll try and post it on Github this weekend and send you a link! Edit: Yep, I just checked and have both the app client and backend code. I will post everything I can this weekend and ping you via email if I can find it in your profiles or I see you have your Discord alias.
    - codepoet80 4y ago
      If you can't get me there, I have an email alias: curator@<the website posted in this story>
alexk307 4y ago
I loved my Palm Pre, still have it lying around, and it still powers up just fine. A lot of the features that were innovative and new at the time were quickly co-opted into Android and iOS platforms.
forgotmypw17 4y ago
Hi there! I'm working on a platform/framework for making retro-compatible websites, and was wondering if you'd have a few minutes to test it with webOS? I've already tested with older BlackBerry, IE3, and as far back as Netscape 2.x, but I don't have a webOS device. Is it possible you could spend just a few minutes on it and send me some feedback? Ideally, you should be able to register in one click (no email), write a post, and vote and reply to your own post. The URL is in my profile...
- codepoet80 4y ago
  Edit: tried it out. When I posted, I got a message that said "No Cookie" It wasn't obvious what to do next... I tried registering and a message posted, but seemed to disappear. Anyway, I appreciate the effort -- the more retro-friendly web platforms, the better!
  - forgotmypw17 4y ago
    Thank you! Those two issues are resolved for now. The first one is due to a feature designed to reduce the impact of crawler bots, which I'm still testing, so it's off for now. The second is due to a caching issue, so I've reduced the window for that until cache-invalidation is solved :D I did see the message you posted, which says: >checking in from a webOS Touchpad! I was also able to recover the message you first sent, reading: >Quickly checking in from a webOS Touchpad. Looks good from here! Thank you again for testing!
mempko 4y ago
It makes me so sad we got stuck with Android and iOS instead of the amazing WebOS. I will never forgive you HP and what you did to my love.
- codepoet80 4y ago
  There's an app for that! http://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/app/leodarts http://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/app/leodarts
  - mempko 4y ago
    OMG thank you! This made my day.
shortformblog 4y ago
The HP TouchPad that I use as a digital clock was very happy to see this. The page loaded up right away!
- codepoet80 4y ago
  If you have Hue lights, you might want to check out my One Night Stand app for webOS, which lets you control them from your digital clock... http://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/app/OneNightStand http://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/app/OneNightStand
  - shortformblog 4y ago
    Awesome—will look into it!
- qiller 4y ago
  I've built Flixi dashboard while back (https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?app=10322 https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?ap...). My last TouchPad died some time ago, and then I couldn't get the SDK going on a new workstation but a few users were running that thing still even not that long ago!
prmoustache 4y ago
As underpowered as it was I somehow miss my pixi. It was just so tiny and the keyboard was surprisingly practical. The convex shape of the keys made sure you wouldn't press 2 keys at the same time. I did much less typing errors than I do know.
joshmarinacci 4y ago
Thank you for doing this. Is it possible to use the dev tools to setup a phone that’s been reset? My original Pre is stuck waiting for auth from an HP server that no longer exists. Who are you, BTW? Were you on the webOS engineering team? I was in devrel.
- codepoet80 4y ago
  Yes, everything you need to setup your phone is here: http://www.webosarchive.com/docs/activate/ http://www.webosarchive.com/docs/activate/ I actually didn't work on webOS, but for a competing mobile platform, but was always a huge fan of webOS, and ended up licensing its printing subsystem from HP for our platform (after HP gave up!) I love connecting with its original community, and I think I found you on Twitter. Drop me a line if you'd like to swap war stories!
hyperdimension 4y ago
Thank you! This means a lot to me. I collect Palm and Pocket PC handhelds, and remember how it seemed every independent developer had their own website with fun little creations on them and how easy it was to get software. It's just not as much fun to use the devices without it being loaded with all sorts of fun programs. I also recently scored a HP Laserjet 2200, which has an IrDA port on the front, which was a nice bonus for me in particular. I remember dreaming of being able to print from them and thinking how cool that would be. Funny how you only appreciate something when it's not possible. Edit: I just realized this isn't about that Palm era, but yes, for the same reason I of course had to get a Palm Pre the second it came out. It was my first smartphone, and I remember it fondly.
