[jeffclark]

It's strange. $99 firesale, new TouchPads in the hands of a bunch of nerds, show off some "good" (not not "great") apps by giving them away.

I kinda hope it's all marketing hype. But now I want decent, functioning apps for this thing.

I created a legit WebOS app for myself in about 30 minutes. The development of these apps are unbelievably quick since it's just HTML/CSS/JS.

Your entire dev environment is a text editor, a WebKit browser and the inspection pane - the same one built into Chrome/Safari/Whathaveyou.

It'd be a shame to see WebOS completely die off.

[barkingcat]

Did you create your app before or after you heard about HP killing the platform off?

If it was after, what made you not develop any apps when the platform was viable?

This would be a great postmortem question for the HP team - if they had such a compelling development platform, why didn't anyone want to make the effort before they killed the entire thing?

[jeffclark]

After.

The only reason I didn't create one before was because I didn't think the platform had enough users to make the ROI on learning how to program for WebOS worth it.

[barkingcat]

So now that you know how easy it is to learn to program for webos (html / css/ js) - would the # of users it takes to make the ROI be reduced by enough such that it's ok to sell to an extremely small market?

ie. Since it's so easy to develop for, you will spend very little time/effort/money to learn to develop vs the iphone (which involves apis, objective c, etc) or vs the android (which involves java, etc) - and so it's ok that the market is small, because you can sell less copies to recoup the investment outlay (which was smaller to begin with because of the ease of development).

Does that change the value proposition of the touchpad?

If it does, then this points to a marketing failure on HP's part - they had a perfectly fine product - just needed to get past the initial "knowledge gap" when no one knows anything about the product.

[tremendo]

new TouchPads in the hands of a bunch of nerds…

I looked for one in local stores and they all told me that eBay hustlers had bought them very quickly after the price drop. Haven't looked on eBay but if true then it's not necessarily the nerds that got them, that could do something useful with them.

[JLW]

Sadly it's starting to look that way