[cbosdell]

Uploaded a folder to the Onedrive with everything I had in my collection that was missing. A few were the right app but slightly off so I uploaded them also just in case.

[jonwise80]

Uploaded a folder to the Onedrive with everything I had in my collection that was missing. A few were the right app but slightly off so I uploaded them also just in case.

Thanks so much. My tools can handle version variations, so looking forward to seeing what's new!

-- Sent from my Palm TouchPad using Forums

[mazzinia]

no, I have dir lists but it's a bit mixed on 3 different drives. I've copied a collage file over

[jonwise80]

Thanks to Herrie, mazzinia and cbosdell, app count is now 3802! There's even a nice new Casino game that works great on TouchPad.
This batch also yielded 10 updates to known versions.

I've updated the wanted lists, which have actually shrunk by 230, since my closest-match effort wasn't reflected in those lists. I'll keep the OneDrive/FTP dropboxes open, in case anyone else can help!

[jonwise80]

State of the Museum Report - November 2020

Shortly after releasing it, I became curious as to whether or not there were users out there for App Museum II. I setup a PushOver notification to ping my phone every time a session is created, and have been delighted to hear it go off throughout the day -- or wake up to a stack of notifications in the morning. There has yet to be a single day where I don't get at least one ping. This morning I decided to pull the Apache logs and see if I could learn a bit more about what remains of the webOS community (at least the subset that has found App Museum II!) I thought this would be interesting to everyone. As users, maybe you want to know what's popular. As developers, maybe it helps to know that people want to use what you make!

So, without further ado, the data:

• Preware downloads from my help pages: 7
• Visits to the Restored SDK: 38
• App Museum II downloads: 37
• IPKs downloaded from the App Museum: 279
• #1 Most Downloaded App (all versions): webOS Archive Proxy Setter - 18
• #2 Most Downloaded App: Grabber's Forums, with my 1.4.6 hacks/updates - 13
• #3 Most Downloaded App: One Night Stand release version - 11
• Other notable Downloads: Accuweather (all version) - 5, Voice Recorder - 3, Fidelity Market Monitor - 2
• Most Popular Developer: Gameloft (all games) - 7
• Other Notable Developers: Inglorious apps - 4, Karge Software - 4, MyAppCatalog - 4, Self Aware Games - 4, One Crayon - 3

Obviously, this is no Apple App Store, but this is pretty healthy activity for a dead platform! I'll admit to being a little discouraged that this forum doesn't always indicate activity when I post an app, but the access logs show that you folks are out there! Would be great to hear from y'all about where we should steer this ghost ship.

My goals are to not have to touch my regular phone during my morning or evening routines -- too much chance of work or social media crap intruding. To that end, I've had a couple ideas in mind for next steps:

• Restore the Fidelity Market Monitor app: it actually still mostly works -- its only the stock look-up process that's broken. I should be able to replace it with a manual symbol add activity, that bypasses the look-up.
• Build a 7 minute work-out app: since having surgery a couple months ago, I've settled on this as the right amount of morning exercise...but unfortunately need a modern phone app to do it. This should be an easy one to write in Mojo for both Pre and TouchPad. Would anyone else use it?
• Serialize the App Museum master app data to a Preware feed, so older Pre devices can get access to the App Museum catalog through Preware (easier than building a Mojo App Museum from scratch!)
• Improve the web presence for the App Museum (potentially including a web-based browsing experience), SDK and Help Pages to try to help more newbies get on-board and involved.
• Investigate a mechanism for syncing calendars, and downloading YouTube videos -- both probably involving some sort of Proxy to negotiate with modern servers.

Anyone up for helping with any of these projects? Any other ideas that would keep our webOS devices useful?

[jonwise80]

Version 2.7.1 is a minor release that fixes an issue where Pre 2 compatibility wasn't shown. This is combined with another issue where none of the apps were properly marked as being compatible with the Pre 2 for some reason. I'll re-import compat data from Misj's original metadata. For now, if you have a Pre 2, I would say dis-regard the apparent lack of compatibility and just try it! If you can confirm an app works, let me know and I'll update it!

Update: Fixed the back-end too. Update your App Museum II install to see what works with Pre2!

[jonwise80]

If anyone is trying to get on, my apologies, we had a massive snow storm and power and Internet are down here for the past 18 hours. They're predicting another two days before we have service again...

Update 12/3: Still no power, internet or water. Living at a hotel today with my family!

Update: coming back online!

[jonwise80]

Its bug fix day!

Version 2.7.2 is released, with front-end support for separating the packages from the web service. This allows the museum to load from Azure, even if the power is out at my house.

Download 2.7.2 from: webOS App Museum II

[mazzinia]

Why not offering it as an update also inside the app museum ii app itself ?

[jonwise80]

Why not offering it as an update also inside the app museum ii app itself ?

This is a great idea -- but I want to do it as a feature, not as a museum entry. I'm pondering a way to do latest version detection, and then notify the user and give them the option to update. This could work for any of my apps (once I figure out how to do it -- kind of like Sparkle)

Update: Here's a crude, but workable endpoint that returns the latest version, and last line of the versionNote, for any app in the museum -- by name or museum's ID. Unfortunately the packageName is not in the master Data, so it can't be searched by that:

http://appcatalog.webosarchive.com/WebService/getLatestVersionInfo.php?One%20Night%20Stand

An app can use this to check its own version number against the museum, determine if it needs an update, then call Preware for help to install its own update. I'll work on this for the Museum itself (may require an entry) and for One Night Stand, and publish some helper code!

