webOS Developer Geoff Gauchet (aka @zhephree) has brought plenty of goodness to us all, most famously with his FourSquare app and Neato! for shooting data to and from webOS devices and computers. For his next trick, Gauchet is planning on bringing a new app called Incredible! that will serve as an aggregated social media reading tool.

Incredible! will pull in Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, Flickr, Gowalla, Picasa, Delicious, LinkedIn, YouTube, Untappd, and, yes, a few other streams into a single unified app. Rather than try to be a full-featured client for all of these services, Incredible! will focus on providing a single way to read your entire social stream in an interface that is able to give you all those services in something actually readable.

There have been attempts to do similar things on other platforms (MotoBlur on Android comes to mind) and even on the desktop. Based on the screenshots and plans for the app, we’re optimistic that Gauchet just may have done a better job than any of them. Read on for our exclusive preview of Incredible!

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If there’s one homebrew app that’s been incredibly popular from the start, it’s been Music Player (Remix). What started as an enhancement of the built-in webOS Music app, Remix has evolved to version 2.0 with a completely new UI, awesome utilization of dashboard controls, and more.

See everything that’s new, including a video, after the break!

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One of the top tier features for webOS 2.0 is Exhibition – a feature that allows your device to display the app of your choice when it’s set down on the Touchstone for charging. Unfortunately, it’s not ready yet (it’s coming in that OTA update), but we did just get a quick preview at the Palm Developer Day here in New York.

Basically when you set your Pre down on the Touchstone your Exhibition app Zooms in from the distance with a very cool animation. At that point it’s just running, displaying whatever information you’d like it to. Palm recommends you don’t clutter up your Exhibition mode with multiple screens from your app – keep it simple. Palm also recommends you use a snazzy horizontal scroll-in animation that’s almost Windows Phone-eque in how it handles moving text around the screen.

The basic interaction is that you have your app taking up the full screen, hiding the status bar. There is a semi-transparent black bar on the top that displays the time – you can tap or swipe down from the top of the device to switch between different Exhibition modes.  There is also another semi-transparent bar at the bottom for showing notifications. Finally, there will be an Exhibition Preferences App where you can choose your default Exhibition mode and also configure which other modes will be in your drop-down selection list when you’re in Exhibition.

Palm showed a simple clock, an Agenda view, and a photo slideshow. There was also the beginnings of a Facebook Exhibition mode, but it doesn’t look fully baked yet.

Speaking of not fully baked – Exhibition itself isn’t, this was just an early preview. The interface may change a bit before launch, so don’t go judging just yet. Now that we’ve laid down the caveats, head on after the break for the gallery of slides!

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While Facebook is busy building apps for iOS and Android, the Palm Developer Relations Team is continuing to push the boundaries with their own webOS Facebook app. The latest update to the public Facebook app beta, version 1.4.53 brings support for Facebook Places, their location-based service that allows you to “check-in” at various locations. Places is gaining a prominent spot in the navigation menu, and as you’d expect each Places location receives its own page. The first major event we can see testing the new beta’s capabilities? Palm Developer Day NYC 2010, of course.

Source: Facebook for HP webOS; Thanks to everybody that sent this in!

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In this edition of our Tip Roundup, we thought it would be a good idea to present the top tips as rated by you, the users. In case you haven’t noticed, every tip includes a rating area on the bottom that allows you to give anywhere from 1 to 5 stars for that tip. So, please be sure to always rate the usefulness of the tips you read, so we can find the best ones to share in the future. Continue reading after the break to find out which tips took the top honors

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The webOS Facebook app was recently updated to support launching multiple instances of the app in separate cards.  This is really convenient because it allows you to can keep your place in your News Feed or on a personals profile while still loading up a specific post to view. There are two ways for you to take advantage of this feature.

1. Tap the Categories icon on the Top Bar (the icon on the right with six boxes) to bring up the icon view of the main areas of the app, and you will now see an "OPEN NEW CARD" option. Tap that option and a duplicate Facebook app card will launch
2. 2. From almost anywhere in the Facebook App, just Meta-tap (press-and-hold on the Gesture Area) and tap a link, profile, comments icon, photo, etc, and that will load up in a new application card

For anyone on webOS 2.0, the new card will launch into the same Stack instead of in an adjacent card, which will make keeping your Facebook app cards nicely organized!