unwiredben 4y ago
I worked at Palm during the development of webOS, both before the Pre was launched, then again in developer relations and framework development after it came out. I'm very happy to see this archive of the great work the community created around these devices. If you want to archive my old Twitter feed, https://twitter.com/webostips https://twitter.com/webostips, that might be useful for the help section. It really only ran in 2009-2010, as I got too busy after returning to Palm from my stint at Mozilla.
- codepoet80 4y ago
  I see Roku too, from your Profile. That means you've worked on three of my favorite platforms!
shaneos 4y ago
This makes me so, so happy! I put so much work into WebOS apps, and your site lists five of them. Sadly it's missing a few, like "My WebOS Apps", the developer dashboard app I wrote for WebOS app developers that let developers see their download stats on the phone, get notifications of when their app was accepted or rejected and more - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U4bVq_VIhs&list=PL792FA4594BC99B4D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U4bVq_VIhs&list=PL792FA4594... I'm getting so nostalgic, even tearing up a little :-) Flickr Mundo - https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?search=Flickr&safe=on&app=5027 https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?se... Mazer - https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?search=Mazer&safe=on&app=1508 https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?se... Irish Rain - https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?&app=509 https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?&a...
- codepoet80 4y ago
  If you have the source or IPK anywhere for your missing apps, I'd love to add to the archive! Drop me a line at curator@<website listed in article>
BLO716 4y ago
Had to update wikipedia.org :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebOS
- codepoet80 4y ago
  Wow, thank you.
  - BLO716 4y ago
    Modesty and all. :) Just picked up my webOS tablet from HP .. off we go for a long weekend of fun, my friend. THANK YOU .. for the rehashed fun.
xd1936 4y ago
I wish I could upvote this twice. Long live webOS.
mt3ck 4y ago
Wow.. you've done a lot thanks for resurrecting this! Like many of the others, WebOS kicked off my career into software development and was my first endeavor building software larger then a simple website. I created GetMeVino as a simple wine resource for myself as there were similar apps on IOS and I wanted one to use on WebOS. I remember posting it on precentral forums and actually got interest from Palm themselves to build it out further and release it on their catalog. I was blown away, inspired by the possibilities and that really lit a fire in me to want to continue creating even outside WebOS. Definitely wouldn't have been here today without WebOS. Some other highlights, the browser based IDE Ares way ahead of its time, WebOS at CES2010 and the Palm developer relations, getting invited to Mozilla for Firefox OS. I am going to need to find my old devices now!
StillBored 4y ago
I sure would like to know where this came from. Because I'm fairly certain it has to be some internal database, or someone scraped it and there were fields HP was providing in the API that weren't visible publicly. Which means there its possible that the actual author's emails shared with HP during app submission are in there too. In which case, it would be nice if someone made an attempt to contact the authors and get their permission. In my case I would give it, and maybe provide a few things that appear to be missing. Along with maybe cleaning up the code a bit and posting it on github/etc. My touchpad did the whole battery to rundown refuse to boot when plugged in thing a few years ago, and its been on my list of things to recover, but.. sigh.
- codepoet80 4y ago
  Fair questions! Long before my time, but just before the shutdown, the community scraped the catalog metadata -- its been available in a well-known IPK since at least 2012. Because of how apps were built for webOS, and the amazing community around it, lots of sources are on GitHub or SourceForge. Many of the IPKs similarly came from community archives. Most of the media and SDK material came from the Wayback Machine, although some is still available on HP's servers. In the end, I drew from multiple sources, then had to write tools to compile it all together into a usable fashion. I did reach out to some of the big name publishers, but was generally ignored. Because the content is for archival purposes, and there are some provisions for this in US copyright law, I decided to take the approach of removing content upon request, rather than trying to get affirmative responses from people who are either unreachable, or uninterested. To date, I've had one (very polite) take-down request, which I responded to immediately, and removed their content entirely from the archive. Today's post blew up a little more than I expected, so I may get more -- I'll respond to each appropriately. Everything I've published is on GitHub or archive.org, and while I don't have as much spare time for it now, I'll do my best to keep it curated and within fair use. If you'd like to add some of your content to the archive (or have some of your content removed) I've posted my email a couple of times in this thread, or you can find it on the website.
