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Help Us Help You! In our ongoing quest to better serve our community, we want to gain a better understanding into your phone buying habits. Are you buying your next phone in store or online? On contract, off contract or pay as you go? Those are the kinds of questions we're asking on this one. The survey will only take you two minutes or less. Thanks! Take the Survey! View the full article
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If there's one thing webOS doesn’t have a lack of is unit converters.The problem here is which one is right for you? From the initial observations of the app catalog it seems to be personality driven. Are you the dark brooding scientist? Are you the perky, verbal mathematician who loves color? Or are you the suited corporate business type, trading currency around the world? Do you like all the bells and whistles, or do you like to keep it simple and streamlined? The following converters have been selected for ease of use, style and ability to hold you attention whilst using them. Well at webOS nation we have found some great converters to suit your personality. read more View the full article
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This tip is only for webOS TouchPads running webOS 3.0 or higher webOS 2.1 on phones introduced Exhibition mode to replace the standard lock screen when your phone is on the touchstone charger, providing a unique interactive experience for the user while the phone was still charging. This feature was carried over to the TouchPad and webOS 3.0, even though the phone touchstones were not compatible with the TouchPad and required you to purchase a TouchPad-specific touchstone. And if you have multiple TouchPad touchstones, you can even specify which Exhibition app you want to launch for each touchstone. Once you put the TouchPad on the first touchstone, just select the Exhibition app that you want to run. When you move the TouchPad to a second touchstone you will notice that it loads up the stock clock exhibition app and not the previously selected Exhibition App, requiring you to choose the Exhibition app you want to run on this touchstone. Once you make that selection, you can move back and forth between touchstones and the TouchPad will remember which app was running on the each touchstone charger. View the full article
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By now you know how we feel about former HP CEO Léo Apotheker and his reign. Many of the major players in the tech industry - Apple, Google, Microsoft - have charismatic CEOs that act as the sole and unchallenged leaders of their companies. HP is a little more traditional in the Fortune 500 sense, with a Board of Directors tries to stay involved in company business, though it seems that having several competing ideas leads to more drama than we had imagined. Over the past few years everybody in the tech space has seen that HP's board has suffered from no small measure of dysfunction. They've had a revolving door of CEOs - Léo Apotheker's predecessor Mark Hurd had last just five years, and Carly Fiorina before him was forced out after HP's near disastrous merger with Compaq. The board had garnered a reputation of being a leaking sieve to the press, so much so that the chairman had at one point hired private investigators to examine the phone records of other board members and reporters (that ended with a publicly embarrassing trip before a Congressional committee). But none of that compared to the brief reign of Léo Apotheker. Brought on in November 2010 after Hurd's ouster, Apotheker had no hardware experience and had been fired from leading a German enterprise software firm with revenue a fraction that of HP's. His tenure as HP CEO included the unveiling and launch of the HP TouchPad and webOS 3.0 (a project started by Hurd with the acquisition of Palm)., the cancellation of that very product, an ill-advised "exploration" of spinning off HP's PC division, a catastrophic drop in stock value, and his eventual firing by the HP board just eleven months after being brought on. Fortune set out to find out just what happened, interviewing dozens of current and former board members, executives, and employees and examining confidential company and legal documents in the process. What they found is a broken company, struggling to repair itself, with a board full of infighting and open challenges and a chairman desperate to maintain his position while burying over the decisions he'd spearheaded. Not for the first time, the news reached the press before the official announcement. On Sept. 22, Apotheker read that he was being fired and replaced by Whitman. He was flabbergasted. In a meeting that morning, Lane told him that he had lost the support of the board and every single member of the executive team -- including former SAP loyalists such as Homlish. Before the board, Apotheker was subdued, dignified and resigned. But he was incensed. He had fully consulted with the board on everything, he told friends. He'd trusted Lane to make the board a functioning one, but instead Lane had turned it against him. Lane distanced himself from the disaster, blaming Apotheker. The man who'd been proud of HP's bold moves was now running as fast as he could from the word "transformation." It had, Lane said in a conference call with investors, "been stricken from our language." Asked in a CNBC interview whether the board bore responsibility for HP's chaos, Lane reacted defensively. "I'm going to give you an answer right from my heart, okay? In January, I added five board members to this board. This is not the board that was around for pretexting. This is not the board that fired Mark Hurd. It's just like open season to write about this board. It's not this board. This board did not select Léo, okay?" It's a massively long read, but for those interested in just how bad HP got, and how far it has to go, we have to recommend that you head over to Fortune and check it out. It's a doozy. View the full article
