Having recently acquired iambic, SplashData announced in an email sent to iambic customers that they intend to expand their offerings onto new platforms. Specifically, Agendus, and specifically onto webOS and Android:

If you haven’t heard, SplashData has acquired iambic, combining the resources of two of the most respected and established developers of mobile productivity software. We are very excited to have the opportunity to work on Agendus and expand its features as well as bring it to new mobile platforms such as Android and webOS.

Agendus is iambic’s signature product and something missed by a great many Palm OS users after making the switch to webOS. When we’ll see Agendus on webOS and what condition it will be in is still up in the air, but it’s great to hear that it’s coming regardless. And trust us, as soon as we hear something more, we’ll let you know!

If you’re not familiar with Agendus, it began as a Palm OS app (back in the day when the were still called applications) that served as a replacement for the Palm OS Date Book. Agendus was more than just another calendar: it integrated with your memos, tasks, contacts, and more to bring it all into one tightly-knit package: your agenda. There’s even more to it than that – to see why Agendus was such a beloved Palm OS app, we’re going to point you to Agendus’ extensive feature list. If just one quarter of those features make it to webOS we’ll be exceedingly happy campers.

Thanks to Doug for the tip!

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It has been a long time since the Missing Sync from Mark/Space released the PC version of their software to work with your webOS handset. Now they have updated that version to finally have a true 2-Way Calendar PC Sync for your Palm Pre or Pixi smartphones.

Now the Mac users amongst you are [...]

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Who says PC can’t have fun too? The folks over at Mark/Space may be of the Macintosh-inclined variety, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t going to work to make their products fully capable for their Windows-using brethren. To that end, Mark/Space has released a new version of The Missing Sync for webOS that brings two-way calendar synchronization to the PC side of their software. Previously two-way calendar sync was only supported for Mac users.

Change an event name on your webOS phone and sync it back to your computer. Add a location and adjust the time on your PC and then push that back to your phone. Life with webOS and Outlook just got easier. The Missing Sync for webOS is available from Mark/Space’s website for $39.95. A free webOS companion app needed to trigger and manage the sync is available in the Palm App Catalog. Future updates to The Missing Sync promise to bring Tasks and Notes synchronization to both PC and Mac users.

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Fire up your updaters (after you uninstall patches and themes, natch), for Palm has pushed out webOS 1.3.5.1 the Pre and Pixi on Sprint. The update is for one purpose and one purpose only, if the release notes are to be believed: fixing that nasty Exchange 2010 bug we’ve been telling you about and that Palm acknowledged earlier.

This release fixes an issue in which the Calendar app displayed no events for any account after a user synchronized Calendar with an Exchange account. With this update, Calendar events now appear correctly after an Exchange sync.

Good on you, Palm, for the quick turnaround on a critical bug. Next time, though, let’s leave the "bug / quick-turn-around" step out, mmkay? This  wasn’t the first time we saw Exchange busted (or the second, even), let’s make sure it was the last.

Thanks to everybody who 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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Thanks to Jim for the heads up!

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Our Palm Pre phones just lit up with the news: webOS 1.3.5 is now available for download. The update weighs in at just 13 MB, but that 13 MB brings a slew of bug fixes as well as the fixing of much-maligned app limit. We’re downloading it now, we’ll let you know what we find in a bit.

As a reminder to all patchers and themers: Be sure to remove all patches and themes before installing any webOS update. We don’t want you to end up with a wonky install. You do not have to uninstall Preware or any other homebrew apps – just the patches and and themes.

UPDATE [8:38]: Palm’s servers seem to be being hit pretty hard, it’s going slow here. In the meantime, Palm has posted the for both the Palm Pre and the Palm Pixi, and we’ve got it for you after the break.

Highlights:

• App limit fixed.
• App Catalog downloads continue even after leaving the app’s page.
• App purchases have been expanded to US territories (sorry Europe, Canada, etc).
• Switching between days in Calendar is now faster.
• Sprint Navigation can be launched from a Contact.
• Palm Profile app restores happen in the background, letting the user get to the phone faster.
• Future webOS updates can be downloaded over 2G wireless (1xRTT).
• Notifications now work in landscape mode (which has strangely lost the rounded corners).

UPDATE [9:06]: Cool, there’s now a progress meter on the install screen spinner doohicky. It’s slow going, but at least we can see that it’s going now.

