If you are a webOS developer (or would like to be), AT&T has an upcoming webinar for you. “An Introduction to Palm webOS,” featuring Josh Marinacci of Palm’s Developer Relations team, will be happening on Thursday, June 17, from 10-11 a.m. Pacific time:

From beginners to developers with intermediate knowledge of mobile development, this session will benefit anyone looking to build a new mobile application or those interested in easily porting existing mobile applications to a new platform for greater distribution.

In addition to learning about webOS development, attendees may also enter to win an AT&T smartphone (one would hope they’d choose the Pre Plus or Pixi Plus!).

More details and signup information are available on the AT&T Developer Program Web site. Kudos to AT&T for its support of webOS development, and we look forward to hearing feedback from those who participate in the webinar.

Thanks to TopTongueBarry in our forum for the tip!
 

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If anyone needed further proof that Palm loves the webOS developer community, look no further than what happened to Rob Bredow of Kaboom Apps, developer of favorite game Paratrooper (currently ranked #18 on the Palm Hot Apps list. According to Josh, after providing some high-resolution graphics of Paratrooper to Palm for its CTIA and CES displays, he got an e-mail asking if he would like the panel they displayed. Of course, he agreed, and it just arrived in a crate measuring 10 feet tall and 4.5 feet wide.

Hit up a few more pictures of the big care package after the break.

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One of the greatest parts of knowing that the Palm Developer Relations team are the ones working on the Facebook app, is hearing their comments on development.

A few days ago, Palm updated Facebook on their beta feed to version 1.1.6. On the Palm Developer Center Blog, the team posted an interesting article on it. Evidently, there were 2 central issues they discovered during development, that could prove useful for third party developers to learn from.

The first issue was that if service requests don’t get assigned to a variable, there’s a chance the javascript garbage collector might scoop it off into oblivion. Kevin Decker has written up a very informative article discussing a solution that is not only effective, but also memory efficient.

The second issue has to do with multi-stage applications and reminds developers that some old habits, like referencing the document directly, or using prototype to get a document’s element, may cause trouble. The team found a few workable alternatives that will hopefully save other developers some time debugging.

The Developer Relations team assist developers with issues on a daily basis. Their work on the Facebook app has been a testament to that. Makes one wonder what the future of the Facebook app may hold.

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Good news, developers and prospective developers. Palm has taken another step forward in developer relations and has decided to start a YouTube video podcast series.

The first episode of Palm’s video podcast series was posted yesterday and it doesn’t disappoint. Hosted by the well-known Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer, the presentation reaffirms Palm’s deep commitment to their developer base.

This episode covered the current status of developing on webOS. Ben and Dion delve into why they love the webOS and their decision to join Palm. Listening to them, it’s hard not to like webOS. It’s also clear that they’re beyond passionate on the matter and want prospective developers to be too.

Ben and Dion continued the discussion, talking about the Plugin Development Kit (PDK) and the inclusive environment they want the webOS to be. Looking at the possible official/unofficial coding options, it seems to show a lot of potential there; normal HTML/CSS/JS webOS apps, native C plugin apps, Qt plugin apps and future Adobe AIR/Flash apps.  Palm webOS really does seem to be a "can-do" mobile operating system. Personally, I’m excited to see the fantastic HTML5-PDK hybrid apps coming out once the App Catalog opens up for them.

For a half-hour video, Ben and Dion managed to cover a lot. Everything from Project Appetite and Project Ares (with Project Appetite, we learned the site has a few neat Easter eggs) to app distribution methods and the Hot Apps contest.

It will be very exciting to see where this series goes. From the sounds of it, this could be a very popular, providing both valuable information for developers as well as a great communication tool between Palm and developers, directly from 2 big names in the company. Definitely a sign Palm wants to be involved on a more personal level with developers, welcomed with open arms.

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The webOS 1.4 update brought many new and welcomed features. One such feature was the new app loading system. It brought immediate app launch feedback and gave a pleasant splash screen to make it seem as though apps were loading a lot faster.