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There are numerous ways to fool around and make art with your TouchPad. One of those ways is a fun app by Phantom App named Pixelism. As you might gather from the name, Pixelism is pixel art of sorts. With the app you can create from scratch or overlay on existing images your own art built from tiny little stamp-like shapes including squares, triangles, and stars - all in any color you so desire. Normally Pixelism would cost you $1.49 from the App Catalog, but thanks to the developer we have 50 copies to give away to you! Contest: We have 50 copies of Pixelism 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 50 random 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 3.0.0 or higher with the latest version of the App Catalog. View the full article
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HP is looking for several new webOS team members ranging from software engineers to visual designers to user experience experts according to job listings on HP's Taleo job site. While we are hesitant to take this as signs of things drastically changing for the better on the inside we can't help but feel good knowing that HP is looking to hire some people into the organization after all of the drastic staff cuts in recent months. The job openings come after a hiring freeze was put in place in August immediately following the decision to stop the manufacturing of webOS hardware. HP has exactly twelve job postings live at this time. Four of them are internships, one for the Enyo team, one product management internship, and two user experience design internships. There are also eight other job openings that include two senior interaction designers, two senior visual designers, one network engineer, one senior product manager, one in quality assurance, and one senior cloud services architecture role. A couple of these openings appear to be for the Enyo team, specifically the interaction designers, as they are based out of the San Francisco office where the fine Enyo folks work. We hope the listings continue to expand, especially given the vast number of employees who were laid off. The more employees they have on the team the faster they should be able to get Open webOS out, and the better it should be when it becomes available in September. We do know one of those listings will be coming down fairly soon given that the Enyo team has already hired one of the smartest minds in webOS homebrew, Jason Robitaille, as an intern, unless the Enyo team is actually hiring multiple interns which could certainly help the framework grow to be even bigger and better. View the full article
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HP updated the webOS Developer Center today to add in sales reporting graphs, a move presumably brought on or sped up by the planned shuttering of Metrix last month, as well as adding more compliance with state and federal laws requiring developers to provide privacy policies when their apps access certain user data which has been an issue on iOS and Android over the past few months. The App Catalog was updated in weeks prior to allow users to see the app's privacy policy but developers were unable to actually add one in until this past weekend. This new functionality allows a developer to provide a privacy policy for an individual app or a company-wide policy. This should add a bit of reassurance to every user knowing that they should soon see a privacy policy for most, if not all, apps that are required to provide one under applicable state and/or federal laws. The other major update of the day is the addition of sales data in the form of graphs. Earlier today the data was available but many a developer tweeted back to the developer relations team to let them know the displayed numbers were horribly off. I personally noted a nearly twenty-fold increase in numbers under "active users" versus actual download numbers. This is a welcome change, of course, because developers have been asking for an integrated solution for some time now. This does not yet not replace Metrix or true analytics systems, however, because while it does provide some information such as active users and download statistics it falls short of providing detailed user data such as device type, the version of webOS being used, screen resolution, and the language of the users. That data is critical to developers and we hope HP adds at least some of it in to the developer portal, even if it requires an extra Enyo or Mojo library be added to the app. View the full article
