Hello world! Excited that we have a fresh new forum to post in, and I thought I'd say a "hello" as possibly the last (legacy) webOS Developer out there. I've been making apps for webOS phones and tablets since about 2018, and rigging up back-end services or proxies to keep our favorite Zombie devices alive almost as long.
My pandemic project was to create a new back-end for the App Museum and try to organize as many archives of preserved and rescued apps as possible into a common repository that could be mirrored and automatically linked to from the front-end. Most of this was just dusting off the great work done by those who've come before, but I also whipped up a little web-friendly front-end to try to make the remains of our ecosystem a little more discoverable. You can check that project out at http://appcatalog.webosarchive.org
As I wrote and rescued apps, I found I benefited from archived documentation, and forums tips and tricks -- but that I ended up with a lot of Browser bookmarks to assorted incomplete bits and pieces. I thought it might be beneficial to have it all in one place. For developer content, I concentrated it around a partially restored SDK (http://sdk.webosarchive.org) and for user-facing content, I built a clean Docs site (http://docs.webosarchive.org) and was able to largely restore the on-device Help for a few devices and regions (http://help.webosarchive.org/HowToUse.php)
With all the tools I needed in place, and lots of help from previous developers (in the form of de-compiled apps with easily readable Javascript), I had most of the pieces to start producing apps again. As a general rule, stand-alone apps are published under my name in the App Museum (https://appcatalog.webosarchive.org/author/codepoet), while services from my archive are published by webOS Archive (https://appcatalog.webosarchive.org/author/webOS%20Archive). I've also repaired or updated some other developers apps, and where possible, keep their name and appIds intact -- or just add my name if there's already a history of multiple authors.
Another interesting side-effect is following the original Platform team's journey to crossing Platforms. Apps written in Enyo or Enyo2 (aka EnyoJS) can fairly easily be wrapped in Cordova and published as Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) for Windows and Mac, or compiled for Google Play -- making it possible to literally run webOS apps on Android. More on that in the future.
But you don't have to entertain other platforms to have fun with webOS apps. With a little help, the TouchPad or Pre3 are remarkably useful devices, Pre2s and Veers can still do a lot, and there's a nice legacy of fun things the older devices can still do. Check out my Things to Try, visit webOS Archive, or join the community chat on your webOS device, or on Discord.
I'll be back to post more -- but I hope I'm not the only one. webOS led the way in so many innovations, its worth seeing where they came from, and its fun to keep old devices useful, and even better to remember a time when users were the customer… not the product.
