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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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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When developing and pushing the limits of webOS applications, it can be helpful to know some of the boundaries you might run into. Here are a few that have come up in the past for other developers: Maximum size for an ipk file (i.e., the app package): 200MB. You can locally install larger ipks, and [...]

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The good folks at MakleSoft are celebrating the holiday season and the release of their new app Plancastic! by offering both of their webOS apps on sale for a limited time.

• Plancastic!  $0.99  (first 1,000 paid downloads)
• SecuStore  $4.49  (50% off the regular $8.99)

Plancastic! is a new Plancast client for webOS.  Plancast is a free web based service that allows you to share your upcoming calendar and events with friends and family. SecuStore is a highly polished, full featured password and data encryption app.  Both are on sale now in the official Palm App Catalog.

While you’re at it download the free On Sale app from the App Catalog for a full list of apps currently on sale.  Go ahead, get yourself and your webOS device some new and shiny coding this holiday season.  Your Pre 2, Pixi 2, Pre or Pixi (Plus or Minus… this is getting confusing) will thank you for it.

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If you’re one of those folks that lives in a country where webOS handsets aren’t yet available, but you couldn’t help yourself and got one unlocked and are running it on your network of choice, then you might want to fire up the App Catalog and check out what may be waiting for you. We’ve received reports from Portugal and Sweden that the App Catalog, at least in its free apps version, is now available to those users, despite being in a country where Palm doesn’t officially provide services. And if we had to guess, it’s probably becoming available elsewhere. Is this the first step in Palm’s path to eventually open up the App Catalog to everybody (ecommerce included)? We certainly hope so.

Thanks to Stefan and Gilberto for the tips!

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Happy Tuesday, everyone! It’s Tuesday that we look at Monday’s apps, and Wednesday that we look at Tuesday’s. It can be confusing, but remember this: there are more apps, and that’s a good thing.

• Picture News brings you the latest news (served up by Yahoo) as a wall of easily-browsed pictures.
• GetHuman provides major business phone numbers, chat options, email address and more that will get you to a real person instead of dealing with an automated routing system.

There are more apps, and they are after the break. Yeah, you’ve gotta click it.

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An app round-up on Sunday? What is this devil magic? It’s the result of new apps on, wait for it, Saturday. Yeah, weekend apps. What’s up with that? Either way, it’s good, because it lets us catch up on Friday before Tuesday hits. Cool, eh?

• Discography for webOS hooks into the user-maintained catalog at Discogs.com to get your info on albums.
• Plancastic allows you to easily share your plans with friends and colleagues using Plancast.
• My Diary is a password-protected digital diary with search and sharing, though we don’t know why you’d want to share a supposed to be private diary. Whatevs.

There’s more? Yes, there’s more! After the break, o’course.

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After a slow one-app Tuesday, things picked up considerably on Wednesday to give us plenty to talk about on this Thursday. Here’s a sampling:

• BeamOut combines block breaker with tilt arcade with three dimensional goodness
• Relego for Read It Later is a full-featured Read It Later client, built by a team of webOS developers in one day during the hackathon.
• WebOSdev 2010 lets you watch all of the presentations from HP webOS Developer Day NYC 2010 in one place.

The rest, as you may have already figured out, is after the break. We wouldn’t have said plenty if we didn’t mean it.

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We’re going back to Friday again, because, well, we were so overwhelmed with hours of Angry Birds Seasons play that we never got around to it. So today you get Friday and Monday’s apps! Cool?

• Drugscyclopedia access a database of more than ten thousand drugs, and offers integration with your favorite read later and Twitter apps.
• Angry Birds Seasons is here to offer Christmas cheer in the form of slightshot-launched kamikaze birds. Also released in Pixi size.
• DigiNotes and DigiTask provide a replacement for Memos and Tasks, and come complete with categories, PIN security, online integration, and calendar reminders.
• zNibble is the way ringtone creation should be: pick any portion of a song on your phone to be a ringtone, not just the beginning.

This isn’t it. Far from it, in fact. All the rest is in the usual spot, after the break.

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¡Buenas noticias, México! It is now possible for you to download paid apps from the App Catalog, they’ll even take your pesos at a very generous exchange rate. Bad news: you have to hack webOS 1.4.5 onto your phone to get it to work, because for reasons that we cannot fathom Telcel’s Palm Pre phones have yet to receive the update to enable the ecommerce App Catalog. They’re still stuck on webOS 1.4.0. Mind boggling, we know.

PreCentral reader Juan let us know that he had managed to get his Telcel Pre running 1.4.5, and up until last week he’d been able to view all sorts of apps in the App Catalog, but had never been able to complete a purchase. But now if he tries to download one of the paid apps that shows up in the Mexican version of the App Catalog, he’s prompted for credit card account information and then permitted to buy.

So far each app he’s tried to buy (iGPS, Internet Radio Pro) has gone through successfully. Additionally, the exchange rate for Mexican pesos to US dollars has been fairly generous, running at 1.00 USD = 10.00 MXN, whereas the current value is more like 1.00 USD = 12.40 MXN.

Is the Palm expanding the App Catalog to support more countries, even where App Catalog support is lacking (or where Palm technically doesn’t even have service), or just a glitch? We don’t know, but we’re glad to see more people getting access to the full App Catalog, even if they have to hack their phones to get there.

Thanks Juan!

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