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There's a bit of a difference between fishing and selling, though. Fishing is a lot of waiting for the right people to come along. Selling is finding the right people, and convincing them that the product is right for them.
On the Engineering side, they really should/need to do some major improvements. I love what we have, but we need a lot more of it. As a developer, there are so many more things that I could do, if the abilities weren't all locked down. If I had better documentation and samples. And to not put the blame entirely on the people who are busting their ***** off at Palm, also if I had paid more attention in math in school, and if I were a better GUI designer, if I knew more JavaScript. I know C better than I know JavaScript, but I can't even understand how to get a native program to work, because.. docs.
If we as developers, could write proper replacements for the existing apps, if we could access the data that the palm apps get to access, if we could do various "mashups" with all the various data that is available, if we could control the system volume, the screen state, if we could allow the user to authorize an app to access all the system services that right now only Palm can use .. (individually, not all at once)
If the system could download files from secure websites, then Facebook would work properly for the most part, my GVoice app could directly access your voicemails . . if the Facebook app didn't launch you to the browser for everything it doesn't support, because it actually supported everything .. (the Android facebook app does the same thing, so does the Pre facebook app) if Exhibition and Just Type programs defaulted to on .. if Exhibition mode could be disabled. . . .
Just poking at the top apps in the iPod catalog right now.
TurboScan - take a picture of something, it converts it to PDF or some such, based on what area looks like paper. possible in webOS, but well beyond my ability. Also, our TouchPad cameras are complete crap, so it's not really useful except for phones.
Voice Actions - while the basic parts of the program could be easily implemented (capturing the voice data), I'd guess that you'd have to go to native code to actually interpret that data into something useful. Again, possible app. I've tried the voice recognition programs in Android, and they are all complete junk, but that may be because of microphone difficulties in TouchPad CM7.
Splashtop - yay! we have that! but it's not really feature parity to the other versions, and they keep promising us that, but there has only been one update, and that wasn't obvious what it did.
Craigslist - there are at least 3 craigslist apps in our catalog
Flashlight - well, we have to resort to Preware for that, because our apps can't control the light.
About 20 different FatBooth type apps - believed to be possible without native code, however, the math is beyond me. I don't know if the APIs required actually work or not, or if all of them are present, because I don't really know what would need to be done. If they -are- present, it's only on newer softwares. That much I do know. However, there's not a way to save the data out to a file once you have it.
Replacement/Alternate Keyboard Apps - this is a staple on both Apple and Google's stores. Not possible in webOS, except via Homebrew, and even at that, it's proven rather difficult considering the number of people who've researched it and moved on.
Texts from Last Night - hey, someone should go through and make an app template for all these sorts of sites, and get it out there.
Lightsaber - we have two of them. Our current system software on the TouchPad renders them almost but not completely broken.
Barcode Scanner - HP supplies one of their own in the app catalog! Again, it's useless on TouchPad, due to the hardware. I hear it works great on phones.
Checkbook - another win for webOS, we already have this program. Or at least a program with a similar name that does the same thing.
Mint.com - redirection problems prevent us from writing a scraper-type app, they provide no public API, and they haven't written a version for webOS.
Games, Games, Games - plenty of Games on all platforms. Nothing really new on webOS though, not in the last year. It's like the whole of known Game developers jumped ship before the TouchPad even came out, or very shortly thereafter. Unreal would probably run fantastically on the TouchPad and Pre3, but it's pretty unlikely that any particular dev studio would ever try to port the engine to run on webOS, SO that needs to be coordinated with Epic. (if I had instructions I could follow on how to get basic applications built natively, or even command line programs, I could probably do a large part of the work involved with that, but again, no studio is going to pay me to do it)
Sleep Machines and Alarm Clocks -- oh, we can't control the volume! If the user doesn't leave the volume at max, we can't do a damn thing with it.
Period Tracker Deluxe -- well, we have an app for that. It's not "Deluxe", though. ha. ha.
GarageBand - i have no idea if this is possible.
Guitar Tuner - theoretically possible, probably would require native code.
Driving, Navigation, GPS, Geocaching, etc - we've got all that, but typically only one or two options in each category.
Replacement web browsers - well, we shouldn't have a web browser that is in dire need of replacement, but it's just a damn difficult undertaking.
"Battery Boost" programs - probably just Snake Oil. Wether they are or not, we can't really do anything like that, unless we make definite Snake Oil.
"Blacklist Manager" - blacklists telephone numbers from reaching you. Oh, we can't access the incoming call information, not before during or after the call. (I'd really like to have our nifty "TimeTracker" app coordinated with the telephone call system, so it could automatically track telephone calls with certain people.
Swype - don't really know how it works, thinking it's not possible, considering it falls under "keyboard replacement" most likely.
Just a sampling there, I didn't go more than one page deep in any of the categories.
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