Our first WebOS app has been released into the wild!

TheTicketApp is a somewhat lush app for the HP TouchPad, which exposes the inventory of theatre seats LastMinute sell: up to a few minutes before a performance starts, you can dive in and grab a ticket.

We've worked with the team at LastMinute Labs for the last three years, and it was they that put together the back-end and did the initial mobile-web version of TheTicketApp (which launched in January of this year). Our brief was to tie into the existing back-end, and present a user interface that played to the strengths of WebOS.

Despite being our first WebOS product,in terms of process it was pretty well by-the-book. HP supplied us with a tablet quite early on; this might seem like an obvious first step, but some of our work with pre-release hardware has involved not seeing real kit until near-launch, and it's always nicer to be able to play with physical stuff. This time around, we could fiddle with the rather fresh and spangly device, run through other apps, and generally get used to the flow and metaphors of the UI. Then it was the usual story: work up a set of wireframes, double-check against the capabilities of the platform, and progressively fill in the visual detail. We're quite familiar with the LastMinute brand, so were comfortable taking it to a new operating system and form fator.

The JavaScript toolkit we used to develop the app, Enyo, supports the WebOS metaphors (like the sliding panes). Our dev team were divided: some felt that it's quite nicely architected but documentation was lacking, others the precise opposite. But we're all happy with the end result, and are already working on a second app which pushes Enyo a little bit further...

You can find TheTicketApp in the TouchPad App Catalog. Thanks to the team at FP who delivered this little bundle of joy: that's Doug Hoskins, Trevor May, Dominic Travers, John Revill, Ben Carias, Paul Welsh, and Cori Samuel. At LastMinute, Dave Slocombe kept us on-track with the product vision, and Richard Lewis Jones held our hands with the API. Pramesh Chauhan at HP provided phenomenal support - his 4 minute turnaround for a support request is the best we've seen...