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Nearly five months ago HP VP of webOS Developer Relations Richard Kerris vacated his post for a new job at Nokia, just eight months after he was trotted out before the world at Think Beyond. Granted, a lot went down in those eight months at HP, so we can't blame him for looking to the greener pastures of Nokia's Sunnyvale office. But it's been nearly half a year since Kerris left, with nobody stepping in to fill the void. Until now - today the HP webOS Developer Center made the stealth announcement of Palm veteran Fred Patton as the new head of Developer Relations.

Patton came to Palm in early 2010, tasked with running the developer website - yes, we're now to the point where two years qualifies one as a veteran at webOS. With all of the departures and layoffs that have hit the Developer Relations team in the past few months, two years later he's now "managing day-to-day operations" of the department, as he put it in the "about me" blog post that went up this evening.

An impressive resume is part of what Patton brings to the table here, having developed command and control software for Air Force and NASA satellites and been the Director of Engineering and Quality at Innovative Robotics (where he wrote user and developer documentation and optimized customer setups - good skills for leading a software developer relations team).

So congratulations on the new gig, Fred, and good luck. We'll be watching. And waiting (save us some cake).

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It's that time of year. The squeak of sneakers and screams of crowds fill the air and the hopes of 67 squads from across the United States are crushed with a ferocity that only basketball can bring. That's right, March Madness is underway. While there are plenty of sports apps in the webOS App Catalog, only one really stands out as worth your money for keeping tabs on all the games upon which the success of your bracket. That one app is Sports Live!

Well, it's Sports Live and it's derivatives. On the TouchPad, we wouldn't talk anybody out of buying Sports Live HD, and for this happy go lucky season of basketball insanity, you wouldn't be wrong to buy College Basketball Live for your webOS smartphone either. Both apps let you passively keep tabs on your favorite/necessary teams through the joy of webOS notifications. Should you be feeling more antsy, you can also open the app itself and check out the scores in real time for all games.

Both apps are made by More Solutions and available now in the App Catalog - Sports Live! HD for the TouchPad is currently on sale for $2.49, while College Basketball Live! and Women's College Basketball Live! are available for $1.99 and Sports Live! for webOS smartphones is $7.99

Also, go Bearcats!

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In a new posting by webOS CTO Sam Greenblatt on the HP webOS Developer Blog, HP has announced it plans on publishing additional components of webOS version 3.0.5 for the TouchPad to open source, calling it the “Community Edition”. It will be posted at opensource.palm.com and is to be completed by June. The publishing of the code will provide the community the ability to “work with legacy devices using the current platform.”

In a separate announcement, the Linux 3.3. kernel has produced a seventh release candidate containing patches for networking, drivers, management, and memory. The release should be ready by the end of this month.

You can see the post in its entirety here.

Source: HP webOS Developer Blog

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Although the HP Pre3 was only officially released throughout Europe for just a few days before HP pulled the plug on webOS hardware, a lot more AT&T (and a few Verizon) Pre3s made their way to eBay and other "unofficial" channels. Unfortunately, since HP will not support the device or make any additional accessories for it, it appeared as if spare or extended Pre3 batteries would never see the light of day, even if you simply needed a replacement for a defective battery. Luckily for us Pre3 owners, Mugen Power Batteries decided to produce two sizes of extended batteries, the 1400 mAh "SL" extended battery for $46.95 and a 2800 mAh "XL" extended battery for $98.95. As compared to the stock Pre3 battery that clocks in at 1230 mAh, these batteries will give you an additional 14% or 128% of battery life, respectively, before your phone needs to be plugged back in. The 1400 mAh SL battery--which we previously reviewed--is only slightly bigger than the stock battery, essentially making it more of a spare battery than an extended battery. With no other source of spare batteries for the Pre3, having this option for a spare or replacement battery is great. In addition, since Mugen's SL battery is the same physical size as the stock Pre3 battery you can continue to use your existing touchstone-enabled back cover for the Pre3 with no issues

However, if you are looking for some more heavy-duty battery life for your Pre3, you may instead want to consider the 2800 mAh XL battery from Mugen. After putting our review battery through its paces, our overall reaction was quite favorable. While the battery's capacity is twice the size as the SL extended battery, it is also physically bigger, weighing 1.7 ounces (48 grams) as compared to .85 oz (24 grams) of either the stock or SL extended battery. As a result of the larger size, it also requires a larger back cover for the phone which is included with your purchase. For this review, we will focus on both the affects on battery life but also the affects of the larger back cover.

