We’re preparing Pixi to be available in time for the holidays. Are you preparing your applications for Pixi?
If you haven’t looked at Pixi, you can find details of the Pixi announcement here. We want to encourage all webOS developers to build your app to run on both Pixi and Pre, adapting as necessary to work properly and look good on both devices.
There are only two significant differences between Pixi and Pre:
- Pixi’s display resolution is different – it’s 320×400 pixels, as opposed to Pre’s 320×480
- Pixi doesn’t have WiFi
Designing for different display resolutions
The display resolution difference will affect some applications more than others. If your application presents content and interface elements in a list-like or vertically stacked layout and makes use of Mojo widgets, you shouldn’t have to do much to support Pixi. On the other hand, if your app is designed to fill the screen, you will need to approach your layout with flexibility in mind. To help you do this, Palm’s Human Interface team has prepared a document that you can find at http://developer.palm.com/images/palm/pdf/flexibility_responsiveness.pdf.
To test your app at the new device’s resolution, you’ll need to configure the Palm Emulator to run at 320×400. This page explains how.
Designing your app to work without WiFi
With rare exceptions, Pixi’s lack of WiFi should not affect your application. WebOS apps should be designed in such a way that they operate well in a WAN-only scenario, since even users with WiFi-capable devices are frequently not connected to a WiFi network. If you want to alter your app’s behavior based on the presence/absence of WiFi at any given time, you can use the Connection Manager API to check whether a WiFi connection is active.
Applications that fundamentally depend on WiFi such as desktop sync apps will need to be rearchitected to work without WiFi. If rearchitecting is not a viable option for a particular application, then that app may simply not be a good fit for Pixi at this time and we encourage the developers of those apps to recognize this and inform the user appropriately if they try to run the application on a Pixi device anyway. We also recommend that limitations are documented in the App Catalog description to prevent the disappointment of a user downloading an app they can’t use.