As we come to a close of our first year as Open webOS, we would like to thank everyone involved. Since we published the original roadmap 12 months ago we achieved our goal of delivering 1.0 on schedule as promised. The New Year will see new features and components as we look to enhance the OS.

This month we completed and delivered the pluggable keyboard project, WebAppMgr separation and upgrading to Qt 4.8.3. Work continues as planned on upgrading Qt5/webkit2 (more details next month). Also, the complete rewrite of mediaServer has been completed and is now undergoing internal QA testing, look for this to hit the repos in the coming weeks.

Apache Cordova

The power of Open Source is the ability to leverage other open source projects. We have been privileged to know and support the PhoneGap guys from start and are excited to be part of the Apache Cordova project. Originally Enyo 1.0 supported direct API access to webOS hardware, however in order for Enyo 2.0 to be a truly cross-platform framework, it doesn’t.

To allow Enyo apps to be built once for multiple platforms we have worked closely with the Cordova project to also support webOS. With the release of Cordova 2.2, Enyo 2.0 is now supported on webOS up to version 3.0.5, which includes the Community Edition. Testing and development for Open webOS continues and should see full support in version 2.3. You can read more about how to use Cordova to wrap your Enyo 2.0 app here.

Community

This month we’ve added a new “getting to know the community” section where we highlight a prominent community member. The WebOS Ports team have done some amazing work over the last few months, so it’s fitting we start with a founding member: Patrick Roberts, known as halfhalo on IRC. Patrick decided to tackle the Samsung Slate 7 project because he wanted to see Open webOS running on a standard x86 tablet. He said that although he hadn’t contributed to a lot of open source projects before, he was able to get up-and-running with Open webOS very quickly. While talking with community manager Roy Sutton, he said “The key was learning how the Open Embedded layers system used for building Open webOS works.”

Patrick said he enjoys working with the ports team and that the IRC channel provides a good means for the team to collaborate and solve problems.  He would like to have more contributors working on the Slate 7 port and encourages others to get involved. One issue still to be resolved is the lack of acceleration. Because the x86 version uses a different method for interacting with the graphics system than the Galaxy Nexus port, he can’t borrow the same solution. You can check out the current status of the Slate port below.

The WebOS-Ports team also release a video today of Open webOS running on a Nexus 7 

We’d like to wish you all a happy New Year, may 2013 be a joyful and prosperous year for you and Open webOS.