As a parent, Christmas time means I get to hear my 8 year old oggling over every toy commercial she sees. In fact, that’s usually the first indicator that I have to sit her down with a pencil and a piece of paper to get her to write a letter to Santa Claus. Once the letter is done I can remind her that she already wrote to Santa to make the begging lull…a bit.
But this year I got to thinking…what would I ask Santa for? I mean other than a unicorn and a rocket launcher, of course…here’re my top 3.
1. Open webOS Alpha 3’s release, more support for the @webosports Team, and LG to provide the Open webOS deliverables they promised. This is my top wish because this is the future of webOS. Without a guarantee from LG about webOS mobile devices in the future…it’s all resting on the Ports team. If you’re a developer, I need you to help them! Many hands make light work (think Elves…this is a Christmas list after all). LG promised a laundry list of items for the Open webOS effort and many of them have gone unfulfilled. We know LG has been actively hiring for webOS developers which could be part of the hold up but the Ports Team has been filling in gaps pretty much straight from Linux distributions. Not a bad idea at all but it would be nice if LG would step up their game and follow through on those promises because even with the Ports team making slow and steady progress the timetable is slipping. I mean I’ll wait but LG could make the wait shorter. It’d also be nice if they’d put up a message about their active work on it for the public to read.
2. webOS Nation to bring back the news. Don’t get me wrong here. pivotCE is filling a gap for English webOS news and so far it’s going pretty well. But we all know it’s not the flagship webOS news source that is webosnation.com and what a boost it would be for the community to get their favorite news source back. I’ll go to bed Christmas Eve with visions of webOS News dancing in my head. And I’ll wake up to a gift-wrapped RSS notification labeled From: webOS Nation To: ME!
3. ACL for webOS. Seriously. This year. For the love of God. If you asked me when we first heard about this plan I would have put all of my eggs in a basket labeled “this is going to make webOS last forever“. I have taken all but one egg from that virtual basket. A lackluster and buggy Preview gave us some hope while at the same time leaving a bad taste in kickstarter backers’ mouths. It’s been a month since the last Preview and all PIC and OM keep saying is it’s “almost” here. Without a working deadline…”almost” might as well be sometime after today but before the apocalypse. Why does the apocalypse feel closer? I’m still excited about it but the suspense is worse than listening for hoof steps on my roof.
So this is my list. What’s yours for webOS this holiday season?
#webosforever
I wish LG would realize that they can’t copy Samsung on everything and might as well throw a WebOS out there for Devs to use and develop so that we can soon believe that we will have a decent port.
Well the Port won’t come from LG but some of the pieces would be great for the webOS Ports team. Throwing a release of webOS out there is what got Palm in trouble back in 2009.
I’d wish for a lot of more spare time to invest in this great OS. 😉
I now installed open webOS on my Gnex, because I couldn’t stand Android anymore.. it always confuses me, when I try to switch tasks. Also looking into that OS a bit more, I really love Synergy much more than before. And Just-Type.
Currently I evaluate a Lumia 925 with WP8 as possible smartphone for my mother (I can’t give her Android, that’s for sure. And I would feel kind of bad dragging her into the same situation that I am in, loving to use webOS but with a dark perspective for the future, when the old hardware will finally fail). WP8 does a lot of things much better than Android. But still task switch includes a lot of pain and other stuff, especially again account management, seems pretty rough. Also it has this hardware search button. But all it can do is launch a web search. I hoped for something close to Just-Type… but no. I don’t get why that concept is so hard to grasp… I seldom go through the launcher to launch an app in webOS, I just start typing it’s name. I dug the contacts-app icon somewhere deep in that launcher, because I can just-type and search for contacts by far faster than searching them in some app… all this… AHRG… and they have that dedicated search button and it does.. what? Nothing… Similar goes for Android and their stupid search bar on the stupid home screen. They got big with search engines. Why can’t they do on device search at all?
So, basically I would some wishes:
1. Let my Veer last as long as possible. 🙂 Give me ACL for that device, so that I don’t need to fix all that stupid apps by myself (which reminds me that I need to fix ReadOnTouch Phone, damn).
2. Let webos ports work out good and turn my Gnex into something useful. Something I like to use. Something I could leave my Veer at home for. Also let us find an easy way to run Android apps… maybe something like Jolla uses. Is that open source? I’ll take a note to look into that… 😉
3. Let ACL and other similar approaches change the world… so that every buyer can decide what system to install on the piece of hardware he bought. Don’t describe OS features as features of a specific phone (I REALLY hate that). Make drivers more open. Find a common hardware specification. It worked for PCs. Do that for mobile. Now. Go. 😉
Kind of a backup wish:
4. Give brains to Google, MS, Apple or whoever and let them copy webOS features in a good way without screwing them up. Let them integrate some of the better webOS concepts like synergy (the whole thing!), just-type search for everything on device and web, easy task switching into their systems.
Kind of an extra wish:
5. Someone give me a phone with Sailfish OS. 😉
That’s a great list!