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If you were to ask any of the webOS faithful what they used their devices for the most you would more than likely hear Twitter from a fistful of them. Outside of our forums here at webOS Nation, Twitter is how most of us keep in touch with one another. We debate, give virtual high fives, discover cool new apps, and keep track of news with Twitter. To say that is important to us would be understating just how much we depend on the popular micro-blogging service. Once upon a time the webOS landscape was full of third party Twitter clients. We never let a little thing like not having an official app stop us because at any given moment we had a multitude of choices to keep us tweeting 'till our hearts content. Over time interest in webOS dwindled and many developers either pulled their apps or abandoned them altogether. The most recent loss was developing house dots and lines pulling their powerhouse Twitter clients Carbon and Graphite. After the initial shock of loosing two of the greatest Twitter apps to ever grace our platform we composed ourselves and ventured off to the App Catalog to see what we could find. This journey turned out to be quite an eye opener for us as it was brought to our attention that good Twitter apps are hard to come by on webOS these days. A quick search of the App Catalog will bring you a fistful of results however with a little research we discovered many of these apps have been rendered useless by Twitter's various API changes over the years. So in the spirit of saving our readers time and money we decided to put together a quick roundup of great Twitter apps. It should be noted that this list contains apps that work as advertised and can be found in the App Catalog. This article is also not intended to compare these apps as we just want to give our readers a quick heads up on what options they have available. read more View the full article
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Although all webOS devices have a built it Memo app, it wasn't until the TouchPad that any of them had a built in app (Quick Office HD) to actual edit local text files. Not willing to let this oversight stand, prolific developer (and soon-to-be Enyo intern) Jason Robitaille decided that he would build his own text editor into his Internalz Pro file manager homebrew app. With Internalz Pro, you can now open up any type of text file (not just .txt files, but any plain text file) right on the device, even choosing if you want the text file to have Windows, Mac OS X or OS 9, or Linux line endings. However, this text editor may not be activate by default, so follow the steps below to set up Internalz Pro as your default text editor: Ensure Internalz Pro is installed, using any valid homebrew method Open Internalz Pro, swipe-down from the top-left and select "Preferences" from the Application dropdown menu Scroll down to the "TEXT EDITOR" section and ensure that the "Register as file handler" is set to ON Make any additional settings updates, as required, based on how you want to use the text editor Swipe-down from the top-left and select "Close" to return to Internalz Pro (you can also swipe back on webOS phones) Now you need to update the Default Applications for your device by opening up the "Device Info" app, swiping down from the top-left corner of the screen to bring up the Application dropdown menu and select "Default Applications" Scroll down to find a file type that has Quick Office shown in black text (as opposed to gray), and then choose Internalz Pro. Swipe-back on phones or tap the "Back" button on the TouchPad to return to Default Applications listing Repeat for all text file types The next time you try to open any text file, it should now open up in the Internalz Pro text editor. Note that you can also follow these similar steps to set up Internalz Pro to be the default applications for images or IPK files, as long as the "Register as file handler" is set to ON in their respective section of the Internalz Pro preferences page. View the full article
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Mobile Nations Podcast Feed Mobile Nations on iTunes Mobile Nations YouTube Samsung Galaxy S III Event Wrap-Up Samsung Galaxy S III versus the HTC One X! Flipboard for Android - we go hands-on! All you need to know about BlackBerry World 2012 Whoever becomes RIM’s new Chief Marketing Officer is now walking into a much easier job CrackBerry Podcast 085: BlackBerry World 2012 Super Podcast! webOS developer relations head leaving HP. Again. ToodleTasks hops, skips, and jumps onto webOS smartphones and Android Dock goes in reverse, brings an Exhibition Enyo app to webOS third, not first iOS 6: Is it time for Apple to revamp the Home screen? Best free iPad apps Siri six months later: Why aren’t we using it? Pandora vs. Slacker vs. Spotify: iPhone music streaming app shootout! Is the Windows Phone Samsung Mandel built off of the new Android Galaxy S3? Nokia's Chairman claims tablets and "hybrids" being looked into We examine the LG Fantasy (E740) Windows Phone prototype View the full article
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Homebrew extraordinaire Jason Robitaille, the creator of webOS Quick Install, Comic Shelf (and its big sibling, Comic Shelf HD), Internalz, Internalz Pro, and many other apps, dozens of patches, and several homebrew services, will soon be joining the Enyo team in sunny San Francisco for the summer as their intern, he announced today on his Twitter account. The move is unsurprising, given his active participation in the community and numerous recent contributions to the open source Enyo project. Jason's ability to work with the Enyo team came following the herculean recruiting efforts of Matt McNulty, the Senior Director of Frameworks and Tools at HP, more simply known as the head of the Enyo team. As a Canadian citizen, Jason required more than just the typical human resources visits to hire. McNulty did everything he had to do to ensure that Jason would