Well, it’s 2024 and technology continues to advance. The TouchPad isn’t new by any means, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be slightly modernized to be more convenient today. Specifically, it is entirely possible to convert the TouchPad’s Micro USB port to USB C for charging and USB storage access. I’ll show you how.
This is a tough mod which requires micro-soldering and modifying a PCB which you will have a hard time sourcing a replacement for without buying another TouchPad. Proceed at your own peril.
For readers of this blog, representation of webOS devices will be in two of those areas. Jon W of the webOS Archive is attending over the weekend and will give a 50 minute talk at 900am on Saturday the 13th. The consignment shop will have a small selection of webOS devices for those who are interested.
So if you are in the area, why not go along?
If you can’t make it, you can follow along via the VCF video channel and TouchPads are available remotely at Tindie
Sooo that was a really long time since a release, but webOS Ports are still around and active as ever!
We have continued making updates and producing testing images. But a lot happened that resulted in us not putting out a proper release out in the past few years.
Those who have stayed in touch with the community will know there has been some turmoil with the closure of the webOS Nation forums last year. Things stabilised over the last year as people converged around the webOS Archive and made plans on the associated Discord server. Much of the old information from webOS Nation was preserved thanks to the internet archive and can still be accessed, if imperfectly. We have now set up a new community forum that largely replicates the old layout and is ready for fresh content.
If you are eager to find out what we’ve been working on and to try out the new release, read on…
(UPDATE: The webOS Nation disappeared from the web on Friday the 13th, 2023)
It appears Future Publishing US have decided to “Sunset” the WebOS Nation forums. This term could mean anything from ceasing product support, through archiving to full closure. Whatever the term means in this case, the process is due to begin in early January.
pivotCE was originally created some years ago to fill the gap in webOS news when webOSNation.com stopped publishing stories, but the forums continued until this day. Many of pivotCE’s stories were originally sourced from the forum. Both parts of webOS Nation contain a wealth of data and history about the webOS project and it’s successors. It’s hoped that this information can be preserved in some way.
When I saw a tweet from @webOSdev announcing webOS OSE was available to install on a Raspberry Pi 3, I knew what I’d be doing that night after work. Unfortunately, the process to build it requires hours of time and a computer running Linux natively (virtual machines are not recommended). I didn’t have either of those things. Luckily, someone had already built it and made the image available to download. Sweet! I put the image on a SD card, loaded it into my Pi, and powered it up.
After booting, you’re greeted with a nice splash screen with the webOS OSE logo in the corner. The recommended first thing to do is go into settings and connect to ethernet or Wi-Fi, so that’s what I did. That’s actually the only thing you can do in the settings right now. The only other section contains some basic info about the OS and that’s it. Alright, how about apps?
As this is the very first version of the project, I wasn’t expecting much here. Pressing F1 on the keyboard triggers the app menu to slide in from the right side of the screen. There are three “apps” in there, but they’re nothing more than website wrappers. ‘Enact’ and ‘webOS OSE’ will bring you to two sites with lots of info about the OSE project and how to get started developing. The third is ‘YouTube’, which is obviously a YouTube app. I haven’t tried signing into my Google account, but videos on the landing page work just as they should.
The interface doesn’t have cards like we know them from old webOS or the small tiles of webOS TV. I’m not sure how webOS OSE handles switching between apps. They only really told us how to open the app list. I’m curious to learn more about this.
I’d say that this is a pretty barebones OS in its current form. It seems to be the TV OS with a lot of the stuff removed (or just not accessible yet?), like the apps along the bottom of the homescreen, content store, most of the settings, etc. I think it’s enough for developers to start poking around though. I don’t know if it’s touchscreen-enabled, but I would assume so.
So, that’s all there is to see for now, at least from an end user’s point of view. If you happen to be an app developer like me, there are already some tools on the webOS OSE site to get started tinkering. I’ve had some limited success getting a couple of my apps up and running. If you’re looking to dig deeper than app dev, the entire project is open source so feel free to dive right in! The documentation for app development seems to be pretty decent considering how new this project is.
If you don’t want to bother setting up a Raspberry Pi, I made a short video showing most of what I mentioned above.