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In a new posting to the HP webOS Developer Blog, webOS CTO Sam Greenblatt announced that HP intends to publish additional components from the already-released webOS 3.0.5 to open source, branding the components as "the Community Edition." The work will be hosted at opensource.palm.com and is expect to take through June, and is not directly related to the Open webOS project. The idea behind open sourcing parts of the legacy code is to allow the homebrew community to do even more with devices currently running webOS 3.0.5 - that is, the HP TouchPad. Greenblatt wrote that the hope is "that this additional release will help [the homebrew community] better understand the platform and create a constructive environment for moving forward as Open webOS itself is released."

What exactly we can expect to see from this release is still up in the air, and being a side-project like this is, we wouldn't expect to see a roadmap like we did for Open webOS. The name "Community Edition" doesn't refer to the entirety of webOS 3.0.5 (since it contains plenty of proprietary third-party bits that HP can't open source), but do the portions that HP will be open sourcing. It's a thank you to the homebrew community that helped webOS keep on keeping on.

Greenblatt also laid out some housekeeping notes for March's Open webOS release commitments. Delays in the final release of the Linux Standard Kernel 3.3 have pushed that back to the end of the month, while we can expect to see the Nyx abstraction layer and components released in the next few days ahead of the kernel.

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This tip is only for devices running webOS 2.x

The order of the email accounts listed in the email app is determined by the order that you add them to the app. While you have been able to reorder those email accounts since the original days of webOS 1.0.1, that functionality seems to have been broken in webOS 2.0. Fortunately, that is not the case, but rather it just requires one additional step, added below as step #5

In this example, you can see a Yahoo account and a Gmail account. Let’s say we want to swap the order of how those two accounts show up, so Gmail shows first.

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Phil McKinney left his position as HP CTO and chief big thinker at the end of this past October. Since then he published a new book, Beyond the Obvious: Killer Questions That Spark Game-Changing Innovation [hardcover, Kindle, iBooks] that explores his experience as an innovator. In promoting Beyond the Obvious, McKinney sat down for an interview with "strategic marketing expert" and fellow author Rick Mathieson. Most of the interview touches on what's in McKinney's book, but in part four of the interview he steers the discussion towards what went down with webOS and McKinney's last few months at HP. We'll let McKinney do the talking here:

McKinney notes that he was part of the team that drove the acquisition of Palm and that there are always challenges to overcome with trying to get a large organization like HP to be innovative. As the existence of a three-year plan for Palm implies, the challenge is sticking to a long-term plan that ignores the quarterly financial reports in favor of the long view.

It's equal parts hard and frustrating to imagine where Palm and webOS would be today had HP not pulled the plug on hardware development and essentially killed (and since attempted to revived) the OS. It's been seven months since former HP CEO Leo Apotheker made the decision to kill webOS hardware, and during that time we expect that we would have at the very least seen the release of the HP Pre3 and TouchPad Go, plus whatever else HP might have been working up.

For his part, McKinney still uses a webOS smartphone and a TouchPad.

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We've seen all sorts of interesting things done with webOS notifications, from persistent weather and stock information to pop-up mini news readers. But they were always basic and focused apps. But Science Apps, the webOS developers behind Starter and Lithium News, recently kicked things up a notch with the app-in-a-notification system with Pop!Later.

This new app is a Read It Later client that lives in a notification on your webOS smartphone or TouchPad. Not only can you use it to submit a copied URL, you can actually browse, read, and manage your saved articles all from within the notification. You might be asking yourself, "Why would I want this?" Essentially this lets you have two apps running at once on the same screen - Pop!Later providing the Read It Later view while whatever else you want - a movie, for example - takes up the rest of the screen.