be able to get the necessary documents from the US State Department to work and live in California, which is neither trivial nor quick. Jason has told us that he will be starting later this month, May 14th to be precise, and that his internship will last roughly three months, ending in early August. We look forward to seeing what contributions he can make to Enyo 2.2, which is currently scheduled for release in July. We wish him the best of luck and we hope he can take with him some great knowledge, excellent memories, and perhaps even an offer for a job after he graduates. We expect he will enjoy working with the great group of folks over in the Enyo team and home he enjoys his time in San Francisco - after all we could use a guy like him at HP helping mold Enyo into a better framework and Open webOS into a better operating system with the community truly in mind. View the full article
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He hadn't held the job for very long, but today HP has told us that veteran Palm employee and webOS Developer Relations head Fred Patton is departing the company for the ever vague "opportunity outside" of HP. Here's the official (and brief) statement on the matter: "Fred Patton is leaving HP to pursue another opportunity outside the company. Enda McGrath will lead the developer relations team on an interim basis as we continue our work with the community on Open webOS." Now, you might be thinking, "Hey, didn't Patton just get that job a few weeks ago?" You're right, it was unofficially unveiled six weeks and one day ago that Patton had taken the head position of webOS Developer Relations. Patton had stepped in after the departure of veritable rock star developer relations VP Richard Kerris in October. And if you'll flashback with us to that tumultuous time in late October, you'll find similar wording of "to pursue an opportunity outside of the company." Kerris, of course, ended up landing at Nokia where he's been working to build up the Windows Phone catalog of apps, along with a handful of former HP webOS developer relations staff. For his part, Enda McGrath is an eleven year Palm veteran, having worked in technical and developer support functions over the past decade. Yeah, he's been with Palm for a while - all the way back to the days of Palm OS 5.0 and the Tungsten line of PDAs (ah, those were the days). We'll admit we're not super familiar with McGrath, though we hope that we and the community will get to know him a bit better until such time that HP decides on a permanent lead for developer relations. We're hearing that HP's wanting to work on expanding their developer relations beyond app developers contributing to the App Catalog; they're hoping to bring in a wider community of open source developers to help contribute to Open webOS. The help facilitate this goal, HP's looking at its own employees and possible external hires to fill the vacancy on a more permanent basis. All we can hope is that they manage to pick somebody good who can stay on for a while... just when we feel like we're getting to know somebody they're whisked away to corners unknown. View the full article
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Come on guys! You can't just "borrow" ideas like that... View the full article
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Image Worker Pro, by MetaViewSoft, is an app that will allow you to edit your photos directly on your webOS device, giving you the ability to resize, crop, rotate, adjust brightness, and so much more (check out our review of IW Pro, although note that MetaView is actively updating the app and there may have numerous enhancements and bug fixes since our review). One of the updates to the app has been to change its rotation so that it's always in a landscape mode. While this works better on the TouchPad, you may prefer the app to work in a portrait orientation on a webOS phone. Although there is no preference within the app itself to change the rotation, MetaView added a homebrew solution for you to manually adjust it. The easiest way to do this is by using the text editor within the homebrew file manager app Internalz Pro and following the directions below: Close Image Worker Pro, if opened Open up Internalz Pro and navigate to /media/cryptofs/apps/usr/palm/applications/de.metaviewsoft.printimagepro/ Find the prefs.txt file, tap on it, and select "Open" to open up the text editor. Towards the bottom of the file, find the row that says "ORIENT=". Update the row to say "ORIENT=1" Swipe down from the top-left to reveal the Application dropdown menu and select "Save File". Close the file Next time you open the app, it will now be in portrait mode Note that you may need to make this change every time MetaView updates the app (which is rather often). Image Worker Pro is available in the webOS App Catalog for $1.99 and is compatible with all webOS devices running webOS 1.4.5 or higher View the full article
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The joy of the Enyo application framework is that apps can be easily built not only to work on webOS smartphones and tablets, but across platforms. We've seen plenty of apps take advantage of this cross-platform nature, including Exhibition-emulator Dock, Flashcards to Go, and Instapaper-reader Paper Mache. Now, one of our favorite apps for task management - ToodleTasks - is making that same jump. ToodleTasks HD, built by ProdiSoft on Enyo, has been available for some time on the TouchPad. The toodledo client for webOS recently made the jump not only to webOS smartphones, but to Android smartphones and tablets. For smartphones, there's ToodleTasks Phone Edition for webOS ($3.99) and Android ($2.99), and for Android tablets you can download ToodleTasks Tablet ($3.99). And, of course, there's still the original ToodleTasks HD ($4.99), with the same sliding Enyo panels interface and feature set as the other three versions. That's the power of Enyo, baby. View the full article
