Why App Stores SUCK – Segregation

I was recently going through the Blackberry developer forums and stumbled across a thread that is all too common. A developer had an app on the market and was doing well until a negative comment was posted and sales stopped.

It’s possible that the app in question wasn’t any good and the loss of sales had nothing to do with the comment. . . but, for the sake of this article, I am siding with the developer because when it comes right down to it, app stores kind of suck.

Get the Tide out because it’s time to air some dirty laundry.

TouchPlayer Documentation

TouchPlayer 1.0.7

Note to self: Port mplayer to Touchpad

I have been working on porting mplayer over to the Touchpad.  When I work on projects, I write a note to myself at the end of the day to remember where I left off.  This is a copy of those notes.

Play mkv, avi, flv and wmv files on webOS Touchpad

This article is no longer maintained, please see TouchPlayer Documentation.

One thing the touchpad clearly lacks is the number of supported video formats available. Out of the box, the mp4 container with h.264 codec is pretty much it.  If all of your videos are in this format already, you can benefit from the hardware acceleration that the stock video player provides for this codec.

If you want to play any other format, you have a few options:

1. Convert your existing media to mp4 h.264 with an app like Handbrake. Leave it running overnight to take advantage of spare CPU cycles.
2. Run a media server like Playon that transcodes media on the fly.  You need a reasonably fast cpu to do this (atom powered servers do not apply) as you are converting and serving the video real-time.
3. Get a new video player for your touchpad.

This article is going to explore the 3rd option in more detail.

Design Diary – Shiva 3D Mobile Optimization

As we are narrowing in on the release of our game, we turned our attention on the game performance.  Our low end target is an Android HTC Inspire, mid-range is an HP Pre Plus and super high-range is an HP Touchpad.

We were having an issue with 1 scene in-particular where on the Touchpad, we were consistently dropping to 15 fps. For a dual core beast, this was bad.

This article is partly about the debug process and highlights 3 areas we found where we gained performance.

WebOS Camera Patch: Advanced Camera Configuration

UPDATE 2: What was formerly the Self-Timer and Burst-Frame patch has been replaced.  To maintain compatibility with older camera patches, the new patch combines the following patches into a single Tweaks-supported patch:

• Video camera flashlight
• Capture with volume-key
• Shutter sound
• Self-Timer and Burst-Frames

Lab Notes – Hacking file_storage.c

Progress Update

I made attempt 3 to use file_storage.c as a means of presenting an ISO image on the Pre as a CD-ROM drive over USB.  I tried grabbing several of the more recent versions of file_storage.c from git.kernel.org in an attempt to back-port them to the 2.6.24 kernel.

I found the following:

Using the Homebrew Javascript Service Framework

The Homebrew JS Service Framework

WebOS 2.x allows us to create services using node.js.  Services are great, but by default they run in a jail that prevents them from accessing the entire device.  For many services this is fine because there is no need to do anything outside of this jail.  On the other hand, there are some services that are only useful if they have root access.  To obtain root access, these services can use Jason Robitaille’s Homebrew Javascript Service Framework for webOS, hereto referred to as HJSF.

This article is going to explore the essential configuration requirements and validation steps for using HJSF in a node.js service.