The Enyo blog has announced a public release of Mochi, a design language that the webOS user interface team had been working on for the next generation of webOS phones and tablets before, as the author says, “everything abruptly and famously screeched to a halt” in 2011.
The blog post explains that the WebOS team, which was acquired by LG in February 2013, does not have “immediate plans” to work on Mochi, but are happy to see the open source community take on the language.
To this end, the team has put all the pieces in place to have the Mochi code go open source under the Apache 2.0 license, just as with the rest of the Enyo source code.
“The Mochi GitHub repo is now public, and we’ve started putting up some documentation in the Mochi wiki. Of particular note is our list of design documents which includes the PDFs and PNGs that were developed internally to guide Mochi’s development. Not only can this guide future work, but it shows just how much thought went into how these widgets work together. It also points to features that are yet to be implemented,” notes the blog post.
WebOS was launched in 2009. A January 2012 article by Infoworld provides the salient details, but suffice to say that “debacle” was a common description of the turn of events when HP acquired Palm in 2010 specifically for webOS, then killed off the first hardware to run webOS six weeks after its launch together with further development on webOS in August 2011.
Learn more about webOS at the Open Source project sites for Enyo and Open webOS.