July has turned out to be a pretty packed month. The Community Edition has been extremely well received in the community. Developers have already created some very interesting modifications to LunaSysMgr that have enhanced the user experience on TouchPads.

We also officially announced the release of Enyo 2.0 at OSCON and have been picked up by xTuple to be their front end framework. The Developer relations team attended Open Web Camp in San Jose, Throne of JS in Toronto and GothamJS in NY. Head on over to our developer blog to read more about these events.

On to July’s Open webOS releases: You may remember that we released the System manager bus ahead of schedule back in April and are pleased to announce today the release of System Manager (also known as Luna) and the core applications.

The core applications provide a comprehensive set of platform user applications, including Email, Calendar, Contacts, Memos, Accounts, Clock and Calculator. The background services which support webOS Synergy functionality within these applications will be included with the full 1.0 release.  

We are excited to open up the active development branch of our upleveled System Manager. This major upgrade incorporates the latest QtWebKit and Qt technologies in an improved architecture. Modern QtWebKit now underlies all applications, providing state-of-the-art support for HTML rendering and I/O. The latest stable release of Qt has been integrated across the system, eliminating alternate rendering paths and providing a clean base for the future. These changes bring enhanced stability and performance to Open webOS. Look for us to actively continue developing System Manager. As always the source code can be found here.

With these components released, our next step will be our Beta release, including a revamped build system. We’re looking forward to the community being able to join us in taking Open webOS forward, to new hardware platforms, new form factors, and integration of other leading open source technologies. To that end, we’ll be providing a development-optimized environment supporting emulator and desktop.  

For Open webOS we are aiming for support on future hardware platforms where SoC’s support Linux 3.3+ kernel and where open source replacements for proprietary components are integrated. Existing devices cannot be supported because of those many proprietary components, including graphics, networking and lack of drivers for a modern kernel (but of course, there is the Community Edition for those interested in improving the TouchPad). 

To continue this work we are looking for talented, experienced people to join us on our march to 1.0 and beyond. See our full list of open positions at www.webosjobs.com and come join our team.

As always your feedback is welcome and I look forward to talking to you in the community world.