[eekfuh]

I've developed a fairly well known (to the webos community) application. I had a top 10 app in Palm's million dollar contest. I've been on their print and web promotional tools and featured several times in their app catalog... yet I feel and felt that HP and Palm both have dropped the ball when it has come to developing for WebOS. They have terrible, poorly documented API's.

I think its all fine and dandy that they have semi-rewarded me with some free advertising, but as a developer, I really only care about writing a killer app and if there is no way to do certain things, or making me write a C++ browser extension just to properly cURL data, well its just not worth my time.

Being able to phonegap applications will help their count, but most developers know, those apps never feel purely native and the apps typically are extremely low powered, unintelligent apps.

I think that accounting for all that might be more of a recipe for disaster. Poor usability and a lack of strong apps, except for the occasional game (written in C++ as a browser plugin so they can opengl).

[piranha]

So if writing a browser extension in C++ is hard, then what about writing whole application in Objective C instead of writing in JS? I'm genuinely interested what do you consider easier platform to develop, since I've just tried out Enyo and I really like it.

[eekfuh]

It's not really about the language, it was more about the API's available. I write iPhone apps also and the frameworks that Apple has developed are far superior and far more reaching than anything Palm/HP has done.

Their API's available to the browser extensions are basically just opengl related.

[davej]

I know absolutely zero about WebOS development so this is probably a very naive question. Isn't Node.JS available to WebOS, couldn't you use something like http.request()? http://nodejs.org/docs/v0.4.7/api/http.html#http.request

[eekfuh]

Node.js is only available for WebOS 2.0 (~90% of people are on older versions of WebOS).

[davej]

Ok, I see that the original pre and pixi don't support WebOS 2.0, that's a real pity. From what I can see the WebOS 2.0/3.0 developer ecosystem looks a lot nicer (although it's probably not practical to drop 1.0 support yet), have you tried out Enyo + Node on 2.0/3.0? Any thoughts?

[eekfuh]

I actually haven't. Once my revenue dropped below $1k a month from WebOS, I basically stopped adding new features and moved over to my iphone stuffs. I make over $1k on iPhone and growing quickly, gotta love the power of 100m users (vs 1.5m shrinking set of users).