lostgame 4y ago
WebOS is still; to this day, my favourite mobile OS. When it was open sourced - I’d actually hoped it could be a serious open source competitor in the field. Quite a sad disappointment.
ChrisArchitect 4y ago
Wow what a throwback, amazing work. Those WebOS times were really a unique little slice of history sort of nestled after blackberry was cemented and the dawn of iPhone era and social media but before those had really really taken off. The influence of WebOS via concepts maybe ahead of its time, and moreso the people who worked on it that went out into industry in many areas, was large.
brundolf 4y ago
Is there a webOS emulator out there for Android devices, to complete the circle?
Milner08 4y ago
The Palm Pre was always a phone I lusted after but never got to actually use. Is there a good emulator or way to experience what WebOS used to be like?
- codepoet80 4y ago
  It takes a little work, but the restored SDK has info on getting the official emulator up and running on VirtualBox (you'll need an older version to create the VM, which is linked)
als0 4y ago
Enyo was a very cool framework for WebOS and it had a web based IDE, which was crazy innovative at the time. Nothing like it. A shame it was gutted by HP.
yuhong 4y ago
I remember when the plug on developer.palm.com was pulled: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1135561 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1135561
oogabooga13 4y ago
It’s crazy to me that WebOS is still the future all these years later. Love ios but it still doesn’t come close to webos in actual functionality. Who could forget notifications? Still the best way I have seen them handled in a mobile UI to date.
notjustanymike 4y ago
Holy moly, this has the Newsweek RSS app I built a long time ago. It was the first time I had access to localStorage and other HTML5 features. PalmOS was really revolutionary at release, such a shame it didn't succeed.
- codepoet80 4y ago
  Yay! I'm so glad I was able to preserve it -- and nice job on the app ;-)
radicalbyte 4y ago
Oh that's awesome. Need to see if I can find my old Palm.
atkailash 4y ago
jianshen 4y ago
I see an old Sudoku game I wrote in here and it brings back some great memories but now I'm also scared to look at my old code now. O_O Curious how did you back all this up?
- codepoet80 4y ago
  I think this mostly answers your question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31611208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31611208 The other part is the community. People who had backed up their libraries. Devices found on eBay that still had a bunch of apps on them. People who had hoarded IPKs and had them saved on hard drives and were willing to share. That and lots of scraping Google by filename...
Linda703 4y ago
[dead]
zwaps 4y ago
Palm Pre was the best phone I ever owned edit: like, by a lot.
incidentist 4y ago
Nice to see this project on HN, and nice so many familiar webOS names on this board. I worked on Word Ace and the Card Ace games back in the day, and got back into playing around with my Pre and TouchPad a few years ago, thanks in part to codepoet80's work.
- codepoet80 4y ago
  Nice to see you here, incidentist. Your work on novacom for modern macOS has been invaluable!
soganess 4y ago
I wrote one of those apps (I'm not going to say which one for anon reasons)! It was the first (and last) JS app I ever wrote. Its been over a decade, but I remember liking the SDK. Thanks for bringing this back to life, memory lane and all. I miss my Pre and Touchpad. That mirror on the back of the Pre was such a delightful little touch. I also love the idea that a screenshot I took on my computer years ago is still kicking around on the internet. Anyway thanks again!
Morieris 4y ago
oh snap! I made this one https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?category=Games&count=1009&app=471 https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?ca... It's nice to see it again. I always thought webOS and the palm pre were pretty rad, I really thought it catch on.
- codepoet80 4y ago
  nice job!
freshrap6 4y ago
This is great!! Last week I took out my old Pre 2 and Pixi to show my kids. It brought up great memories. I can’t wait to spend the weekend going through this. How did you find everything and put it together?
- codepoet80 4y ago
  Lots of time and scraping, and lots and lots of community contributions!

