Episode: 02
Title: 1 year celebration of the Homebrew Community.
Date: 07/29/10
Guest: Jason Robataille
Synopsis:
As developers, we spend a lot of time developing for the app catalog. Homebrew is where it all started and the place where the sky is the limit. Palm’s open ecosystem allows developer’s to do what they want with their devices and help other users do the same.
Alrighty boys and girls…gotta ‘nother poll.
This one is a pretty big one and will definitely be a challenge to win. BoyGeniusReport is asking what mobile OS people want to see most. Of course we want to see webOS 2.0!
Lets see if we can take our undefeated streak and whup some OSs shall we? Vote below!
Source: BGR
Will wonders never cease. For the past 3 years, the perennial underdog, Sprint has been hemorrhaging subscribers each and every quarter. Needless to say, people have been calling for their demise for about that long (even though they are a $32 billion a year company).
Today Sprint released their quarterlies and, again for the first time in 3 years, they actually grew. Now, it wasn’t anything huge (111,000 new subscribers), but heck… that is a lot better than shrinking.
Check after the break for the nitty gritty.
With the PDK Hot Apps competition in full swing, Palm took the opportunity to announce the winners of the regular Hot Apps Competition.
First, the top winners, who both received $100,000, were:
Congratulations to Syntactix and Pandora. Both very deserving apps. We hope to see you guys take the money and invest in some great new features and apps. If you have not downloaded either of these apps yet, be sure to check them out.
Read the rest of this entry »
The official Facebook app for webOS has really come a long way since it was first released. If you remember, the first version was more like a Twitter version of Facebook. The Developer Relation Team has taken over the development of this app in order to show off the great capabilities of the webOS SDK and they sure have done a good job with it.
Facebook for Palm webOS v1.2.30 was just released with some great new features. Palm actually teased these features a few weeks ago on their Facebook page. The most visible ones are full app landscape mode, a filterable feed list, and finally a way to clear multiple notifications.
Be sure to check out Palm’s Developer Blog for all of the details on this new update.
If you already have the Facebook Beta installed, be sure to go to the App Catalog and check out the app updates in your shopping bag. If you are not using the beta yet, why not? Seriously, go get it.
AT&T was selling the Palm Pre Plus for $149.99, but after a quick check of AT&T’s website, it appears as though they’ve decided to knock $50 off of the price. Accompanying the new price is a “temporarily out of stock” notice. Hopefully this means that the Pre Plus is selling well for AT&T. For a phone as good as the Palm Pre Plus, $99.99 is a great price.
Even with this great price from the carrier, it isn’t the best price around. The AT&T Pre Plus can be had for a penny on Amazon. Additionally, HP’s Wireless Central is giving away the AT&T Pre Plus, along with a $50 HP gift card and free shipping
With the Pre Plus also available for $49.99 with Verizon Wireless, why is it that Sprint refuses to discount the original Pre below $149.99? It’s over a year old, and they probably still have a large inventory. Maybe they are waiting to drop the price, until close to the release of another webOS phone. That is purely speculative at this point, but we sure hope it’s the case.
Remember when we did not even have 100 apps in the app catalog? This time last year that was the case. As a matter of fact, this time last year we did not even have paid apps in the catalog.
My how far we have came in a year. Today we have officially passed the 3000 mark!
We should all be celebrating right now because several people never thought webOS would make it this far. Some of you may say that 3000 apps is not a respectable number. It especially looks minuscule in comparison to the offerings from both Google and Apple but we have only been at this for a little over a year now. The App Catalog has grown and matured so much during that time period that it is almost hard to remember when all we had were free apps. With the 1.4.5 update right around the corner, and 2.0 in the horizon, we are sure that there will be an influx of great apps.
So pop the corks and let the champagne flow. That is certainly what we are doing here at webOSroundup ;)
Yesterday I watched BBC’s remake of Sherlock Holmes. The show puts a modern twist on the classic stories. One of these twists is the Sherlock Holmes character’s fascination with text messaging. In one scene, Mr.Holmes texts a journalist and the message is shown with a close-up of a Palm Pre. The text messaging theme certainly seemed out of place in the episode which adapted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, but at least the Pre got some screen time out of it.
It is worth noting that we see a original Pre in what is presumably a product placement. This is because O2 is the exclusive provider of webOS devices in the UK, but they currently sell plus versions. However, this one can probably be chalked up to filming that occurred before O2 upgraded to plus devices.
And oh, I loved the show, despite the awkward cell phone/text messaging theme. I wish it wasn’t so hard to watch BBC programming in the United States…
Great news for all of you 3D game fans! ExZeus arcade by HyberDevBox is now available in the App Catalog! As we mentioned in our previous post about it, this game looks pretty darn good.
Unfortunately, if you are not running webOS 1.4.5, you’ll have to wait a little bit longer. You must be running 1.4.5 in order to play the game. Looks like webOS users in the US are out of luck for now.
Are you an amateur chef? Do you enjoy cooking, but don’t always have a recipe idea? If you go and browse the App Catalog, there are very few recipe apps that aren’t made by Brighthouse Labs.
If you like getting cooking recipes from cooking shows, then maybe Video Cookbook by forwebOS.com ($0.99 in the App Catalog) is for you.
If you aren’t familiar with forwebOS.com, they are the same dev shop that have made a few other popular apps including ActiveCard 2.0 and aniWeather. The one thing that I’ve come to expect from this developer is a good user interface (UI). Video Cookbook does not disappoint.
Readers of webOSroundup are surely familiar with Tim Stiffler-Dean of Palm Pre Challenge fame (and regular contributor here on WOR). Tim is more intimate with his phone than most of us and he clearly cares about his phone. On his blog, he posted his opinion on a recent theme of discussion in the webOSverse: new hardware.
Everyone should click through to his post. To summarize, Tim suggests people “shut-up” about requesting new hardware and instead focus on bettering our community. He explains such comments encourage “disorder and dissent,” which are attitudes that don’t move webOS forward. This negative mindset affects users on multiple fronts, such as developer interest and media attention. Arno Arni’s fan-made commercial is the perfect example of a productive contribution to the webOS community (embedded after the break). However, please don’t take this summary in exchange for reading Tim’s insightful post. Read the rest of this entry »
If you are not familiar with the Homebrew file manager Internalz, then you may be familiar with its developer, Jason Robitaille. Jason is also the developer of the much used tool WebOS QuickInstall. Internalz is the one and only on-device file manager for webOS. It allows you to move, copy, delete, rename, and edit files on your webOS phone. If you have not already used Internalz and you want to take a little more control over your phone, then this is a great tool to have. You can get Internalz through Preware or WebOS QuickInstall.
Internalz v1.2 was released today with a few new features. These include Master Mode, an ipk installer, and a patch installer.
Master Mode allows you to control all files on your webOS device, not just on the USB partition, as on the default mode. If you do turn this mode on, be sure to use extreme caution. You don’t want to mess up any essential OS files.
