Chrome OS to get card based touch optimized interface

Google's Chrome OS will get a card based touch optimized user interface. The Chromium issue tracker reveals Google developers are working on 'Project Athena'.  Athena should replace the currently used Ash Windows Manager which isn't touch optimized. Internet pages and web apps seem no longer require the browser to start, but likely appear as a native application to the OS.

myce-webos-card-based

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(screenshot of the card based WebOS, NOT ChromeOS)

The tracker reveals how the developers are working to get touch and basic gestures working on Athena and also support for gyro and accelerometers will be added, making it possible to detect movements of a device running Athena.

The OS should consists of activities on cards and the start screen appears to be called the Home Card.

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Activities are explained in a commit, "An Activity can be a WebActivity, a SampleActivity etc. Each Activity has an ActivityViewModel. The ActivityViewModel describes the UI for the Activity. The ActivityManager is there to manage the list of activities. It is the source of all the activities that various other activity-managers would use. The ActivityViewManager is notified of activity updates from the ActivityManager, and it creates the appropriate UI elements (views::Widget, etc.) to show the UI for the activity to the user."

More proof that Athena means a card based UI is in another issue as a Google developer writes, "Athena organizes cards of activities in an MRU [..likely Most  Recently Used] fashion. We'll need a navigation controller to track and control things like the MRU list and back-forward behavior. One suggestion is to equate anything the user can experience with a URL. Track that history in order to enable back/forward behavior as well as population of the MRU list and launcher stuff."

There's also a lot of talk on Web Activities which gives us the impression that for websites and web apps it's no longer necessary to start the browser but that they will appear as being native applications.

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Chrome OS would be the second OS to use 'cards', cards recently made their introduction to the general public in LG TVs running WebOS. This OS was initially developed by PDA developer Palm which was acquired by HP in 2010. HP never succeeded in making WebOS popular and in the end it licensed WebOS to South Korean TV manufacturer LG. The latter is now using WebOS on its latest generation TVs and controlling the TV also goes by using cards.

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