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What do you get when you mix together a 4.8" 720P AMOLED screen, 8 megapixel camera, quad-core processor, a 2100mAh battery, a smooth riverstone-inspired shape, and a wireless charging system? The Samsung Galaxy S III, of course. Yeah, those latter two could have been said about the original Palm Pre as well, and we'll admit we take issue with Samsung's misleading "first wireless resonant charger", which we have no doubt the uniformed will take to mean "first wireless charger", even though Palm crossed that bridge more than three years ago. It's like Christopher Columbus discovering the Americas... centuries after the Vikings. Disgruntled grousing aside, the Samsung Galaxy S II and Samsung's latest implementation of Android 4.0 and TouchWiz do qualify as impressive. It's a high-powered device that serves as an effective counter to HTC's recently unveiled One series of smartphones. We're also pleased to see a greater focus on software over specs, with the Galaxy S III packing new features like WiFi direct, a camera that can tell if you're looking at the phone (and turns the screen off when you're not), facial recognition for social networks, picture-in-picture for videos while using apps, a Siri competitor dubbed "S Voice" (how original), and much more. The Samsung Galaxy S III is dues to come out later this month, hitting the US in June, in both HSPA+ and LTE variants. Presumably it'll hit most, if not all, US carriers, hopefully without the increasingly silly default email signatures we've been watching our Android brethren cope with over the past few years. Check out Android Central for all the latest on the Samsung Galaxy S III. View the full article
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Way back in 2009, the Palm Pre and webOS were still new to the world. Also new to the world was Evernote, who released an app built with the also new Mojo framework for webOS. It was a decent app, but it struggled to keep up with changes made to webOS and the Evernote system. So long as you had a webOS smartphone, though, it generally worked. At least, it did until last month, when Evernote made modifications to their API that killed the app for weeks until enough webOS users complained and Evernote brought it back. The change to the API also affected a fledgling app for webOS that brought Evernote to the TouchPad in proper Enyo fashion: E Notes. Put together by PetzApps, E Notes does require an Evernote account, but that’s not exactly a difficult thing to register and you can do it through the app if you don't already have one. Evernote will even give you a very unique and very long email address that allows you upload notes anytime, anywhere. We would advise you to save your new email in your contacts in your system. E Notes takes full advantage of webOS' Enyo app framework, utilizing a beautiful sliding pane system that aids in multitasking, making it a breeze to jump from one task to another. E Notes even has a notifications to keep you updated when a note, notebook, or tag on your account has been altered or has been added. read more View the full article
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PreCentral: Add "To Computer" neato! launcher icon
News Reporter posted a topic in LG and webOS News
neato!, by Geoff Gauchet (or Zhephree, as he is known around these parts) is an amazing app that brings the ability to send any text or URLs between your webOS device and your computer (or another webOS device) with almost no effort at all. While you only need to have neato! active in the dashboard to receive any message, you need to actually open up the app and tap the "Send to" button to bring up a screen where you can send off a message. However, Geoff has made this process a little easier by giving you the ability to add a neato! "To Computer" icon to your launcher that you can quickly access to save you a step in the process. To add the icon to a launcher page: Open up neato! (if the dashboard is active, you can press the icon to launcher the app Scroll down and select the "Prefernces" button On the Preferences screen, just tap the "Add Launcher Icon" and a "To Computer" icon will appear on the bottom of your first launcher page Whenever you need to send off a neato! message, just tap that icon or use Just Type to find it. Now, if only Geoff can add in a Just Type Quick Action to send to computer, we could remove yet another step in the process! neato! is available in the webOS App Catalog for $1.43 and is compatible with all webOS devices running webOS 1.4.5 or higher View the full article -
