This is a mobile platform with a graphical user interface and is specially designed for devices with touch screens. The platform uses web technologies like – HTML 5, Java Script and CSS. Using Web OS, one can develop applications which include the verticals like – social networking, games, camera, business applications, tools and utility applications, entertainment applications and many others.
Web-OS application development
A Web-OS is composed of one or many different scenes that can be rendered on a stage. The web applications have become common today in mobile devices. These applications run locally and are built with a programming language like Objective-C or Java. As they are built for a specific device, it is very difficult to port to other mobile platforms or a web site. This makes all the palm device applications as web applications which are created with HTML, CSS, Java-Script by using the Mojo JavaScript Framework. Even the native applications developed on the palm device acts as web applications. As the platform uses web technologies like – HTML 5, it can store data locally and do CSS animations and transitions. In other words, if the developer knows HTML, CSS and other web technologies, he can easily create mobile applications for web operating system.
How to get started
To start building applications, the developer needs to download and install the Palm web OS software development kit. This kit is available for Windows, OS X and Linux. To setup the development environment, one need to follow the latest instructions from Palm. After installing the development kit, one can use any text-editor to create their source code files. For Eclipse, there is a web development plug-in available, but it is advised to use Active State’s edit with a third-party plug-in for Web OS development.
Features
- The web operating system provides support for Palm’s plug-in development kit, which allows the mobile devices to support 3D gaming and other enhanced applications developed using the set of protocols.
- In 2010, a security concern was identified in the existing palm Web OS which were resolved and corrected in the latest version.
- There are many multi-touch gestures which can be used to navigate through the screen. The interface use ‘cards’ to manage multi-tasking and represent applications. The applications can be closed by flicking a card up and off the screen. The ‘cards’ can even be re-organized.
- Web OS integrates data and information from various sources. Users are allowed to sign into multiple accounts from different providers and integrate all the sources into a single list.
- Another important feature is the notification area which is located at the bottom of the screen on the mobile devices. Whenever a notification comes it slides in from the bottom of the screen and the applications are automatically resized while the notification id displayed.
- For synchronization, this platform uses a cloud-base approach rather than using a desktop ‘sync’ client.
- Many third-party applications are accessible from the palm devices for wireless download by using the application catalogue.