Also, the install has added one more step in the form of ‘unpacking.’ Instead of downloading the entire OS over again, webOS updates now come in the form of binary deltas, which essentially boils down to downloading only the new code, which then must be ‘unpacked’

Additionally, the code genies over at WebOS Internals have dug into the update package and found some interesting stuff, notably opengles.ipk and opengles-omap3.ipk, which are part of the groundwork for enabling the GPU. Good times, coming right up!

UPDATE [9:27]: Preware appears to be broken in webOS 1.3.5. It’s throwing up an ‘OnFeeds Error’ and not even getting to load the feeds. Let’s hope this is a server-side fix.

UPDATE [9:45]: rem_kujawa notes that you can use WebOS Quick Install (make sure you have version 2.96) to remove both Preware and its Package Manager, reinstall, and you should be good to go.

UPDATE [11:12]: It seems that the app migration system Palm devised to move your stuff from the /var partition to the USB drive partition only moves App Catalog apps. All homebrew stuff has been left behind in /var. If you want to move homebrew apps to the new folder, you’re going to have to delete them and reinstall.

UPDATE [11:23]: It also seems that the migration utility doesn’t transfer some app data. For example, user data from Paratrooper was left behind and the game launches as if never played before with no saved scores or progress.

read more

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Do you want Microsoft Exchange for all that magical calendar, email, and contacts syncing and pushing onto your webOS phone, but don’t feel like paying for a server all your own? Mail2Web may be the solution you’ve been looking for. The service hooks into your current email accounts, including Gmail and Hotmail, as well as your ISP or business mails, pushes it through their Exchange servers, and down to your phone.

Mail2Web also provides you with something that your Palm Profile doesn’t give: online web browser access through a standard Outlook Web Access client. Mail2Web costs $4.95/month, though a 60-day free trial is currently available. For more information, check out Mail2Web’s website.

Of course, there are plenty of other hosted-exchange services out there like 4smartphone and 1and1 – which is your favorite?

Thanks to not-yet-pre for the tip!

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We at PreCentral receive a lot of tips throughout the day, but more and more over the past few weeks our inbox has been flooding with stories of users having just reset or replaced their webOS phones only to find that their Palm Profile did not back up all their data as promised. If you haven’t experienced this issue you’re in the lucky majority, but it seems the rate of the backup failures is accelerating and spreading.

We do feel your pain – one of our own staff members was hit by this bug and lost all of his contacts, calendar events, memos, and tasks. The only thing that was saved were his apps, which is a small consolation when you’ve just lost hundreds of phone numbers and email addresses accumulated over the years.

While we’re waiting for a third-party backup solution to land, we did some investigating. It turns out that the problem stems from corrupted backups, which is nothing new in the backup industry. Corrupted data happens all the time, but there are always safeguards to ensure that it doesn’t corrupt the system. Usually, that’s a prior backup. The issue is that the Palm Profile doesn’t keep anything other than the most recent backup, corrupted or not. Since your phone doesn’t provide any feedback on backups, even when they end up as corrupted, webOS users have no idea whether or not their backup was successfully completed. That is, until you reset your phone and realize that everything is lost.

Update: Palm has issued an official statement on the situation:

We are seeing a small number of customers who have experienced issues transferring their Palm Profile information to another Palm webOS device. Palm and Sprint are working closely together to support these customers to successfully transfer their information to the new device

read more

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If you were to ask us, we’d have your contacts’ birthdays all show up automagically in the calendar, like they did in the Palm OS of old. But it isn’t happening, and if you want to get around that, where there’s a will there is indeed a way. Reader weldonhd3 showed us two ways to get your birthdays into Calendar, dependent upon where those birthdays are coming from. Truly, weldonhd3 is a genius. And forgetful when it comes to birthdays. They go hand-in-hand, really.

First up is Google. Your Google contacts that have associated birthdays can be pulled into your Google Calendar and then synced down to your Pre. All you need to do is open Google Calendar in your desktop browser, click on Settings (top right corner), then Calendars. In the middle right of the page click on “Browse interesting calendars,” select the More tab, and then click Subscribe next to the “Contacts’ birthdays and events.” After a few hours the calendar should be added to your phone with the magic that is Synergy. From there, if you ever add a birthday to a Google contact it should appear in the calendar and be pushed back to the phone.

But that depends on you to do the work of entering birthdays. And work is unacceptable, right? You have Facebook, and your friends have mostly entered their birthdays into their profiles, so why not get it on your Pre? Through the magic of Facebook apps you can do it, though it lacks a bit of the automagic synergizin’ that we want. Here’s how it works: add the Birthday Exporter app to your Facebook profile, export to an iCal file, and then import it into Google Calendar.

Voilà, birthdays in calendar!

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