Eel

While most of HP's tablet and phone plans (save the Twain) were reactionary and predictable, the software team was working on some truly innovative designs.





For the Twain to have any success, HP would need to do more than just release the hardware with webOS as it was currently known. webOS has had a long and fractured history of rushing to get a less-than-ideal product out the door — putting off necessary and important projects like unifying the OS under a single backend framework. Unfortunately, that trend was still fully in play as Palm began work on the next version of webOS. But while the underpinnings were still in flux, the actual design and functionality of webOS was moving forward in a surprisingly good direction.

Under the leadership of its then-director of human interface, Itai Vonshak, Palm was moving forward with a software strategy to complement the productivity targets it had set for Twain. That meant webOS would need to become more useful for traditional work tasks — without turning itself into something that looked and felt like Windows.





The answer to both of those questions would be "Eel," the codename for the next major version of webOS in 2011. At the heart of Eel was an attempt to expand on the "card" metaphor that Matias Duarte had first unveiled with the original Palm Pre in 2009.

webOS had already introduced "card stacks" in an earlier version, letting you stack your active application cards into logical groupings. It had also introduced another concept that was finally beginning to gain widespread adoption: responsive panels. In essence, a "panel" presented different views depending on where you were in the app and how large a screen you had, but did so without requiring you to rewrite the app. Thus, in the email app, you could tap through your list of emails to a single email on a phone, or on a tablet see both side by side.





Vonshak and his team were tasked with extending both of those two UX metaphors and making them more useful. To do it, the team essentially mixed them together. In Eel, you could tap on a link to open it up in a new panel, which would appear on the left. But instead of simply being a panel within an app, it would be a separate card, which you could slide left or right to have multiple cards visible. You could also "shear" off the card and put it into an entirely different stack. It wasn’t dissimilar from the way that Windows 8 allows you to "snap" windows, but on Eel it was to be more flexible in terms of window size and grouping. Panels and cards weren't quite the "windows" that we're used to on desktops, but it approached their utility while still being manageable on both phones and tablets.