April 16, 2019
We are delighted to announce the major feature release of webOS Open Source Edition (OSE). This release includes the following new features:
Please refer to the release notes for more details on changes for this release.
The long-awaited web engine upgrade has finally arrived! The web engine of webOS OSE has been upgraded from Chromium 53 to Chromium 68.
With this change, webOS OSE provides enhanced performance for web functionality as well as improved web compatibility and security.
From this release, webOS OSE supports camera functionality with Camera service and Camera pipeline (g-camera-pipeline).
Camera service includes support for various cameras and provides camera features available on the device. It also exposes APIs to the application to control camera. com.webos.service.camera2 is the LS2 API that provides an interface to interact with the hardware camera device.
Main features of Camera service are as follows:
g-camera-pipeline is a GStreamer based component that supports camera preview, capture, and record functions on webOS OSE. Third party applications can access the camera preview data for further processing such as AI.
The features supported by g-camera-pipeline are as below:
Common specifications are as follows:
To facilitate the development of context-aware applications, webOS OSE adds Context Intent Manager and Workflow Designer, which are based on Node-RED.
Context Intent Manager (CIM) is a high-level application framework that enables developers to develop context-aware applications. CIM abstracts an application from data collection and processing. In addition, CIM provides a rule-based system to make use of AI engine data and perform an action according to the derived context. Rules or “workflow” can be defined via an interface tool called Workflow Designer. The LS2 API for CIM is com.webos.service.contextintentmgr.
Workflow Designer is a GUI-based utility that provides a flow-based programming environment. Workflow Designer allows you to add AI logic to your web app, without actually modifying its source code. This makes your web app context-aware and therefore provides a better experience to your customers. For example, without updating any code of your app, you can configure it to perform operations on voice instructions.
Workflow Designer provides the following core benefits:
Visit Workflow Designer page to download the package and find out how to use the toolkit along with CIM.
From this release, Physical Device Manager (PDM) has been added. PDM is responsible for detecting, controlling, and managing physical devices. The LS2 API for PDM is com.webos.service.pdm.
Three main tasks of PDM service can be outlined as below:
PDM currently supports a set of devices listed below.
This release adds the Virtual Keyboard (VKB) feature, which supports 64 languages including Chinese. For Chinese, both Traditional (Cangjie and Zhuyin) and Simplified (Pinyin and Stroke) Chinese keyboards are supported.
In addition, word frequency based predictions and user-defined predictions are supported for English and Korean languages.
Several enhancements have been made to Enact browser in terms of internationalization and bookmark-related features. Also, there are more updates and bug fixes for Enact browser, so check the release notes for more information.