439 points by codepoet80 4y ago

My pandemic project was to find, restore and organize scattered and archived remnants of Palm/HP's mobile webOS platform to help keep these delightful little devices alive.

codezero 4y ago

I don’t see my old app in there but it was for a now defunct social network so not too surprising. Great work putting this all together. I still boot up my Palm Pre for some nostalgia kicks from time to time.

codepoet80 4y ago
If you still have the IPK (or source code) I'd love to add to the Museum! I'll message you over on Twitter.

vincentleeuwen 4y ago

Very cool!

pisspiss 4y ago

codyogden 4y ago

Incredible! I'm a big fan this type of archival work. Great job!

shitshitshit 4y ago

molbioguy 4y ago

Great work and many thanks! I was just ranting recently about abandoned hardware and what a waste it is (gTar, Glass, Aibo, iPods, and more). I still have a couple of TPs (new!) in the basement that will benefit from this archive. I really liked WebOS - it seemed ahead of its time.

miguelrochefort 4y ago

Thanks for putting this together. webOS was way ahead of its time, and I really liked the HP Veer at the time.

codepoet80 4y ago
I still use a Veer daily!
i80and 4y ago
The Veer was such an amazing device. I have no idea how HP got that keyboard to work so well! It absolutely sucks that we can't have something like the Veer today :(

haubey 4y ago

Wow! The Pre was the reason I got into development, because I wanted to be able to run through flashcards on the bus to school. So I built Study Buddy[1]. The joke is by the time I figured out how to really build it, I had a car so it wasn't quite as personally useful as it could have been. It was a small community but there was a decent amount of teenage developers, maybe 8 or so of us, and I think 10 years later we're all still in the engineering space, basically because of webOS. [1]: https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?category=Education&count=111&app=5033 https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?ca...

codepoet80 4y ago
Well you did good -- Study Buddy still works, all these years later!

myvoiceismypass 4y ago

Is it crazy that I still think webOS is the best mobile OS of all time? The pre and pixi were just... underpowered

noman-land 4y ago
I agree wholeheartedly. If it was able to be fully baked it could have been revolutionary. The unified chat view that showed your conversation history across multiple chat platforms was amazing.
zeroego 4y ago
Not crazy in my opinion. So many of the things webOS did back in like 2008 the iPhone just recently implemented. It was way ahead of its time. I really wish it was still around.
hajile 4y ago
We're getting close to 13 years since webOS launched and we still don't have anything that comes close to the UI functionality it offered.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  I really thought it would be the future... Just goes to show that the best doesn't always win.
- justusthane 4y ago
  As someone who never used it, what made it better than today’s mobile OSs?
  - explorigin 4y ago
    In design, they paid a lot of attention to making common actions available with your free thumb so you could navigate most apps with one hand. App-switching, context menus, device operations were all swipe operations. Having a hardware keyboard made it a bit chunky but didn't feel bad in your pocket because it was so smooth. Also the hardware keyboard provided a true tactile feel so you could even type out some messages without looking at your screen nearly as much as you need to with on-screen keyboards.

DeathArrow 4y ago

webOS still lives on LG's TV sets, fridges and smart watches.

wincy 4y ago
Wow I was about to ask if they licensed the name similar to how Apple licenses the iOS/IOS name from Cisco. That’s an interesting bit of trivia that LG is actually using the same OS as Palm!
- protomyth 4y ago
  https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/webos-lives-lg-to-resurrect-it-for-smart-tvs/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/webos-lives-lg-to-resurrect... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5278015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5278015
codepoet80 4y ago
There are still many remnants of Palm in LG's TV OS -- but like many smart TVs, they're getting cluttered with ads. There's an open source re-implementation of mobile webOS using LG bits called LuneOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuneOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuneOS
pjmlp 4y ago
So much better than Android TV crap.

eddieroger 4y ago

There was a thread this week about calendars, and it made me miss the unified calendar that webOS gave us. I'm excited (and slightly paranoid) to see this now, and can't wait to play with it! I wonder if I still have my old Pre lying around anywhere, and if it still boots. I love my iPhone, but I sure loved that Pre when it was new. As a random second anecdote, I really miss the hacker community around it. I can't remember the name of the forum, but there was a super active thread the day we got root on the device, and it was unbelievably cool to see some Palm employees show up in it and pointing folks in the right direction. Such a fun device.

codepoet80 4y ago
Probably forums.webosnation.com -- its still there, although its slowed down a lot. The last of us diehard users are on Discord now: webosarchive.com/discord
- andrewmunsell 4y ago
  It was originally called PreCentral :)
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> it made me miss the unified calendar that webOS gave us What did it do that CalDAV doesn't permit?
- eddieroger 4y ago
  It wasn't competing with CalDAV, so there is no answer to this question. What it did was present multiple sources, like CalDAV, in a single view.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    I never saw webOS's calendar. I'm familiar with CalDAV. Was trying to understand what made it memorably fun to you.
- 4y ago

user3939382 4y ago

I never hear people mention the Palm Treo. Apple gets all the credit for inventing smartphones with the iPhone 1st gen, but the Treo preceded it by years. Is it not the first smartphone? One of my first startups was based on Treos, they were awesome devices. Very snappy.

