Exhibition: at a glance [webOS 2.0]

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Exhibition: at a glance [webOS 2.0]
By Derek Kessler | Tuesday, Aug 31, 2010 | 10 comments »       
http://www.precentral.net/exhibition-glance-webos-20
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As we saw hinted earlier this month, Palm is bringing a ‘dock mode’ of sorts with webOS 2.0, and it’s not a dock mode like you might expect. Exhibition is a Touchstone-triggered app extension that displays at-a-glance information of your choosing while your phone charges. It’s pretty straightforward: you set the phone on the Touchstone charger, and Exhibition view is launch and your at-a-glance info is displayed.

- E. I. U$ D0 M5 {4 |+ _What makes Exhibition interesting is that developers can build their own modules, and bake them into their apps. A few off-the-top-of-our-heads example: Calendar could display the day’s appointments (agenda view!), your to-do list could be pulled from Tasks, your Facebook photos could be shown in a slideshow, Top Stocks could display the current state of the stock market, or you could have a simple analog clock. Like the other enhancements coming in webOS 2.0, the possibilities for Exhibition are wide open, and while Palm is creating a handful of Exhibition modules, they want to leave it open to developers to truly exploit its potential.
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There’s one caveat to Exhibition, and it’s one that has us somewhat disappointed. As of right now, Exhibition only supports one block at a time. This, of course, opens the doors for developers to build the be-all end-all Exhibition app that combines as much information as possible into one at-a-glance Touchstone block. Our hope is that Palm figures out how to have multiple Exhibition modules displayed at a time, either by having smaller/multiple-sized blocks (ala Android widgets), via a gesture-based cards-like row of modules, or some other Palm-brewed magic. Speaking of brewing, we reckon it’ll only be a matter of time before the webOS homebrew community patches things up so that Exhibition can be displayed when charging via cable as well.
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Even with that bit of disappointment, we’re still pretty stoked for Exhibition. It’s one thing to rejuice your phone inductively via a fancy pants charger, it’s another for that charger to change the way you use your phone.

zzbomb

so cool~~