These are strange times in which we live. One month ago we were watching accomplished webOS app developer Inglorious Apps - the guy who brought us Glimpse - building an Enyo app called Dock to bring Exhibition-style glanceable info to iPhone and Android users. It was weird, because unlike the previous Enyo ports to land on other platforms (including Inglorious Apps' Glimpse for iPad app Panes), Dock was not a webOS app first. Yeah, the developer used the webOS app framework to make an app for iPhone and Android, with the though of bringing it to webOS relegated to "if there's enough demand." It didn't take long after our first talking about the app for that demand to be demonstrated. And by not long, we mean hours. You guys might not be many in numbers, but you're sure as heck loud. Or just skilled at badgering after years of neglect at the hands of Palm and HP. Either way, your voice was heard and that very same day Inglorious Apps announced that Dock would indeed be coming to webOS. It took a month, but it's finally arrived. In the App Catalog for $1.43 (an odd price if we've ever seen one), Dock essentially breaks down the individual panels of Glimpse into small glanceable bits that stream by on your TouchPad or webOS smartphone screen. We've played around with the app on both a TouchPad and a Pre3, and we've got to say, it was definitely designed for the smartphone-sized screen. Heck, that's why there's Glimpse for the TouchPad anyway - it has Exhibition Mode support too. What all does Dock bring to the glanceable information party? Good question. How about a clock, your Facebook timeline, Google Reader headlines, selected RSS feeds, Stocks, Twitter, and the current and forecasted weather. All of these are customizable with your own accounts or inputs as appropriate, and you can even hit the Shuffle All selection to have Dock just cycle through it all at random. Dock hasn't seen enormous success in the iOS App Store or Google Play Market, but if we had to guess, it'll probably do better on webOS, thanks to both the relative lack of competition for attention in the smaller App Catalog and the near rabid appreciation webOS users have for developers that stand by the platform. If you've got a Touchstone charger, you should probably be checking out Dock. View the full article
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Last month we gave away a hundred copies of Wifi Media Sync in conjunction with the app gaining a new Mac client. This month, developer 8-Bit Development has decided to put the flagship app on sale for the entirety of May. How on sale? Sixty percent off, that's how much. That's cut the price of the wireless media synchronization app to $1.99, from $4.99 before now. That two dollars allows you to sync your favorite media files, including photos, music, videos, and documents from your Windows or Mac computer (using the free desktop companion app), all over the magic of your home (or office or whatever) WiFi network. Wifi Media Sync 3.0 is available for both webOS smartphones running at least webOS 2.1.0 and the TouchPad. It really enables truly wireless operation for the TouchPad for those of us that sync back and forth media from our computers. You get email and browse the web wireless, charge wirelessly, and now you can sling files through the ether. It's the future, except it's now, so… it's today. Tomorrow. Or something, all we know is that it's pretty darned cool. You've got all month to ponder the purchase, but come June you can expect Wifi Media Sync to jump back up to the full $4.99. So if you want to save a few bucks and get your wireless sync on, you've got a few weeks to save 60%. View the full article
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When you're doing something awesome, people can't help but notice. They might not acknowledge it, but they take note and sometimes they just outright copy it. We saw it before when Research in Motion introduced the BlackBerry PlayBook, and we're seeing it again with today's introduction of BlackBerry 10. Where the PlayBook copied wholesale the multitasking card user interface of webOS back in late 2010 (prompting a "heh, good luck" from HP), today in 2012 RIM is copying the sliding panes of Enyo into the upcoming BlackBerry 10 operating system. Unveiled today at the BlackBerry World 2012 keynote, the BlackBerry 10 developer alpha is both interesting and confounding. While it looks nice, the operating system amps gestures up to a level unseen by even webOS. At least with webOS phones the only non-standard gestures you have to know are the back swipe and tossing away a card - everything else is self explanatory. With BlackBerry 10 gestures have become essential to every aspect of the operating system, with few visual cues that we could discern to help increase discoverability and lessen the learning curve. Strangely missing from the demos was the multitasking UI of the PlayBook OS. The BlackBerry 10 dev alpha is based off of the PlayBook OS, which has had its own share of struggles, though RIM at least seems to have learned a lot in the process. We're intrigued by the pairing of predictive text with letters on the keyboard and how it apparently will learn how you type and adjust the tap area for buttons accordingly, yet amused in an admittedly somewhat condescending manner with the faux-realistic appearance of the virtual keyboard (down to entirely non-functional 'frets' between the rows - on the physical keyboard they serve as tactile guides, on a virtual keyboard they are there just because). Understandably, Kevin and the gang over at CrackBerry are excited by today's announcements. We're cautiously optimistic, as RIM has for the past few years been showing off awesome tech demos that never made it to a shipping product (or when they arrived were nowhere near as awesome as the demo). With the future of Open webOS devices a big unknown, we have to ask: is anybody giving BlackBerry 10 consideration? Check out CrackBerry.com for all the latest BlackBerry 10 coverage. View the full article