bombcar 4y ago
There were tons of "smartphones" before Apple - Blackberries were very common and famous - Apple, if anything, took the lead in designing a workable "touchscreen only" interface.
- codepoet80 4y ago
  I'd argue that Apple's big "innovation" was the capacitive touch screen, that made the UI so much more fluid and responsive. Palm almost shipped a webOS device with a resistive touch screen, but pivoted away after Rubenstein took the reigns. The Treo was a great device for its time, but suddenly felt old fashioned after the iPhone came out -- even though iOS was significantly less capable in its initial implementation (modal notifications, no copy/paste, no apps, etc...)
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Yeah the touchscreen was the first that "worked" like you expected it to - before the best screens were the ones with styluses which could work well, but was a piece to lose/harder to use at a glance.
    - hamburglar 4y ago
      They also had the first browser that wasn’t severely crippled by compromises based on d-pad and extremely inaccurate touch input. Before iphone, the mobile web was a sad joke.
      - bombcar 4y ago

hajile 4y ago

Now if we could just get LG to introduce a new WebOS phone. Add android support and native Qt in addition to web apps while switching to the proposed Mochi style would make for a very nice device.

codepoet80 4y ago
I'd buy that in a heartbeat!
- pcdoodle 4y ago
  Same!
  - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
    99k users to go

qiller 4y ago

This is awesome, found all of my apps. Ah the nostalgia. Mojo and Enyo were great platforms for their time

nkotov 4y ago

I think the Palm Pre was one of the prettiest designs and I really liked how webOS looked back then. It's a shame that it died in the mobile space.

larrywright 4y ago
My LG television runs WebOS and it’s easily the best of the television OSes.
- codepoet80 4y ago
  The newer versions apparently got very heavily ad-laden, but I agree - my webOS 4 TV is great!
qbasic_forever 4y ago
It was also a very comfortable feeling device. The whole thing was rounded and felt like a smooth pebble in your pocket, not some sharp slab like phones today.

bni 4y ago

I still have my webOS Palm Pre, this was the last version that was round like a stone pebble. It still starts up. It is a very nice design that is satisfying to hold. Version after the switched to a more flat with a little larger screen. Not as nice but I guess they had to compete with Android. I made an app and its satisfying to see it in the Museum catalog.

classichasclass 4y ago

Got a Prē 2 and a Veer here. Sounds like this will make a fun weekend.

codepoet80 4y ago
Yay! The community is still around -- drop us a line if you need any help! Link is on the website.
- classichasclass 4y ago
  I'm already reading your Classic tips. I loved the PalmOS and have a lot of old school devices. Wish we could do something about the 7-day timer, but at least it will run on webOS 2! I should finish that Gopher client I was writing ...
  - codepoet80 4y ago
    There's a file you can delete every 7 days to re-arm the timer.
    - classichasclass 4y ago
      No, I got that. It's just kind of a pain is all.
      - codepoet80 4y ago
        Agreed. Since its Linux under the hood, I was thinking a little cron job could fix that. Just haven't got around to trying

meremortals 4y ago

long live webOS!!

pcdoodle 4y ago

I was still on the palm centro when this was released so I never got any hands on with WebOS. I do miss the software and hardware design language used by the palm team. What was under the hood? Linux?

codepoet80 4y ago
Yes, a real Linux with a web-based UI on top. They added a PDK for running Linux apps later, and it still works. I (fairly) recently compiled SCUMMVM for webOS, and it "just works"
- pcdoodle 4y ago
  Very Cool!
qball 4y ago
It was Linux to the point where you could run a full X11 server (and LXDE desktop) as an app: it was what Windows 8 could have been, if it was done right.

