PreCentral: Open webOS project starts some big projects in November

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The beginning of a new month brings us yet another rack of updates coming down the pipe for the Open webOS project. This particular month has some very important and extremely technical work being accomplished within Open webOS. Some of this is rather of the heads of the layman (like us, we'll admit it) and some sounds very promising even to the not so tech savvy.

First up is something kind of big and has us all rather excited here at webOS Nation: the Pluggable Keyboard Project. Any webOS fan knows that official virtual keyboards (with the exception of the TouchPad) in our world have been quite elusive over the years. There have been everything from homebrew solutions to apps in the catalog to try and quench the thirst for a virtual keyboard. Despite the herculean efforts, none of the solutions brought forth have really operated like a good solid virtual keyboard should. Thankfully, all the guys and gals working on Open webOS plan to bring those days to an end very soon. Using the existing virtual keyboard logic out of luna-sysmgr (the 'system manager' for webOS) the new keyboard will be both tablet- and phone-friendly. Since it will be based on the much loved TouchPad virtual keyboard we are excited, as the keyboard on the TouchPad is one of the best virtual keyboards around.

Next up, Open webOS will be in the process of updating to Qt 4.8.3. If you remember way back in July the Open webOS System Manager was opened up to active development. This major upgrade incorporated what was then the latest QtWebKit and Qt technologies in an improved architecture, and the update to Qt 4.8.3 update furthers the cause. Since Qt now underlies all applications, providing state-of-the-art support for HTML rendering and I/O and is integrated across the system it allows the Open webOS team to continue to clean out old code and in turn continue to enhance the performance of Open webOS. The Open webOS Project Blog gets way more detailed as to what exactly is going on, but we'll be damned if we understand what they're talking about. If you would like to read an in-depth explanation of what's going down, hit up the source link below.

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