Note: All details are based on the Facebook or Facebook Beta app version 1.4.  Click here for instructions on installing the Facebook app

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One of the beauties of Synergy is that webOS can take multiple entries for the same person in your contact list (regardless if the entry is from Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, or your Palm Profile) and merge them all together so you don’t need to worry about finding the one right entry that has the email address or phone number you need. While webOS will automatically merge contacts based on a formula that looks for the same Name, email address or phone number, it doesn’t always work perfectly. For example, webOS may not realize that "Jon Smith" and "Jonathan Smith" are the same person, or wouldn’t know that "Jane Jones" and "Mom" should be linked together. In other cases, the way that different accounts handle middle or maiden names may cause a problem. In these situations, you may need to manually link those contacts together. Continue ready past the break to learn how

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The bleeding-edge Facebook beta client app developed by Palm today received an update to version 1.4, adding in new features to take advantage of webOS 2.0. Right now the only feature that those of us on webOS 1.4.5 can take advantage of is the Open New Card command, available at the bottom of the navigation pop-over. Tapping that bar opens a new Facebook card that duplicates the view of the source card. Additionally, a meta-tap (gesture area + screen tap) on any link within Facebook will open up in a new card.

The app notes also indicate that Just Type integration is present, as Dieter demonstrated in his 10-minute webOS 2.0 overview, though that integration is not something we’ll be able to take advantage of until webOS 2.0 and its Just Type feature is made available. Additionally, the "shake to reload" feature now has an on-off toggle in the app’s preferences, if, you know, you use your webOS phone inside a rock tumbler or something.

Via: benfysh (Twitter)

Update: That didn’t take long – the non-beta official version of the Facebook app has also received the 1.4.0 bump, bringing along all of the above-discussed features.

Thanks for the tip, Isaac!

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webOS is moving up to version 2.0 and bringing along with it a whole host of new features sure to please even the most jaded of webOS users. There’s the stuff that we’ve already covered: card-grouping Stacks, enhanced and more capable Just Type with search and Quick Actions, Exhibition Touchstone dock modes, and expandable Synergy plug-ins.

That’s a lot, but if you ask us, not quite worthy of bringing the big 2.0. Here’s what else Palm didn’t let slip until today:

webOS finally supports Adobe Flash Player 10.1 (beta), and it comes baked right into webOS 2.0. Flash support is limited to the browser, but by and large it’s a rich and fluid experience, and one that we’re glad we can stop wondering if we’ll ever get.

You can now tag contacts as a “favorite.” Doing so has two consequences. One: the contact will show up under the new Favorites view in the Phone app. Two: contacts tagged as such will appear at the top of searches in Contacts, Email, Messaging, and Phone.

As glimpsed in earlier leaks, webOS 2.0 comes along with Text Assist. The new app and service build upon and greatly expand the auto-correction capabilities of webOS, including general spell checking, dictionary customization, and the ability to set your own macros (custom text strings with a short typed trigger).

Skype Mobile is coming to webOS, so long as you’re on Verizon. This leverages that exclusive Verizon deal, so don’t count on seeing Skype calling on any other webOS devices any time soon.

The new Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite is included from the start, displacing DataViz’s abandoned Documents to Go package. But the only thing you’ll get by default in webOS 2.0 is the Quickoffice viewer, which lets you read Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. There’s no editing just yet (we suspect Quickoffice wants to charge for that, which is reasonable, albeit disappointing), but the included app does sync with online services like Google Docs and Dropbox.

The Facebook app is also getting a bump to 2.0, which brings along support for Facebook Chat in Messaging, through the magic of Synergy. The new Facebook app also leverages the other new webOS tools, like Stacks, Quick Actions, and Exhibition.

And that’s just the beginning – explore the world of webOS 2.0 updated features after the break.

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Considering how tight of a lid Palm and HP have been keeping on details about the next Palm device, we were surprised to see it pop up on the website of French carrier SFR (who recently disappeared the Pre Plus). It’s official: the Palm Pre 2 is coming.

Yeah, you’re interested. Here’s what details SFR dropped:

• 1GHz processor
• 512MB RAM
• Same design as the current Pre series, but with a “flatter screen” (we’re supposing glass) and “more refined design.”
• Update: as arthurthornton notes in the comments – if you look closely that finicky USB door has been removed and replaced with a simple, exposed MicroUSB port. Looking more closely the finish on the edge is matted – so it looks like that crack-prone plastic we’ve been dealing with is a thing of the past.
• Update 2: PreCentral member thomas92 notes via email that SFR also says that webOS 2.0 will bring a faster boot time. We really need to work on our French, it seems.

Additionally, our rusty French translation yielded this until-now unannounced webOS 2.0 feature: push. Specifically, SFR is talking about Facebook push integration (touting it as “the great innovation of 2.0”) with messages, events, wall postings, and chat. We’re not going to read too much into that, as we would hope that Palm would integrate push into more than Facebook. So either SFR is overreaching, or they’re not telling us everything about push and instead are focusing on what customers want to hear about, i.e. Facebook.

Of course, there are battery life and performance improvements, but if the way SFR is writing it, these might be better than the usual negligible bumps. And if you were wondering what the device codename could be, SFR’s given it away in their unedited image name: Roadrunner.

And, before you ask, no mention of price or release date.

Source: SFR; Thanks to JMM for the tip!

UPDATE: SFR wised up and pulled the page down, but we’re the crafty evidence-preserving types. Screenshot after the break!

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