The last post revealed how a simple call to PalmSystem from your JavaScript code opens the door for you to take a stock web app with your favorite framework and turn it into a simple webOS app without having the overhead (or the wealth of cool features, in the interest of fairness) of Mojo.
Continuing with my explorations in the webOS 1.4.5 SDK, I’ve picked out a couple of other useful calls to the PalmSystem object. Both can be added to the “hello world” example I started in part one, and they’re really quick.
Free-wheeling orientation
A common requirement for mobile apps is the ability to respond to device orientation. I’m still digging around to see where you can hook into these events, but in the meantime here’s a simple call which is quite useful:
window.PalmSystem.setWindowOrientation('free');
This tells webOS to let your app rotate along with the device orientation, switching from portrait to landscape as necessary. It’s a high-value one-liner call which should serve most orientation needs.
You can also specify a “locked” orientation with different strings in place of “free”. Options are: up (default portrait), down, left and right. So if you have a side-scroller game that would benefit from horizontal presentation, just use:
