

WebOS 3.0.4 released - j_col
http://jaaksi.blogspot.com/2011/10/no-strings-attached-enjoy.html

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j_col
Love one of the anonymous comments on there:

"From one HP employee to another: THANK YOU for this awesome OS and OTA. The
Touchpad, the Pre 3 ... such awesome products. I truly hope our new leadership
will do the right thing and bring the platforms back."

~~~
pconf
It is an awesome OS except for one significant drawback: javascript. If not
for the dependency on js these phones and tablets wouldn't lock-up hard so
often or hang for several seconds after touching the screen more often than
not. I know js fans will object but their single-threaded, interpreted
language is the #2 source of Palm/HP's troubles.

The #1 Palm issue, however, is the hardware manufacturer/s. If Palm had been
able to use the same CN fabs as Apple the Pre would be _big_. But they weren't
and as a result the Pre/Pixi/Touchpad are larger than they could have been
and, more significantly, the (Pre/Pixi) keyboards are the worst on any
smartphone.

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zwieback
Great for the many HP employees like myself who got a TouchPad in the employee
fire sale, supposedly there will be a lot of TouchPads going out as Christmas
presents. If nothing else, the current TouchPad population is one giant, if
expensive, beta program for WebOS - let's hope someone does something awesome
with it.

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taylorbuley
I am lucky enough to own a tablet of each breed, and my TouchPad is by far my
favorite. Sure there are less apps by an order of magnitude, but HP nailed
most of the core services. For example, mark all as read -- I've yet to find
this basic feature on my Honeycomb tab or iPad.

~~~
coob
You can now mark multiple emails as read in iOS5.

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maaku
mark multiple emails = O(n), mark all = O(1)

~~~
tadfisher
"Mark read" is a broken interaction anyway. You only ever use it when you
_haven't read_ the message.

So why do people do it? I do it to clear out messages that aren't worth
reading, to get that number of unread emails in my Inbox folder down to 0.

Why do I care about unread messages? What I'm really worried about are
_unseen_ messages, and the set of unread messages contains these.

"Read/unread" and "Seen/unseen" are really just labels anyway, right? These
could be automatically applied on seeing the message in a list view and on
reading the message.

Now I have some sort of cool multiple-select label filter in place, and all I
need to do is select the "Inbox" and "unseen" labels to get to email that I
need to peruse. Every time I look at this label combination, all mail is
marked "seen" and I never have to check off messages or apply a "read" state
to _messages that I have not read_.

Notmuch (notmuchmail.org) gets close to what I want. I want to see its ideas
adopted by the major webmail/mobile interfaces, so I don't have to contend
with the legacy of email sorting.

~~~
untog
I don't know, I feel like you're over-thinking it. "Mark as Read" is exactly
that- "mark this as if I have read it, even though I have not". I don't see
how it's broken.

~~~
tadfisher
The problem is that I can no longer distinguish between mail that I have read
and mail that I simply don't care about. The solution I presented requires no
explicit interaction and gives me this granularity. Sure, I can manually apply
a label in Gmail, but that's explicit once more (and requires far too many
clicks for such a simple operation).

~~~
overcyn
> I can no longer distinguish between mail that I have read and mail that I
> simply don't care about.

Why is this distinction important? When do you need to browse through mail
that you've read? If you need to find something you can just search for it by
content or individual.

The problem with automatically applying a 'seen' label, is that it forces you
to to immediately filter through all your new mail. You can't stop halfway
because then some 'unseen' mail will get marked 'seen'.

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jarek
You have to kinda feel for Ari Jaaksi: jumped ship from Nokia when Maemo/Meego
was going down, only to find himself at Palm/HP...

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bergie
_made connectivity with non-HP phones possible_

I wonder what that means. Synchronization? Tethering? Notifications about
calls and SMS on the device?

~~~
unwiredben
The TouchPad can now work as a Bluetooth speakerphone for non-webOS phones
that support the right profiles. It can also do SMS access on phones that
expose that database.

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csomar
Hi. I don't understand anymore. Didn't HP kill the tablet and WebOS?

What does this mean? Will there new tablets? If not, why WebOS is being
updated?

~~~
camiller
They killed the hardware. They have the #2 tablet by user base (admittedly due
to selling many tablets at a loss during the fire sale) and do need to support
them for a reasonable period of time, bug fixes and such, which is what this
release is. They always said they wanted to keep the software alive.

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Pent
I own a touchpad and without a developed app base it feels so rigid to me. I
don't want to share links by email I want to share them through my various
online accounts. I don't want to multitask by navigating to cards I want to
have in-app multitasking through swipes. Even reading a PDF on it is painful
because the font rendering is so poor. I don't think HP really "got it". It
was barely worth the 99 I paid for it. I installed the new update today. And
while this update increased the responsiveness it didn't address the
fundamental workflow problems... But since they are abandoning it anyway I
probably shouldn't expect anything anyway.

~~~
j_col
Sounds like you should sell it on eBay to someone who loves webOS, and make
yourself a tidy profit in the process. The workflow issues you describe are
basically how webOS fundamentally works, so it sounds like it is a design
decision that you will never be comfortable with.

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deyan
Thanks for the link! Does anyone know if this breaks the 3.0.2 recommended
patches (e.g. muffling logging, etc.)

~~~
yoshamano
Word 'round the Precentral forums is that it breaks most patches. Like with
all updates, you'll lose custom kernels until the kernel source is released.
So I made a list of all the patched I use then removed them along with
UberKernel.

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brackin
Yet did HP not announce there would be no more Web OS devices, HP needs to
open source this. The more choice the better! I can see Samsung or HTC
producing some slick devices running Web OS. Hardware was always a key issue
for me, the Pre was slow and boring.

~~~
Tloewald
I forget, didn't people demo Android running much quicker on touchpad
hardware? If so, it's the decision to depend too much on the JavaScript stack
and not the hardware that's the ultimate problem.

~~~
davux
Android really doesn't run quicker than WebOS yet. There isn't any 2D hardware
acceleration (last I knew, a few days ago). This means that sometimes Android
is really fluid, but then it starts studdering and kind of ruins the
experience.

I also had a ton of Force-Close's on the browser. I'm back to WebOS until the
Android CM7 builds get past Alpha. It looks like it'll be usable, but not
really yet.

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thinkcomp
This is still my #1 problem with the TouchPad:

[http://forums.hpwebos.com/t5/HP-TouchPad-Software-
Hardware/A...](http://forums.hpwebos.com/t5/HP-TouchPad-Software-
Hardware/Ampersands-in-URLs-Still-Don-t-Work/td-p/359930)

Otherwise it's great.

~~~
unwiredben
Can you provide more detail? Is this when entering URLs directly? Have you
tried going through j.mp or bitly.com and shortening the URL, then bookmarking
that version?

~~~
thinkcomp
It's when entering them directly, clicking on links, or using bookmarks. The
&amp; gets passed through to the server--it's not just an issue with the UI.
Annoying as hell.

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suivix
For some reason this reminds me of the guy who recently ported Prince of
Persia from the Apple 2 to the Commodore 64.