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In 1908, G.K. Chesterson published the book Orthodoxy, a study of his own personal journey of how he came to believe in the Christian faith. The book isn't an endorsement of Christianity, but a look at how the human psyche seeks to find an answer for what it cannot explain and how faith such as religion can provide the "answer to a riddle." This TouchPad-based copy of Orthodoxy supports power scroll to jump between chapters, copy/paste support, font and text size preferences, full-screen and auto-bookmarking, and even automatic scrolling. It's an eBook on steroids, and we just so happen to have 50 copies from developer Erick Brown to give away. Contest: We have 50 copies of Orthodoxy HD 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 50 random 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 3.0 or higher with the latest version of the App Catalog. View the full article
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We can all agree that the hallmark, the crown feature, of the webOS platform is its unmatched multitasking user interface. There's simply no equal to its prowess. webOS also has been one of the leading platforms for Twitter clients, though that perhaps hasn't been as evident lately. For years webOS has had some of the best Twitter clients in the mobile space, and while many have fallen behind, there are always a few more coming up and ready to take their place, and thankfully they keep spoiling us with quality user interfaces and beautiful design. The latest entrant takes after the conventions of incredible!, bringing a new unified social networking experience to the TouchPad: Taurus. This new social app by OMA Studios has hit the webOS App Catalog, bringing a single-app multi-pane social networking experience unlike that offered by other apps. While incredible! seeks to integrate your networks into one stream like webOS tries to integrate your contacts and calendars, Taurus brings them into one app, but keeps them segmented so that even more dissimlar social network and systems can join the mix. A full Taurus cocktail can contain Google Reader feeds, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook streams, YouTube subscriptions, and your ToodleDo tasks. It's one heck of a cocktail. read more View the full article
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This tip is only for webOS phones If you have multiple photo galleries on your webOS device, it can be a pain to have to scroll through all of them every time to find the one you are looking for. Luckily, you can use the keyboard to quickly search through the list of galleries just as you would do search your emails or memos. From within the Photos app or any app that uses the standard webOS photo picker, you can simply just start typing to filter your gallery listing. You can perform the search using any word within the gallery name, but it has to be at the start of the word. For example, a gallery named "Miscellanous webOS Photos" can be found by searching for "Misc" or "web" or "Phot" but not the "otos" in Photos. If you want to remove any search criteria that you have entered, you can delete what you typed or you can back-swipe it away. View the full article
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With the runway from April showers into May flowers growing short, HP is closing out the week by making good on their April code commitments for webOS. What can you expect to find in HP's various Githubs today? How about the beginnings of Ares 2, an update to Enyo 2, and the Node.js JavaScript platform? Yeah, that'll do (and it matches up with what the roadmap said to expect). First things first, let's tackle Ares 2. While just a bullet point on the roadmap, Ares 2 is the next generation of Palm's in-browser app builder, and it's now fully paired with Enyo 2 (whereas the original Ares was built for Mojo and Ares of the original variety). Ares 2, unlike its predecessor, is built off of Node.js (more on that later), which will enable developers to use it locally on their own machines or up in the cloud - all with a "pluggable, decentralized approach to file storage" to give developers even more flexibility. Ares 2 isn't yet complete - it's described as being "still in the early stages" - though that isn't stopping HP from turning public the Github for the project. But hey, you'll be able to easily build Enyo 2 apps that work across all web-compatible platforms, so that'll eventually be cool. A number of other webOS components are seeing their release into open source today. There's an updated build of Enyo 2, bringing significantly-improved mobile scrolling performance and a "highly-optimized cross-platform virtual list control" widget. the Node.js event-driven Javascript services platform is also going open source, and in an April surprise, the System Manager Bus (otherwise known as Luna-service2) is going open source three months earlier than planned. The Node.js-reliant System Manager Bus manages the inter-process communications mechanism for Open webOS and includes monitoring and debugging utilities. You know, for when we have enough components to build a functioning operating system; we're getting there, we swear. So there you have it, April's Open webOS code commitments are here. Coming up in May… well, actually, there's nothing on the roadmap for May or June. Could be a quiet few months, or HP could surprise us and release some other components to open source early. We wouldn't mind that one byte. View the full article