Pint-sized Raspberry Pi PC launches its own app store

Raspberry Pi's new app store could help encourage programmers, young and old, to keep learning and experimenting.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has just launched a store for programmers to sell software, games, tools, and applications designed for the foundation’s tiny computers. For those unfamiliar, Raspberry Pi is a computer the size of a credit card that the founders want to use for teaching kids programming. The computer is little more than a USB port, RAM chip, and ports for video, audio, and HDMI. Just hook up a keyboard, mouse, and montior and you’re off.

The founders of the foundation, members of the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, realized that compared with the dot-com age of the 1990s, students in the 2000s were unlikely to have serious programming knowledge as computers got more advanced and more expensive. They wanted to create an inexpensive PC that could boot into a programming environment easily and wouldn’t break the bank. Raspberry Pi now has two models, one that costs just $25 and one that costs $35. 

According to the Raspberry Pi Foundation, ”the Pi Store will, we hope, become a one-stop shop for all your Raspberry Pi needs; it’s also an easier way into the Raspberry Pi experience for total beginners, who will find everything they need to get going in one place, for free.” IndiCity and Velocix assisted with the Pi Store, which is offering 23 free titles at launch. 

There is an active programmer community that has grown up around Raspberry Pi, and the charity’s leaders said they hope the Pi Store will offer a place for those people to share their creations with a broad audience. In fact, they are encouraging the winners of the Summer Programming Contest to put their creations up on the store to earn a little pocket change. Developers can put their work up for free or as paid downloads, but even the free works will have a tip jar where fans of a particular piece can give a donation to the creator. The store could also make it easier for new programmers to dive into using the pint-sized computer. 

Image via Gijsbert Peijs

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Open webOS ported to Raspberry Pi single-board computer, still needs a UI

If you'll recall, late last month we at long last saw the release of the first public betas for Open webOS. Surprisingly, the open source successor to webOS came in two forms: a version that ran as an app inside Ubuntu Linux, and a multi-processor-compatible version enabled by OpenEmbedded. The only problem with the latter, which is technically capable of running on a wide range of hardware, is that it lacks a user interface. And that presents a problem for an operating system in 2012 - people just aren't as comfortable tooling around in the command line today as they were in 1982 (Mac OS brought the first consumer graphical user interface in 1984).

While we wait and hope that the complete 1.0 version of the OpenEmbedded Open webOS due out later this month comes with a complete user interface, the fact that it lacks one hasn't stopped enterprising developers from going full steam ahead with porting Open webOS to their hardware of choice. Case in point, today the Raspberry Pi blog called attention to the work of developer aaa801, who has successfully booted Open webOS on the Raspberry Pi single-board computer.

If you're not familiar with Raspberry Pi, it's a fully-hackable credit card-sized ARM-powered computer that sells for just $25. The Raspberry Pi includes a 700MHz Broadcom ARM processor, SD card slot (it has no storage of its own), 256MB of RAM, two USB ports, an Ethernet port, HDMI, 3.5mm audio, and RCA video out, and a handful of other ports meant for developer types to build their own hardware. Spec-wise it's practically an original Palm Pre, though significantly more hackable (and though small for a computer, still notably larger than the motherboard found in said smartphone). At $25 a pop and small enough in size, the Raspberry Pi has proven to be highly popular with hardware hackers, allowing them to build all sorts of contraptions.

It's not too surprising to see that somebody's already ported Open webOS to the Raspberry Pi, given the aforementioned popularity of the mini computer. We're still glad to have seen it happen, and expect that it's just the tip of the iceberg as far as what Open webOS can boot on. Though it'll really need a user interface if it's to be useful… video of the oh-so-exciting white block letters of a black background booting process of the Open webOS OpenEmbedded beta on the Raspberry Pi.

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