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Oh, Best Buy, you didn't tell us you had a brand new TouchPad in stock. We left our number and everything. Did we do something wrong? Why don't you ever call anymore?

In all seriousness, we're not surprised that the Best Buy in Santee, California, found a brand-new 32GB HP TouchPad to sell. How it got on their shelves isn't likely to be a harrowing tale of dragons and sword fights and multitasking cards. Like tipster nfrisbie1, we're more interested in how this Best Buy location thinks they can get away with asking full list price - $599.99 - for a long-discontinued product that sells for close to a third of that on eBay, which is itself notably higher than the fire sale pricing that Best Buy previously honored. You so silly.

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As we noted last week, our little post about the branding design for Open webOS caught some eyes at HP and they decided they wanted to kick things up a notch, throwing in a TouchPad and a session with their design team for the winner. In response you all kicked things up a notch, with well over a hundred entries pouring into the comments over the weekend.

Well, we've waded through all of your creative responses to our design query and picked out what we think are ten deserving candidates to have some confab time with HP's design team, plus a TouchPad for the hell of it. Those with a chance to leave their mark on Open webOS are after the break.

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In 2009 the world welcomed two random-partner chat platforms to the internet. Getting most of the press because of its skeeziness and the prevalence of male genitalia was video-based Chatroulette, overshadowing the ealier-in-the-year launch of text-based random chatter Omegle. With the tagline of "Talk to strangers!" Omegle pairs you with, well, strangers, to chat about whatever. They don't know who you are, and you don't know who they are. Perfectly anonymous chatter. And if you want to get to it on webOS, there just so happens to be an app for that: Padegle, a $0.99 app by Cool Story Products. And if you're the type that wants to get some chat on with a truly random stranger, then we have one of fifty copies to give to you.

Contest: We have 50 copies of Padegle to give away. Just leave a comment on this post to enter. Contest ends next Sunday at midnight US Eastern Time, after which time we will select 50random entrants to win. Please only leave one comment, multiple entries won’t count. Promo codes are only valid in countries serviced by the App Catalog, and users must be running webOS 2.x or higher with the latest version of the App Catalog.

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This tip is only for webOS phones

When webOS 3.0 and the TouchPad were released, Bing Maps was the default mapping application, replacing the Google Maps app that was installed on al webOS phones. Shortly after, those webOS phones were then updated to also replace Google Maps with Bing Maps, bringing almost all of the same functionality of the larger tablet-based version. One similar feature is the ability to change how you view the map, including the standard street map, satellite view and the "Bird's Eye" views that provide an angled viewing of a map. Unfortunately, unlike the TouchPad version, you can not rotate the angle of the Bird’s Eye view.

To change you desired view type, tap on the   icon on the top-right of the app to open the “OPTIONS” screen and use the bottom dropdown to select your “VIEW”. This will then take you back to the map and reload it as selected

 

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If there's one thing that webOS and the Palm Pre ushered into maturity it was the gesture-based user interface. While gestures had been a part of modern mobile operating systems like Android and iOS, they'd only been present in places like the app launcher or widgets panels. webOS kicked that all up a launch, using gestures to go back, to go into multitasking mode, to switch between apps, close apps, delete items, open menus, and much more. It was a genius use of gestures and it gets so engrained in your use of webOS that your author often finds himself trying to swipe up into card view on non-webOS devices.

The TouchPad ditched a lot of that when webOS 3.0 could have taken things up a notch (or ten). The multitasking gestures are still there, and for hardware and usability reasons the back gesture went away, but as I noted back in August, there's no reason that webOS couldn't have adopted plenty of new gestures. Be it swiping in from the sides to switch apps (a feature now in use in BlackBerry's PlayBook OS and Microsoft Windows 8), two finger swipes to go forward and back in the browser, and so much more. None of these would be necessary for anybody's use of webOS, unlike the Playbook which is almost dependent upon knowing gestures, but for users that do know the gestures will make webOS even faster and more fluid to use. So, HP, you're working on Open webOS 1.0. Give the gestures are bit of love, will ya?

