My webOS Journey

I grew up in Manhattan, Kansas. In middle school, I really wanted an iPhone, but back then they were locked to AT&T which our small town didn't have. I ended up getting a Samsung Instinct (whose ads famously claimed it was an iPhone killer–it was bad). I tried learning how to program apps on it but I gave up. It was complicated and there weren't enough resources out there. Eventually, Palm announced the Palm Pre and I was hooked. I spent tons of time watching videos, reading articles, and discussing the phone in online forums.

I got one the day the phone released on June 6th, 2009. I remember on release day I spent much of my day on forums helping other new users answer questions and figure out how to use their new phones. I gained a little bit of notority in a VERY niche corner of the internet and was asked to be a "Technical Reviewer" of Palm Pre: The Missing Manual. (You can see my name in the "About the Creative Team" section. Clearly I didn't get the memo that the bio was supposed to be about things other than webOS).

Fast forward a few months, I decided to try my hand at programming again (age 14 or so). With webOS, I was greeted by a warm IRC community and good documentation. Through the help of many other developers, I figured it out and released a few apps. My first was a puzzle game called Countdown Puzzles. I wrote the majority of the code during a family road trip. I still remember the feeling of building something "real" (not a tutorial) for the first time and thinking, "I can do this."

Another app I made was a music player called Koto Player. A news site even wrote up an App Preview for it. I was really proud of that one.

Along the way, I also spent a lot of time on the open source twitter client, Spaz. In addition, I worked on a messaging app for a while, called Mojo Messenger but it never was released. As part of my work, I actually talked on the phone with Jan Koum of Whatsapp about an "acquisition" where I'd build a Whatsapp client for webOS. It didn't go very far when he found out I was 16ish. One day I'll write more about the experience.

In 2010, HP bought Palm and one of their new products was the HP Touchpad, a tablet to compete with the iPad. I built a Google Reader client for it called NomNomNom.

Eventually, HP gave up on Palm and webOS and cut the Touchpad price way down to get rid of inventory. Over night, there were thousands of more devices out there but still the same amount of applications for sale. I still remember the feeling of opening of the app catalog developer portal and seeing how many sales I'd had. It was a wild time.

I bought my first macbook air with that money and lots of milkshakes from sonic.