andrewmunsell 4y ago

This is amazing, thank you. Seems like several others, my actual development career began on WebOS. In high school, I was intrigued by the idea of a web-based, multitasking capable smartphone and begged my parents to buy me one. Ultimately I learned a ton and have great stories such as staying up all night re-architecting Weatherman (https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?&app=247 https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?&a...) because of the popularity (and this was before it was on the WebOS store, at this time it was invite-only so I had to post it on a forum!). Weatherman was just a hack on top of a hack on top of a hack. There was no Canvas API on the device so I had to generate the weather images on a server and then send them to the device, for example. The highlight for me was winning one of the top spots in the Palm Hot Apps competition for the "free apps" category with Pixi Dust (https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?category=Games&count=1009&app=4196 https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?ca...). The physics weren't accurate by any means, but it was the first time I had seriously used C++ (I think it was, it was so long ago!). I miss having platforms like these with innovative ideas and small communities. I learned so much by having to hack my way around the limitations of the operating system, and really miss WebOS overall. I think I might still have an old Palm Pre sitting a drawer somewhere.

codepoet80 4y ago
If you've still got your back-end code, it'd be fun to restore your app -- I could help host it!
- andrewmunsell 4y ago
  I do have a zip archive of (I think all) my source code. Maybe I'll try and post it on Github this weekend and send you a link! Edit: Yep, I just checked and have both the app client and backend code. I will post everything I can this weekend and ping you via email if I can find it in your profiles or I see you have your Discord alias.
  - codepoet80 4y ago
    If you can't get me there, I have an email alias: curator@<the website posted in this story>

alexk307 4y ago

I loved my Palm Pre, still have it lying around, and it still powers up just fine. A lot of the features that were innovative and new at the time were quickly co-opted into Android and iOS platforms.

forgotmypw17 4y ago

Hi there! I'm working on a platform/framework for making retro-compatible websites, and was wondering if you'd have a few minutes to test it with webOS? I've already tested with older BlackBerry, IE3, and as far back as Netscape 2.x, but I don't have a webOS device. Is it possible you could spend just a few minutes on it and send me some feedback? Ideally, you should be able to register in one click (no email), write a post, and vote and reply to your own post. The URL is in my profile...

codepoet80 4y ago
Edit: tried it out. When I posted, I got a message that said "No Cookie" It wasn't obvious what to do next... I tried registering and a message posted, but seemed to disappear. Anyway, I appreciate the effort -- the more retro-friendly web platforms, the better!
- forgotmypw17 4y ago
  Thank you! Those two issues are resolved for now. The first one is due to a feature designed to reduce the impact of crawler bots, which I'm still testing, so it's off for now. The second is due to a caching issue, so I've reduced the window for that until cache-invalidation is solved :D I did see the message you posted, which says: >checking in from a webOS Touchpad! I was also able to recover the message you first sent, reading: >Quickly checking in from a webOS Touchpad. Looks good from here! Thank you again for testing!

mempko 4y ago

It makes me so sad we got stuck with Android and iOS instead of the amazing WebOS. I will never forgive you HP and what you did to my love.

codepoet80 4y ago
There's an app for that! http://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/app/leodarts http://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/app/leodarts
- mempko 4y ago
  OMG thank you! This made my day.

shortformblog 4y ago

The HP TouchPad that I use as a digital clock was very happy to see this. The page loaded up right away!

codepoet80 4y ago
If you have Hue lights, you might want to check out my One Night Stand app for webOS, which lets you control them from your digital clock... http://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/app/OneNightStand http://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/app/OneNightStand
- shortformblog 4y ago
  Awesome—will look into it!
qiller 4y ago
I've built Flixi dashboard while back (https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?app=10322 https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?ap...). My last TouchPad died some time ago, and then I couldn't get the SDK going on a new workstation but a few users were running that thing still even not that long ago!

prmoustache 4y ago

As underpowered as it was I somehow miss my pixi. It was just so tiny and the keyboard was surprisingly practical. The convex shape of the keys made sure you wouldn't press 2 keys at the same time. I did much less typing errors than I do know.

joshmarinacci 4y ago

Thank you for doing this. Is it possible to use the dev tools to setup a phone that’s been reset? My original Pre is stuck waiting for auth from an HP server that no longer exists. Who are you, BTW? Were you on the webOS engineering team? I was in devrel.

codepoet80 4y ago
Yes, everything you need to setup your phone is here: http://www.webosarchive.com/docs/activate/ http://www.webosarchive.com/docs/activate/ I actually didn't work on webOS, but for a competing mobile platform, but was always a huge fan of webOS, and ended up licensing its printing subsystem from HP for our platform (after HP gave up!) I love connecting with its original community, and I think I found you on Twitter. Drop me a line if you'd like to swap war stories!