Have your own thoughts on this webOS Wish List entry? Of course you do - the comments are below. Surely you have your own ideas as to what ought be on the webOS wish list, and so we've created a forum thread just for what has proven to be an awesome discussion.

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Touch-to-share was a concept that was introduced at the Think Beyond event with the unveiling of the Veer, Pre3 and TouchPad. The concept was that you could use a near field communications-type technology to share data between your devices simply by touching them together. While touch-to-share was ultimately going to be expanded to include a lot of different types of data, even giving developers the ability to access it in their apps, touch-to-share currently only lets you share web pages between devices and doesn’t appear that it will be expanded any time soon. And unfortunately, while the Veer has the hardware requirements to allow touch-to-share, it never received the software update to take advantage of this functionality; so, you will be required to have a Pre3 and a TouchPad (or two of each device) to access it.

So how does touch-to-share work? All you need to do is place the back of the Pre3 (where the HP logo is) on top the home button of the TouchPad and let it sit for a second or two. You will know that the touch-to-share was activated because a giant ripple will emanate from the home button on the TouchPad, and then one of a few things will happen:

• If Bluetooth was not turned On on either device, you will get a notice saying that you will need to turn Bluetooth on in order to take advantage of this feature and give you an option to turn Bluetooth on. Once on, try touch-to-share again
• If the two devices were not already paired together via Bluetooth, they will automatically get paired together and you will get a pop-up on your Pre3 asking to allow messaging access to share your text messages across the devices. Regardless of the answer to this question, your devices will now be paired together and you can access touch-to-share.
  • You can also adjust your Bluetooth preferences (such as allowing messaging or phone calls between devices) later or even open up the Bluetooth app and swipe-to-delete a device from your list if you want permanently delete it from your list of trusted devices.
• Assuming that you now have Bluetooth turned on and two devices paired together, if you have a webpage active on the screen from the stock web browser on the Pre3 and/or the TouchPad when you touch the two devices together, the URL of that site will be sent to the other device and the stock web browser will launch and open that page. Unfortunately, it will not send your position on the page or any other data that you may have filled in on the originating device. It simply sends over the website address

While this is not a feature that is probably used often, it is convienent when you are reading a site on your phone and decide that you would rather read it on the larger screen of your TouchPad, or if you are reading a site on your TouchPad but have to leave the house and you can quickly transfer that site to your phone. And, until HP or someone within the Open Source webOS team expands touch-to-share, this is all that we will be able to use touch-to-share for.

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An interesting question was posed this morning in our forums by aia832003: should HP make a "Nexus" device? For those not familiar, Google has over the past few years commissioned a series of "Nexus" phones for Android, phones that are the launch device for a new version of Android and run "pure" Android, [mostly] free of carrier and manufacturer interference. They're also typically the state-of-the-art as far as smartphones of the moment are concerned. For example, the current Nexus device is the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, a powerhouse of a smartphone no matter which way you cut it.

With webOS going open source, HP's going to face two problems going forward. The first, and largest problem, is convincing another manufacturer to take a chance on webOS. The second will be controlling webOS - while you technically can't control an open source project, especially with HP's plan to go with Apache licensing, setting the example can go a long way towards setting consumer expectations. With Android, consumers have come to expect and differentiate between the experience offered by the skins of HTC, Samsung, and Motorola. Obviously HP will want to avoid that kind of fragmentation, and setting the example with a "hero" type device might do that trick.

That said, there are some potential problems with the Nexus-approach for HP. The first being smartphones - it'll be hard enough to convince any manufacturer to pick up webOS, it'll be even harder to convince the carriers to give webOS yet another chance after years of disappointment at the register. There is of course the tablet market, in which HP could easily do the Nexus thing. They're planning on making ARM-powered Windows 8 tablets, and that hardware engineering wouldn't be that far off from what an open source Open webOS kernel could support. Heck, HP CEO Meg Whitman even said she'd like for HP to get back into the webOS tablet game.

