I didn’t stop for a second before picking up a $50 Veer from Craigslist this morning. I’m well aware that webOS is dead, there are no apps, and it’s partly a compromise in hardware design, but from the first time I played with it two months ago, I’ve known it’s the phone for me.

I think form’s winning over function as I age.

My next post will be better.

I think I’m going to have to learn JavaScript if I want to go any further with this layout. Some things, like resizing videos and changing the way notes are displayed, just have to be done after the page is loaded.

Using JavaScript to rewrite a webpage seems so redundant and awkward to me. It also goes against Semantic Web ideals (but then again, so does a lot of my markup). I guess in a world devoid of time, performance and money, I’d probably want to write my own API parser.

But this is about the learning experience. It’s kind of weird how I never bothered to pick up JavaScript at any point. It seems like the natural flow after learning PHP and being able to create dynamic webpages. Maybe I’ve always seen it as a gimmicky extra, rather than something that really drives web technology.

JavaScript is certainly a necessity if I plan to do any webOS development.

My next post will be better.

And after weeks of only having the motivation, I now also have the time. There’s actually a huge list of things I’ve been putting off, but I at least want to work through these programming ones:

1. Adobe Flash. I’ve always wanted to be able to use this, at first just for animation, but now to create a game. I don’t know what’s stopped me every time in the last 10 years… maybe it’s because of the stupid number of ways to do things and the huge disconnect between work and output. It’s amazing that I haven’t learned how to use a new program in years now, and it’s kind of scary now that I’ve lost my childhood capacity to just pick things up immediately.
2. OpenGL/CGV. Taking on the hardware strand and being abroad next year means that I’ll be missing out on one of the more interesting courses. Graphics is maths-y and I don’t know whether I can pick up a 20 credit course in my spare time, but I don’t want to be left so far behind everyone else.
3. Prolog/LPA. This one’s not really a hobby thing, but I need to invest some time to get comfortable with Prolog just for the sake of passing the course. The language just isn’t intuitive to me and I probably will never touch it again, but the idea of not being to grasp something bugs me.
4. webOS. I’m being a hypocrite telling kids that mobile app development is a brilliant way to start of programming when I haven’t even tried it myself. There’s a huge list of things that webOS is really missing — even a basic countdown timer — and though I don’t intend to make a profit, the niche is still there.

We’ll see.

My next post will be better.

In the meantime, I bought a Palm Pre. I definitely don’t need a smart phone, but it was going cheap.

Given how shit (my experience of) Android is, I’m really happy with the way it runs. webOS comes pretty close to my ideal user experience, minus just a couple of things things. I love the unique look and feel, as well as some of the design considerations (built around productivity), and the technical performance is amazing (for a completely non-compiled system).

The industrial design doesn’t hold up too well, so I’m definitely interested on their next announcement for my next step. Battery life is kind of shitty. I’m not sure if this is a result of the software (a high number of running services?), hardware, or just an old battery, though.

I guess the key thing is that I don’t dislike it. That means a lot, as I continue to grow more fickle with age.

My next post will be better.