[jonwise80]

Working on the above post made it super obvious that a web-front end would be easy too -- at least for the details pages. Building an experience for wading through 3800 apps on the web is a little less trivial, but now at least I can send people a link for apps in the museum that they can get on their computers. Here's an example -- I'm no CSS wizard, but I think its kinda pretty. Open to suggestions to improve!

One Night Stand - webOS App Museum II

[mazzinia]

Well, imho looks quite good already

[jonwise80]

Well, imho looks quite good already

Thanks

Here's a simple category-level front-end. This lets you browse the museum even without a webOS device handy:
webOS App Museum II - Web Catalog

Update: Made some layout and design improvements. I think its clean and functional -- enough for a quick peek without your device handy. I will eventually add a search feature too.

WebMuseumCategories.PNG WebMuseumDetails.PNG

This UI can be found at the improved home page webOS App Museum II

[mazzinia]

oh nice.

mmm next step could be, in general, to add filter options ( show all , show only selected - pre pixi pre2 etc ), maybe

[jonwise80]

I added a Search feature. Super useful when curating without a TouchPad handy.

mmm next step could be, in general, to add filter options

Those are about the only things that can be filtered on -- for performance reasons, I'm only using the master data meta file for search results.
However, I hate the crappy "bikini girl" apps, and I think I'm going to have to add a field for those, so I can filter them out.

[jonwise80]

Update Service from App Museum II

Mojo and Enyo libraries and code samples are here:
https://github.com/codepoet80/webos-.../main/Examples

The update process has three steps, all of which are implemented in the above libraries and work on all webOS devices that support Mojo or Enyo.

CheckForUpdate (appname, callback)
Unfortunately, the Museum "master" metadata does not include the webOS app id, so you have to pass in an app name, or museum ID, that it knows about. If this were a real AppStore, that would be untenable, since the final app name and store GUID would not be known at design time. But since there's only a few of us left, and a finite number of apps in the Museum, I think we can live with this.
Given the name you pass in, the Model will ask the Museum for the latest version, and compare that response to the built-in webOS app information, to see if the currently running app is older than the museum version. The response from the museum contains meta data about the latest app version, which will be augmented with a boolean value indicating if your app has an update.

PromptUserForUpdate (callback, message)
This function is entirely optional -- you can choose to handle this yourself if you prefer. If you'd rather not be bothered, just call this function if an update is indicated by the CheckForUpdate callback. You can also optionally over-ride its auto-constructed message to the user if you like everything about this UI except for the text. When called, this function will inform the user of the update availability, and if you don't over-ride the message, will give them the last line of the versionNote meta data from the Museum's response. A boolean value sent to the callback indicates if the user accepts the update, or declines it.
You can directly call the next function in your callback handler (you just need to evaluate the boolean response from the user first!)

InstallUpdate
This function will call Preware, passing the URL to the updated version .IPK given by the Museum response.
Once Preware is called, your app's "card" will be moved to the background, Preware will become the foreground app and will forcibly replace your running app with the new version from the Museum -- assuming the Museum is up, the device is still connected to the Internet, etc...
If the update fails for any of the above, or other, reasons, the user will have to swipe away the Preware card to return to your running, and unaltered app.

Here's a screenshot of the auto-generated Mojo UI on a Pre:
onenightstand_2020-16-12_210233.png

[jonwise80]

Brief curation update.

We're holding at just shy of 3800 verified, cataloged apps with binaries and meta data (7 have metadata I need to manually repair.)
This leaves us with 5895 missing.
I've processed donations from multiple members of the forum (thank you!) as well as scouring all the dark corners of the Internet. Most repositories are duplicates. unfortunately.

After sorting, de-duping and eliminating older versions, I an left with 1505 "uncatalogued" apps -- those that don't appear to exist in the catalog meta data.
A good chunk of them flag on a "close match" scan, but now need to be manually (or semi-manually) curated to see if they really are legitimate matches. I will wade through those as I am able -- but would welcome help, if anyone wants to volunteer! Alternatively, I'm accepting donations toward the purchase of Total Commander, before the Shareware gods smite me

[mrhall17]

I'm willing to beta test apps on the Touchpad and provide feedback.

-- Sent from my Palm TouchPad using Forums

[jonwise80]

I'm willing to beta test apps on the Touchpad and provide feedback.

I sent you an email!

[jonwise80]

Hi folks,

Last night the Museum experienced either a) unusually heavy usage or b) a brute force attempt to scrape the file system. Either way, it kinda sucked, and brought my little Raspberry Pi to its knees for awhile.

I just want to re-iterate that the Museum is not a way to download apps in bulk -- and HTTP is not a good protocol for downloading thousands of binary files. If someone is looking to download the entire archive, please reach out to me. I do intend to post it, using someone else's bandwidth/server -- once curation is complete/stable. If you need access now, I'll be happy to share -- please PM me, rather than assaulting the server.

Thanks!