So what do you say, oh webOS Nation? Should HP take the lead and set the example with webOS hardware, or should they leave it to the professionals?

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Two days ago we posted what we thought would be a fun exercise: getting the webOS Nation community involved in working up fresh branding for Open webOS. At the time we were doing it just because, with no expectations that HP would do anything with what was worked up, much less that they might be paying attention.

Well, dear reader and potential logo designer, HP is paying attention - they've been watching the comments rolling in and like what they've seen thus far. So much so that they want to get involved, well, technically they want to get you involved. So they've pitched in a sweet prize pack that will go to the winning logo designer (more on that in a bit).

So to determine who gets this sweet prize pack we're going to take this fun exercise and turn it into a competition. We'll be taking submissions (keep posting them in the comments of the original post) through Sunday, March 11th, at which time we'll pick a group of what we think are the best and put it up to a community vote to determine the winner.

What does the winner get? Well, HP's chipping in a brand-new TouchPad, an article that is becoming harder to find every day. They'll also want to get the winner involved with the official branding process and will arrange for them to do some speaking on their design with the design team currently working on the branding for Open webOS.

So go ahead and get cracking on those Open webOS logo designs - a TouchPad and your chance to leave an official mark on webOS are waiting!

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I'll be honest, this is one of those wish list items of something minor that's always bugged me. I'm talking about the App Catalog, which if anything should be the epitome of webOS apps. So what does it do? It completely ignores the most characteristic of webOS TouchPad app features: the sliding panels of Enyo. For most of the browsing experience in the App Catalog that's forgivable. The top and bottom tabs do just fine and make sense to navigate around.

Where things break down is when you open an app listing. Suddenly you're presented with this tabled layout that works, but there's this weird, out-of-place button labeled "Back" in the bottom left corner. You know, right where the Enyo grab handle should be.

The App Catalog is an Enyo app, there's no doubt about that, but in the most identifiable of ways it behaves more like something out of iOS or Android. Heck, even the web browser has sliding panels, and that's for things like bookmarks that could be very easily displayed in a pop-over list. Think about it - browsing in the App Catalog could be greatly enhanced with the addition of Enyo panels. You could have a list of the apps on the left and the listing itself on the right, enabling fast one-tap comparisons. Screenshots could be presented in true full-screen instead of the also out-of-place overlay. There's a lot that Enyo could bring to the App Catalog, and it just doesn't make sense that it's not there. [/rant]

Have your own thoughts on this webOS Wish List entry? Of course you do - the comments are below. Surely you have your own ideas as to what ought be on the webOS wish list, and so we've created a forum thread just for what has proven to be an awesome discussion.

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The built-in Memos app for webOS isn't all that great. We all know it. With a big 9.7-inch screen like that on the TouchPad, its even more unforgivable how basic it is and how little its been updated. If there's one good thing about the pitifulness of the TouchPad Memos app, it's that it has opened the door for several third-party developers to built the better notepad. One such developer is Inglorious Apps, who created the aptly titled and well-featured Notes HD.

For the asking price of $1.99, Notes HD drags memos on webOS up to modern standards. Well, really it brings back a lot of the features from the Palm OS Memos app, including titles, password protection, and categories (gasp).

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When you get an email from someone in your contact list, did you know that you can easily call, text, look up their address, or get access to any of the data from their contact record with just a single tap on the screen? From an email message on either webOS phones or the TouchPad, tap on the header that shows who was the sender of the email. On phones, this will bring you directly to that person's Contact record, while the TouchPad will give you a little pop-up dialog box with all of their information.  From here, you can tap on a phone number to call the person, tap on the SMS icon next to the phone number to text them, initiate a skype call, or perform any other action based on the data available, all without really leaving the email application. If you want to go back to the message, just back-swipe on phones or press the "Close" button on the TouchPad.

Note that if the person is not in your contact list, you will have the option of adding them by tapping on the sender header.

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So everybody's got their panties all in a bunch over some new iPad or something that's being announced today. You heard it here first, folks: It'll be better than the last one. It'll be more magical than the last one. Magical-er.

