HP‘s TouchPad and Palm devices may be long and gone, but webOS
(the mobile OS that these devices ran off of) has been alive and well
despite its hardware extinction, mostly thanks to its open-source
status. Open webOS, as its now called, went into beta in August, and now a month later, a final stable build is ready for consumption as version 1.0.
The 1.0 release offers some changes that the Open webOS team hopes
will offer major new capabilities for developers. The team also mentions
that over 75 Open webOS components have been delivered over the past 9
months (totaling over 450,000 lines of code), which means that Open
webOS can now be ported to new devices thanks to today’s 1.0 release.
In the video below, Open webOS architect Steve Winston demoes the
operating system on a HP TouchSmart all-in-one PC. He mentions that it
took the team just “a couple of days” to port Open webOS to the PC that
he has in front of him. The user interface doesn’t seem to be performing
super smoothly, but you can’t really expect more out of a 1.0 release.
Winston says that possible uses for Open webOS
include kiosk applications in places like hotels, and since Open webOS
is aimed to work on phones, tablets, and PCs, there’s the possibility
that Open webOS could become an all-in-one solution for kiosk or
customer service platforms for businesses. Obviously, version 1.0 is
just the first step, so the Open webOS team is just getting started with
this project and they expect to only improve on it and add new features
as time goes on.
If you place 32 metronomes on a static object and set them rocking
out of phase with one another, they will remain that way indefinitely.
Place them on a moveable surface, however, and something very
interesting (and very mesmerizing) happens.
The metronomes in
this video fall into the latter camp. Energy from the motion of one
ticking metronome can affect the motion of every metronome around it,
while the motion of every other metronome affects the motion of our
original metronome right back. All this inter-metranome "communication"
is facilitated by the board, which serves as an energetic intermediary
between all the metronomes that rest upon its surface. The metronomes in
this video (which are really just pendulums, or, if you want to get
really technical, oscillators) are said to be "coupled."
The math
and physics surrounding coupled oscillators are actually relevant to a
variety of scientific phenomena, including the transfer of sound and
thermal conductivity. For a much more detailed explanation of how this
works, and how to try it for yourself, check out this excellent video by condensed matter physicist Adam Milcovich.