It’s been almost three years since HP decided to scrap all of its webOS hardware and in that time some of the software has been released as an open source project, and much of the the webOS team has moved to LG to work on televisions. But the team has one more thing to give to the community: The new “Mochi” design language for smartphones and tablets that had been under development a few years ago has now been turned into an open source project.
Palm’s innovative mobile operating system, webOS, was never a commercial success, but the team behind it certainly had some great ideas. Now, long after HP largely abandoned the operating system, the team is releasing one of its most intriguing user interface ideas to the community for further work. The project is known as Mochi, and we first revealed it earlier this year alongside some of very last ideas that the webOS team was working on before HP scuttled its plans. The user interface overhaul introduced a cleaner, “flat” design long before Apple and Google made similar moves, and it included a feature that expanded “cards” so that you could swap in multiple panes at once for multitasking, á la Snap in Windows 8.