February 24th 2010 | Posted by
Jason Robitaille
We’re all aware webOS 1.4 is coming soon. Ever since CES it’s been dangling in front of us, just out of reach. Thankfully, in the time we’ve been waiting, the fantastic "Auto Update Patch Technology" (AUPT) was released, in both Preware and WebOS Quick Install. The basic idea behind AUPT: you don’t need to remove your patches before you update webOS.
However not many people actually know what that will mean when the update happens. Thankfully, by nature of the AUPT scripts’ versatility, there many ways to deal with an over-the-air update.
So here’s the scenario: you’ve just updated to 1.4. What now? The most straight-forward way is to go into Preware or WOSQI and go into the patches area and hit the "Update All" button.
For your patches that are available for 1.4, they’ll be updated to the current 1.4-equivalent patch on the feed. And for the patches that haven’t been updated for 1.4, the update wil install a "dummy" package. "Dummy" packages are just that; they do nothing and contain nothing. The point of "dummy" packages is that when the patch eventually does get ported to 1.4, you see it in the "Available Updates" section. Clever, eh.
Of course, updating patches works fine with the webOS-patches feed, but what about patches not on the feed. Patch files installed via WebOS Quick Install are on the AUPT system, but of course, the process is a bit different.
Open WOSQI after the update and go into the Tweaks section. The version change will be detected and a special Update Helper will popup. All .patch files installed via WOSQI will be removed and reinstalled if it can be successfully reapplied. In addition, any on-feed patches that haven’t been updated for 1.4 will be updated as well. Two birds with one stone.
And lest we forget, it’s worth noting that you can adjust for OTA updates the manual way. The AUPT scripts are strong enough that after an update, you can simply uninstall each patch via WOSQI or Preware without error, and then reinstall the 1.4 equivalent. Lastly, if you haven’t updated to the latest version of Preware, you really ought to.
Currently, it seems that almost 30% of those polled don’t trust AUPT. That’s really unfortunate, as countless weeks and months were put forward freely by many many developers to make sure everything works well. Thankfully the 1.4 OTA update experience should help assure users for updates after that.
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Everyone know that webOS 1.4 brought with it many welcomed features and additions. Unfortunately it also brought with it a few bugs.
