The App Catalog on the HP TouchPad might not have the most expansive selection in the tablet space, but it's got some pretty decent apps in it. One of those is the free USA Today app, which provides a slick interface for accessing the news site's stories. And as it would turn out, it's a relatively popular app. From a leaked slide from an internal USA Today presentation, we've learned that the USA Today app for TouchPad has been downloaded 250,000 times, which isn't bad for a platform that might have over a million devices on market.

While that pales in comparison to the 2.9 million downloads for the iPad, the webOS tablet app handily trounces its Android tablet competition. All standard Android tablets (excluding the Amazon Kindle Fire, because while it's based on Android, it's not a "true" Android tablet) combined have netted a total of 130,000 downloads. That's on tablets from multiple manufacturers who are still standing behind the product. Heck, HP's defunct tablet has managed to clock more app downloads than Windows Phone as a platform.

Is this a sign of the success of webOS? Not really, since a good number of those downloads likely came from users that had purchased their TouchPad at fire sale prices. This is more an indictment of the state of Android tablets, that despite the forces pushing them they have yet to see notable success. Meanwhile, the $200 Kindle Fire has snagged 260,000 downloads of its own custom USA Today app, just barely more than the TouchPad's quarter-million. Not bad for a dead platform, eh?

Source: GeekWire; Via: Daring Fireball

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So it turns out that this week is App Catalog Access Week for the webOS Wish List. We already touched on the need to expand the App Catalog to more than the less-than-a-dozen countries currently covered and revamping the app promo code system with global and shorter codes. Now it's time to supplement the current app-based promo codes with promo codes based around the one thing that makes the world go round: money.

HP has already demonstrated the ability to create monetary App Catalog promo codes – TouchPad early adopters received a promo code for $50 in apps back in August. The infrastructure is there, and it's already been exercised on a mass scale. The only thing missing is the ability for average Joe users to create their own App Catalog gift cards.

We'd like to propose two types of gifting for the App Catalog. We know that the chance of there being physical App Catalog gift cards like there are for the iOS App Store is practically nil, so we're totally cool with this being all digital. The first type is the monetary type, where through the hpwebos.com website users can create an App Catalog gift card for whatever amount they want and send it to a desired user. The second is the ability to gift a specific app, which one would be able to do through the website or through the App Catalog app itself. both would quite simply generate the appropriate promo code and email it to the recipient with appropriate flavor text about what it is and who sent it to them.

Like the global promo codes, this would make our lives at webOS Nation and that of developers quite a bit easier, but it would also give our friends and family new options for quick-and-easy gifts. Certainly it'd be less silly than the app gifting suggestion we had to include in our Holiday Gift Guides – forcibly acquire their device, download and install the app and pay for it with their registered credit card, and then give them the app price plus applicable sales tax as compensation.

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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It hasn't been that long since we kicked off our name change, and as promised, 2012 is bringing more than just a new name to the site. Last night our extraordinary team pulled off a combination site redesign and back-end overhaul. The goal of the redesign is simple: give webOS Nation a clean and modern look that is both easy on the eyes and the browser. For the most part things haven't changed from the user perspective, though you should be able to access our much more functional mobile site with webOS devices now. Also, commenting now works across the full range of webOS devices – huzzah!

As always with a redesign like this there are bound to be some hiccups or tweaks to be made. If you notice anything off kilter, please sound off in the comments. Or just drop us a note about how awesome this all is, that's cool too.

Enjoy the new site!

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The quest to get thinner, stronger, faster, and healthier with iMore and Mobile Nations continues!

We’ve survived the first week of Mobile Nations Fitness Month. We’ve set our goals and whether we achieved them (yay!) or are still working on them (take that!), we’re feeling better and doing better because of it. And we’re getting tons of great feedback. This might just be the year where mobile and lifestyle fully come together, where eHealth and eFitness — or iHealth and iFitness — finally start making the impact we’ve all been waiting for. It’s gone from being a token arm band case to being an entire ecosystem of highly specialized companion apps and accessories.

We recorded a special edition of ZEN and TECH with CrackBerry.com’ Kevin Michaluk, where we answered a lot of questions, cleared up some big misconceptions, and went over a lot of dos and don’ts to get things going.