The splash screen system has been generally quite well received, with only a small number of people not liking it.

Keen-eyed users may have noticed several webOS apps seemed to have customized splash screen.  Apps like the web browser, tasks, and the calculator (as shown in the screenshot to the right) have customized splash screens.

Metaview is one such keen observer. On his blog, he explains how easy it is to add custom splash screens to any app.  In fact, all developers need to do is create a 320×480px PNG background image and a 256×256px PNG icon image then add then to your app’s appinfo.json file like:

"splashicon": "icon-256×256.png",
"splashBackground":"images/splash-screenshot-default.png",

Some might wonder why this neat new option is mysteriously absent from Palm’s appinfo.json breakdown. Well, put simply, that page is a bit out of date. In fact, it still refers to "miniicon", when that was officially changed to "smallicon" a while ago.  It’s very doubtful that using a custom splash screen in your app you cause any app submission guideline issues.

This is a neat bit of customization allowed on Palm’s part. It’ll certainly be interesting to see how creative developers can get in the future with their own splash graphics.

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Now that Palm has finally come to their senses bringing 3D games to the webOS platform — they made the announcement of this great news at CES 2010. They will be present at the 2010 Game Developers Conference, even though their new Plug-in Development Kit (PDK) is limited to a few select developers for [...]

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After all this time, Palm has opened up officially the developer program, now any developer can submit his/her applications. Palm is closer to its goal, which is in their own words, to “bring the true power of the web to a mobile platform for the first time.”

The official App Catalog remains, of course, but [...]

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[Image via Engadget]

Over the weekend, numerous press reports (such as this one from sister-site Android Central) have been brewing about the "Google Phone." Whether Google intends to brand and market it to the public is still an open question, but what one thing that does appear to be settled is that the phone is meant to be a developer phone, as happened with versions of the G1 and Magic before it. All the buzz reminded us at PreCentral that we haven’t said this stridently enough yet: Palm needs to release a webOS developer phone sooner rather than later.

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Those following the PreCentral video recording thread will know this has been a long time coming.  Back before webOS 1.3.1, video recording was a pipe dream and would require a lot of work to get done in a successful, safe manner.

However, webOS 1.3.1 changed all that.  Many of those in the private beta developer release of 1.3.1 noticed Palm’s GStreamer libraries were significantly updated. GStreamer, for those unaware, is the media framework used in the webOS and is responsible for camera operation and media playback. With webOS 1.3.1, essentially everything was there.

Evidently, Palm could release an updated camera service and an updated Camera application, and some developers thought they would. When webOS 1.3.1 went live without video recording, Zsoc (aka Prenosicator on the forums) decided not to wait for Palm and figured out a plan to create a 3rd party video recorder.

Zsoc rebuilt a modified GStreamer binary, to fix an issue that otherwise would require a pre-set recording time. With that in hand and Zsoc’s understanding of GStreamer, I worked with him to build a custom service for video recorder and he built a webOS application frontend (with assistance from Roy from Pre101).

Well, it’s my pleasure to announce the first alpha testing is now underway. Currently things are pretty limited and by no means polished. That said, it records at 30 FPS 480×320px resolution and it supports AAC, AMRNB, and MP3 audio encoding as well as MPEG-4, H.263, and H.264/AVC video encoding. In addition it supports mp4 and 3gp file output, with the option to enable the camera’s flash while recording.  Oh, and the best part, the videos can be replayed in the Pre’s video player!

For those adventurous, and aware of the many risks of using alpha software, the GstService and Precorder installation information/ipk links can be found at its wiki page.

Update from Dieter: How about a sample video? It’s after the break!

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As most of you already know, Apple has broken iTunes sync with the Palm Pre yet again. Yes, it is unfortunate for those who rely solely on that to sync their Pre. Well, there are other options out there you know? But if you are still waiting on Palm to fix it, you might get [...]

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