hyperdimension 4y ago

Thank you! This means a lot to me. I collect Palm and Pocket PC handhelds, and remember how it seemed every independent developer had their own website with fun little creations on them and how easy it was to get software. It's just not as much fun to use the devices without it being loaded with all sorts of fun programs. I also recently scored a HP Laserjet 2200, which has an IrDA port on the front, which was a nice bonus for me in particular. I remember dreaming of being able to print from them and thinking how cool that would be. Funny how you only appreciate something when it's not possible. Edit: I just realized this isn't about that Palm era, but yes, for the same reason I of course had to get a Palm Pre the second it came out. It was my first smartphone, and I remember it fondly.

unwiredben 4y ago

I worked at Palm during the development of webOS, both before the Pre was launched, then again in developer relations and framework development after it came out. I'm very happy to see this archive of the great work the community created around these devices. If you want to archive my old Twitter feed, https://twitter.com/webostips https://twitter.com/webostips, that might be useful for the help section. It really only ran in 2009-2010, as I got too busy after returning to Palm from my stint at Mozilla.

codepoet80 4y ago
I see Roku too, from your Profile. That means you've worked on three of my favorite platforms!

shaneos 4y ago

This makes me so, so happy! I put so much work into WebOS apps, and your site lists five of them. Sadly it's missing a few, like "My WebOS Apps", the developer dashboard app I wrote for WebOS app developers that let developers see their download stats on the phone, get notifications of when their app was accepted or rejected and more - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U4bVq_VIhs&list=PL792FA4594BC99B4D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6U4bVq_VIhs&list=PL792FA4594... I'm getting so nostalgic, even tearing up a little :-) Flickr Mundo - https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?search=Flickr&safe=on&app=5027 https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?se... Mazer - https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?search=Mazer&safe=on&app=1508 https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?se... Irish Rain - https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?&app=509 https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?&a...

codepoet80 4y ago
If you have the source or IPK anywhere for your missing apps, I'd love to add to the archive! Drop me a line at curator@<website listed in article>

BLO716 4y ago

Had to update wikipedia.org :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebOS

codepoet80 4y ago
Wow, thank you.
- BLO716 4y ago
  Modesty and all. :) Just picked up my webOS tablet from HP .. off we go for a long weekend of fun, my friend. THANK YOU .. for the rehashed fun.

xd1936 4y ago

I wish I could upvote this twice. Long live webOS.

mt3ck 4y ago

Wow.. you've done a lot thanks for resurrecting this! Like many of the others, WebOS kicked off my career into software development and was my first endeavor building software larger then a simple website. I created GetMeVino as a simple wine resource for myself as there were similar apps on IOS and I wanted one to use on WebOS. I remember posting it on precentral forums and actually got interest from Palm themselves to build it out further and release it on their catalog. I was blown away, inspired by the possibilities and that really lit a fire in me to want to continue creating even outside WebOS. Definitely wouldn't have been here today without WebOS. Some other highlights, the browser based IDE Ares way ahead of its time, WebOS at CES2010 and the Palm developer relations, getting invited to Mozilla for Firefox OS. I am going to need to find my old devices now!

StillBored 4y ago

I sure would like to know where this came from. Because I'm fairly certain it has to be some internal database, or someone scraped it and there were fields HP was providing in the API that weren't visible publicly. Which means there its possible that the actual author's emails shared with HP during app submission are in there too. In which case, it would be nice if someone made an attempt to contact the authors and get their permission. In my case I would give it, and maybe provide a few things that appear to be missing. Along with maybe cleaning up the code a bit and posting it on github/etc. My touchpad did the whole battery to rundown refuse to boot when plugged in thing a few years ago, and its been on my list of things to recover, but.. sigh.

codepoet80 4y ago
Fair questions! Long before my time, but just before the shutdown, the community scraped the catalog metadata -- its been available in a well-known IPK since at least 2012. Because of how apps were built for webOS, and the amazing community around it, lots of sources are on GitHub or SourceForge. Many of the IPKs similarly came from community archives. Most of the media and SDK material came from the Wayback Machine, although some is still available on HP's servers. In the end, I drew from multiple sources, then had to write tools to compile it all together into a usable fashion. I did reach out to some of the big name publishers, but was generally ignored. Because the content is for archival purposes, and there are some provisions for this in US copyright law, I decided to take the approach of removing content upon request, rather than trying to get affirmative responses from people who are either unreachable, or uninterested. To date, I've had one (very polite) take-down request, which I responded to immediately, and removed their content entirely from the archive. Today's post blew up a little more than I expected, so I may get more -- I'll respond to each appropriately. Everything I've published is on GitHub or archive.org, and while I don't have as much spare time for it now, I'll do my best to keep it curated and within fair use. If you'd like to add some of your content to the archive (or have some of your content removed) I've posted my email a couple of times in this thread, or you can find it on the website.