Also Kevin produced the single greatest (or most terrifying) fitness video in the history of YouTube. Watch his Sexy and you know it workout.

So let’s keep it going! Once again, we’re setting reasonable, attainable goals, and we’re going to take advantage of our awesome community to make sure we attain them. We have a special edition of our Superfunctional podcast coming your way this weekend to help keep you motivated. Since it’s a new week, we’ve got a new Fitness Month thread in the forums to keep us focused, keep us accountable, and keep us keeping on!

Oh, and we’re still giving away a lot of great prizes!

• Weekly drawings for an TouchPad Touchstone. We’re giving away 4 total, one each week!
• Grand prize drawing for a 32GB TouchPad Bundle (includes Touchstone, Bluetooth Keyboard, and Folio Case)!

Our ZEN and TECH podcast has also added to the pot with an Xbox 360 Kinect giveaway, so be sure to enter that as well!

So hurry up and jump into the forums and pick your goal for week 2. Mobile Nations fitness month continues!

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This time last year, Derek, Dieter, and Riz were running around San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center covering what turned out to be the biggest planned event in the history of webOS. It was the coming out party for webOS under HP, and it came to be known as “Think Beyond.” One year ago, HP SVP and Palm Global Business Unit manager Jon Rubinstein got up on the stage to introduce, in order, the tiny HP Veer smartphone, the HP Pre3 – larger, thinner, and more powerful webOS smartphone that the faithful had been waiting for – and the first webOS tablet, the HP TouchPad, all slated by the end of Summer 2011

That day brought more than hardware announcements. We got our first look at webOS 3.0 on the TouchPad, met the new VP of Developer Relations Richard Kerris, found out that HP was not going to update older handsets to webOS 2.0, and said goodbye to the Palm brand. Things were looking up – even if the TouchPad wasn’t a mind-blowing piece of hardware, it was the first of what we hoped would be several products to take the market by storm.

The Veer shipped to middling reviews in May and the TouchPad followed in July. And then everything went downhill from there. After just a month on the market, HP cut the TouchPad’s price by $100, and ten days after that pulled the rug out from under the webOS community by canceling all webOS hardware development. Since then we’ve gone through a hardware fire sale, a fired CEO, the loss of Kerris, Rubinstein, and many others, questions about the future of the platform, and emerged on the other side with plans for going open source with a new Open webOS.

My, what a year it has been.

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Ready to jump into the wide world of homebrew on your TouchPad, Pre, or Veer? Alright! Here’s what you need:

• Your webOS tablet or smartphone
• A computer, Mac or PC, connected to the internet
• A Micro-USB cable to connect the webOS device to your computer (you can use the cable that came with the device, but any Micro-USB cable will do)
• A stiff drink (this isn’t required, but you’ll deserve one for being awesome enough to be doing homebrew)

Got that? Okay, time for some clarifications. webOS devices do not need to be “rooted” – they come from the factory open enough that special tools aren’t needed to install apps outside of the App Catalog or gain access to the operating system. The process of getting a homebrew installer set-up is relatively straight-forward and doesn’t involve anything scary or potentially warranty voiding (there are potentially warranty-voiding things you can do after that, but everything described in this how-to is perfectly acceptable).

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We’ll be honest – this one is more for the developers and our own lazy purposes. Right now, webOS App Catalog developers are only able to generate promo codes for their apps on a per-country basis, i.e. a promo code can only be generated for a specific country, and doing so for other countries requires a different promo code. Here’s a glimpse into the headache of country-specific promo codes.

When we do our weekly app giveaways here on webOS Nation, we have to get a multi-use USA code from the developer to send out to the winners, knowing that the majority will be on the American App Catalog. But should they be an international user on, say, the German App Catalog? Then that code won’t work for them and they need a German promo code. Not a problem, we’ll get one from the developer. Now do that for 15-20% of the winners in our giveaways. It can escalate a migraine to a headache real fast keeping track of which winners need a code for which country.

It’s even worse if you’re a developer who wants to just put a promo code out there but still cover all the international bases – you have to make one for each of the ten countries that support promo codes and hope that people pick them up. Amusingly/frustratingly, even though HP supports app sales to Singapore, they never got around to adding Singapore to the promo code selection list.