Anyhoo. Our pals at iMore are rocking the all-day coverage, including a boatload of live commentary. And just like with the iPhone 4S event, there's a better than average chance that Phil will swing by to remind everybody that it's just an iPad, they should all go outside and enjoy the fresh air -- basically do his damndest to burst that Reality Distortion Field.

Just keep it glued to iMore.com.

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Sometimes, for reasons we've yet to determine, the built-in first-party apps can disappear off an HP TouchPad. It's rare, but it happens, and for the average user it's annoying, frustrating, and confusing to have a basic app like the App Catalog or Calendar just up and disappear. Thankfully, HP has made it relatively easy to restore these apps, and you can do it all on your TouchPad, though some homebrew magic is required.

First things first, you'll need the excellent homebrew file browser Internalz Pro installed on your TouchPad. Our how-to install homebrew apps guide will give you a step-by-step of how to install Internalz (or any other homebrew app, for that matter).

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You know what's fun about open source? Anybody can contribute. While that generally has to do with code-level stuff, there's still plenty of user-facing design work that has to be done with open source software projects - Open webOS included.

We've already seen the snazzy logo HP whipped up for the open source Enyo application framework, but as of yet we haven't been graced with a new logo for Open webOS. So we're asking you, webOS Nation, to step up and show HP how it ought be done. We know there are a lot of good designers and artists in the crowd, and we want to see what kind of work you can come up with for the Open webOS branding.

This isn't an official or unofficial HP project - we're just doing this because we think it'll be fun and, frankly, Derek's a giant design nerd. So have at it, dear reader, and post your attempt at a logo for Open webOS in the comments of this post. You know you've got a good idea or two!

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webOS developers from around the world gathered yesterday in person and online to take place in the first ever virtual Enyo hackathon. The event lasted right around six hours, including an introduction from HP's Ben Combee, a Q&A session, and judging period. Seventeen apps were submitted by the end, with the only rules that they must made with Enyo 1.0 or 2.0, use a publicly-available API, and run either on a TouchPad or in the Chrome browser.

The judges - Combee, Enyo Developer Relations guru Lisa Brewster, and your's truly - selected apps to win the vaunted label of best design, best functionality, and best overall app, with the best overall winning an HP TouchPad while the other two went home with a Pre3. So, without further ado, the winners are…

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The biggest stumbling block for webOS, apart from mismanagement on the part of HP, has always been the relative lack of apps. Sure, there are standards there and the most basic needs are covered, but the "long tail" of apps, those apps that aren't the nine or ten that everybody's downloaded, that's where webOS has struggled for the whole time it's been around. The app situation isn't entirely responsible for the predicament webOS is in today, but it certainly played a big part in the vicious cycle (despite our protestations that Palm and HP do something about it).

Enter OpenMobile with a solution that aims to work around this problem by drafting Android into the webOS ecosystem. OpenMobile was showing off their Android Compatibility Layer product at CES, which grafts Android as a runtime into webOS, allowing users to run Android apps in webOS, complete with cards, notifications, and all that jazz.

At the time, the folks at OpenMobile had made the ACL work on Meego and webOS, but at the time they weren't involved with HP. Since then things have been pretty quiet on the OpenMobile front, but webOS Nation forum member Zukny reached out to OpenMobile to see if he could find out more information. Unexpectedly he got a call back from OpenMobile CEO Bob Angelo, who informed him that not only is HP interested in getting the OpenMobile ACL onto the HP TouchPad and Open webOS, the project has high-level support within the webOS organization.

Additionally, though OpenMobile's original business plan was to work with HP and other manufacturers to integrate the ACL into the product before it shipped, they've changed gears with webOS for obvious reasons and are exploring offering the ACL as a package you'll be able to purchase at what they're expecting to be a relatively low price point - though we're sure plenty of you would pay good money for access to a couple hundred thousand more apps over the couple thousand currently available to TouchPad owners.

We're pleased to hear that OpenMobile is encouraged by the enthusiasm the webOS community has expressed for their efforts and hope it won't be long before we're running Android apps without running Android.

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