For over 6 months now, users and developers alike have been reporting to Palm about a bug in the German App Catalog that prevents proper time-based categories from appearing. Thankfully, today, a workaround has been discovered!

Earlier today, ArthurThornton discovered the issue was actually due to a localization fumble and posted about it on the Palm Dev forums.

Essentially, the bug is caused by a simple issue with capital letters. The translations of "today" and "yesterday" listed in the German translations are "Heute" and "Gestern". However the App Catalog compares those strings to their all-lowercase equivalents.

Palm’s Ben Combee has since posted saying he’s requested the fix be in the next OTA update, but whether that happens is up in the air. Thankfully there’s 2 workarounds to fix the issue right now.

The first option, is to use Internalz to fix the translations. Navigate to /usr/palm/applications/com.palm.app.findapps/resources/de_de/ and open the strings.json file.  Then just change the "Heute" and "Gestern" lines, near the end, to all lowercase and save the file.

The second option is a bit easier. I’ve placed the translation changes into a standard patch file about in this forum post.  You can install it with WebOSQuickInstall or Internalz.

This is just another example of how amazing the webOS community can be and how it can benefit Palm. A low-priority bug for Palm gets solved for them and users benefit from a fixed App Catalog. A win-win scenario and one that strengthens the webOS developer community with Palm for the better.

Source: Palm Dev Forums; Via: Blacklight (Twitter)

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Everyone know that webOS 1.4 brought with it many welcomed features and additions.  Unfortunately it also brought with it a few bugs.

When 1.4 arrived, several people took notice that both the PDF View app and the Doc View app now suddenly were missing multi-touch.  Given the recent legal new with App and HTC, some worried it may have been removed intentionally.

Thankfully, Palm Tech Support employee and PreCentral forum member HardBeatZ, popped in to tell us Palm has this tracked as a bug in their system. Furthermore, a few days later, Palm’s own Ben Combee posted in the official Palm forums, saying

I checked on this. The lack of pinch zoom is a bug with some common code in PDF and doc viewer that wasn’t updated for 1.4, and it looks like it’s been fixed for a future release.

Not only was that an unintentional bug, but it sounds as though it’s already been fixed and will be in a future update (presumably webOS 1.4.1). Big ups to Palm for allowing their people to be out there in the community, letting us know we’re not crazy and that fixes are coming.

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With all of the attention on Windows Phone 7 Series’ lack of true multitasking, we wanted to point out that figuring out multitasking on webOS is still a work in progress.

Being able to do background processing is one thing the webOS is know for. So when 1.4 changed how background processes worked, developers took notice.  Absent from the list of 1.4 changes was an alteration that widely affected applications that work in the background.

Essentially, before 1.4, background applications wouldn’t close unless the developer specified them to. Makes sense, however some reports suggest the built-in javascript garbage collector wouldn’t be called on background applications, causing memory leaks, and potentially leading the "too many cards" error.

Developers were the first to notice this changed with webOS 1.4. Now, after 15 seconds, applications without an active stage are automatically closed. Naturally this caused a bit of frustration; getting an active GPS location alone can take 30+ seconds, so how could a background applications get everything done in 15 seconds?

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Oh, daylight savings time changes.  You wreak havok on our sleep schedules and evidently, our phones. A number of users (this blogger included) have been experiencing odd behavior from their phones with today’s time change.

One bug users are noticing is that the time displayed in the top bar is different than that of what’s shown on the lock screen and in the clock app.  The issue doesn’t appear to be affecting the  functionality of the core PIM apps, as calendar entries and emails are all showing the correct time stamp.  The other issue being reported is less benign, and users in this forum thread are finding that calendar entries are shifting a full hour ahead of the actual time – a major inconvenience to be sure.  

Toggling airplane mode or performing a reset has been found to remedy the issue in both cases for some, though the issues have persisted for most of those who have been experiencing them. 

So while we get to the bottom of what might be causing this, let us know in the comments: have you experienced any DST bugs today?

Thanks to everyone that sent this in!

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Palm has updated its support Web site with a confirmation of the Exchange/webOS calendar error and workaround previously discussed here:

Palm has discovered that the turn of the year 2010 has surfaced an issue that affects customers who use Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) to synchronize their calendars. Data remains intact on the device; however, this issue prevents the data from being displayed correctly in the Calendar application. It impacts all versions of webOS.

Customers synchronizing calendars using EAS are not able to see events from any calendar source on their webOS phone until they perform a manual workaround to correct the issue (see below for instructions). After performing the workaround, Calendar events from each source should display correctly.

This manual workaround may need to be performed again if the issue resurfaces. Palm is actively working on a software update and will provide a new version for download over the air as soon as possible.

The support article goes on to describe the year-shift workaround that others have found temporarily solves the problem.

We’re glad to see that Palm plans an OTA update to address this issue, and will let you know as soon as it becomes available.

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We’ve been hearing reports that since webOS 1.3.1, some Exchange users have been experiencing an issue that prevents the successful sync of calendar data between their phones and Exchange servers. The issue, which appears to be linked to an incorrect timezone setting, does have an unofficial workaround: Going to the Date & Time menu, setting Network time to "off", and manually selecting the correct time zone should restore proper sync functionality.

Palm has recognized that this is an issue for some, but it seems that they’re having a difficult time reproducing this issue.  A Palm Technical Support employee responded directly to users with this issue in their support forums:

We have been trying to reproduce this for awhile and can’t get the same things you guys are seeing to appear on devices that we are using, so we would like to possibly look at some log files on the devices and see what is causing the error.

Specifically we would like to see a log from someone that turned off network time and the issue resolved, and someone that doing the same thing did not resolve this issue.

The good news is that given Palm’s track record, I think that we can safely assume that if this issue does turn out to be a widespread one, they will likely release a fix in short order. We’ve seen rapid fire bug fixes in the past: if you recall, webOS 1.2.1 was released a short five days after 1.2.0, fixing the Exchange issues brought by that release.

So, help us gauge just how widespread this is: have you been affected by this bug?

Thanks to Trajadoja for the tip!

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