The time has come to overhaul the promo code system. The first step is to institute global promo codes – one code to cover every country. We can forgive not supporting promo codes in countries where app sales aren’t happening, though that’s something that needs to be worked on too. The second step is to eliminate the requirement for having a payment method on file with the App Catalog in order to use a promo code. Best Buy doesn’t require that I have cash on me when I use a Best Buy gift card, why should the App Catalog need a credit card to use a promo code?

And step the third: make them shorter. The current 32-digit alpha-numeric promo code system is both ridiculously hard to manually enter and overkill – it allows for 1.9 quattuordecillion (that’s 1.9 billion trillion trillion trillion) possibilities. Note only would it be near impossible to guess a promo code, even with a computer doing the inputting, but HP is never ever going to run out of combinations. Our humble suggestion: cut it down to eight alpha-numeric characters. That’s still 2.8 trillion possibilities. Go for ten (3.6 quadrillion) or twelve (4.7 quintillion) if you’re feeling antsy about hackability.

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 is sure to be an awesome discussion.

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It was early December. The whirlwind year that was 2011 was coming to a close and the future of webOS was still a great unknown. But one developer stood up and proclaimed, “My name is Zhephree, and I shall build an app to catalog my media!” And so it was done.

Fast-forward to today and Geoff Gauchet’s Wooden Rows app is now available for TouchPad owners. The app leverage’s Amazon’s vast database of books, CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, and video games to allow the user to build a searchable library of their own personal physical collection. With that library put together you can then even keep track of when you’ve loaned things out to friends. Wooden Rows is not a content portal – you can’t watch your movies, read your books, or listen to your music through it, nor will you likely ever be able to – it’s a personal inventory tracker. If you’ve got a large media library, we can think of much worse ways to spend $3.99.

If you’re in the mood to spend that amount twice, Zhephree has also cut their price of their other flagship app by a dollar, bringing the social network aggregator incredible! (properly lowercase and exclaimed, for the record) down to $3.99 as well. The move is a permanent price cut, and should be an easier pill to swallow for users looking to unite their Facebook, Flickr, foursquare, and Twitter existences in one cohesive stream.

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A few months back, deep in the midst of the TouchPad fire sale, at least a few of HP’s webOS tablets shipped out the door and to customers with an unexpected install: Android. While HP never figured out exactly how their internal build of Android got released into the public, they’ve gone ahead and released the kernel and GPL (General Public License – i.e. open source) components. It’s worth noting that releasing this is not something HP had to do – while those that ship Android devices are required by the licensing terms to release the kernel to open source, HP’s release was accidental and thus open sourcing was not required – this release can be chalked up to goodwill, even if resulting from being pressured into doing it.

As was noted on RootzWiki, the source code released appears to have been developer separately from webOS on the TouchPad, possibly as a precursor project to HP’s acquisition of Palm. The last change in the code was in March 2011, three months before the TouchPad’s July 2011 release, but well after HP announced the webOS tablet in February. The crew at RootzWiki is understandably encouraged by the release and intends to adopt various portions into the CyanogenMod 9 Android 4.0 port.

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Good news, webOS Nation: Theme Manager is now available! The Enyo-based app by Janne Julkunen (better known around these parts as homebrew master coder Sconix) is now available from WebOS Internals and stands ready to safely install, remove, and mix-and-match your themes.

Thanks to AUSMT, Theme Manager is 100% update safe, meaning you shouldn’t have to panic about removing themes before installing an update to webOS. The app can manage both ZIP- and IPK-packaged themes, both side-loaded and downloaded. Themes are even applied in the background by Theme Manager, though a quick Luna Restart may be required afterwards for the changes to take affect.

Have multiple themes and like to switch things up? You can actually mix-and-match parts from multiple themes – a wallpaper from here, icons from there, a boot logo from that one, and system menus from the other one. You can even just pick an aspect or two from a single theme and add them to the default theme – just pick that one part of the theme you like and hit the apply button.

We’re working on adapting our own themes gallery here at webOS Nation to be Theme Manager compatible, in the meantime developers interested in packaging their themes for compatibility can find instructions on how to make that happen at the source link below.

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