lostgame 4y ago

WebOS is still; to this day, my favourite mobile OS. When it was open sourced - I’d actually hoped it could be a serious open source competitor in the field. Quite a sad disappointment.

ChrisArchitect 4y ago

Wow what a throwback, amazing work. Those WebOS times were really a unique little slice of history sort of nestled after blackberry was cemented and the dawn of iPhone era and social media but before those had really really taken off. The influence of WebOS via concepts maybe ahead of its time, and moreso the people who worked on it that went out into industry in many areas, was large.

brundolf 4y ago

Is there a webOS emulator out there for Android devices, to complete the circle?

Milner08 4y ago

The Palm Pre was always a phone I lusted after but never got to actually use. Is there a good emulator or way to experience what WebOS used to be like?

codepoet80 4y ago
It takes a little work, but the restored SDK has info on getting the official emulator up and running on VirtualBox (you'll need an older version to create the VM, which is linked)

als0 4y ago

Enyo was a very cool framework for WebOS and it had a web based IDE, which was crazy innovative at the time. Nothing like it. A shame it was gutted by HP.

yuhong 4y ago

I remember when the plug on developer.palm.com was pulled: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1135561 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1135561

oogabooga13 4y ago

It’s crazy to me that WebOS is still the future all these years later. Love ios but it still doesn’t come close to webos in actual functionality. Who could forget notifications? Still the best way I have seen them handled in a mobile UI to date.

notjustanymike 4y ago

Holy moly, this has the Newsweek RSS app I built a long time ago. It was the first time I had access to localStorage and other HTML5 features. PalmOS was really revolutionary at release, such a shame it didn't succeed.

codepoet80 4y ago
Yay! I'm so glad I was able to preserve it -- and nice job on the app ;-)

radicalbyte 4y ago

Oh that's awesome. Need to see if I can find my old Palm.

atkailash 4y ago

jianshen 4y ago

I see an old Sudoku game I wrote in here and it brings back some great memories but now I'm also scared to look at my old code now. O_O Curious how did you back all this up?

codepoet80 4y ago
I think this mostly answers your question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31611208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31611208 The other part is the community. People who had backed up their libraries. Devices found on eBay that still had a bunch of apps on them. People who had hoarded IPKs and had them saved on hard drives and were willing to share. That and lots of scraping Google by filename...

Linda703 4y ago

[dead]

zwaps 4y ago

Palm Pre was the best phone I ever owned edit: like, by a lot.

incidentist 4y ago

Nice to see this project on HN, and nice so many familiar webOS names on this board. I worked on Word Ace and the Card Ace games back in the day, and got back into playing around with my Pre and TouchPad a few years ago, thanks in part to codepoet80's work.

codepoet80 4y ago
Nice to see you here, incidentist. Your work on novacom for modern macOS has been invaluable!

soganess 4y ago

I wrote one of those apps (I'm not going to say which one for anon reasons)! It was the first (and last) JS app I ever wrote. Its been over a decade, but I remember liking the SDK. Thanks for bringing this back to life, memory lane and all. I miss my Pre and Touchpad. That mirror on the back of the Pre was such a delightful little touch. I also love the idea that a screenshot I took on my computer years ago is still kicking around on the internet. Anyway thanks again!

Morieris 4y ago

oh snap! I made this one https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?category=Games&count=1009&app=471 https://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/showMuseumDetails.php?ca... It's nice to see it again. I always thought webOS and the palm pre were pretty rad, I really thought it catch on.

codepoet80 4y ago
nice job!

freshrap6 4y ago

This is great!! Last week I took out my old Pre 2 and Pixi to show my kids. It brought up great memories. I can’t wait to spend the weekend going through this. How did you find everything and put it together?

codepoet80 4y ago
Lots of time and scraping, and lots and lots of community contributions!