Following up on the story we posted not too long ago, the Mitch Allen "Application Basics" free webcast went off without a hitch. Thankfully, for those like myself who missed it, O'Reilly Media has uploaded the recording of it to YouTube, though it looks like the last few minutes were cut off.

This is of course the second webcast in the series and as such, covers the second chapter of the WebOS book, of the same name.  While the first webcast/book chapter was a general overview and introduction of what the WebOS is like, this webcast was a perfect introduction to the fundamentals of the WebOS.  The appinfo.json file and basics of scenes and their controllers are explained quite well.

This webcast series is just the thing that I've been wanting Palm to do; not only just giving an SDK and the option to buy a book on how to program, but actually engaging the developer community.  What better way that a free video webcast to explain the book and the WebOS platform, both explaining how the various components work, but also giving practical examples of usage.

If anyone reading this has ever thought about programming for the WebOS, I highly recommend this webcast series, and await eagerly for the next one.

Update: The Palm Developer Network Blog has some Q&A up from the event.

Palm webOS will also land in paperback, retailing at $44.99. Interested parties can save a pretty penny by picking the book up at Amazon.com for a hefty 35% discount.

Are you a hard-copy, gimme the book sort of person, or is it easier to just hit up the developer forums?

Thanks to ericnyc646 for the tip!

Folks in our forums have been taking a gander and while it’s not a terribly complicated app - this is quite literally a rough cut - with multiple users experiencing varying degrees of frustration getting it to work properly. There are two options for you to get your hands on this application: either download it from the PreCentral forum thread, or mosey over to Palm’s developer website and download that fresh new SDK (the code you need is in the sample folder).

[via: Gadgets On The Go]

Chapter 11 of the O'Reilly Palm webOS Rough Cuts is available now - and you keep all those bankruptcy jokes to yourself. Heck, Appendix A is available now as well (thanks jbern8!). Since we missed reporting on Chapter 10, which is also available, we'll give you a quick run down of what to expect in both.

The tenth chapter is perhaps one of the most important, covering Background Applications:

Whether you're interested in building an advanced application or just want to add notifications to a basic application, this chapter covered some essential topics. There was a broad review of advanced multi-stage applications with an introduction to Notifications and Dashboards. You learned that advanced applications are based on an Application assistant, which can handle external launch requests and potentially run in the background. You were also shown how to customize your application's behavior when minimized, meaning switched out of the foreground view, and how to use the internal application notification chain to coordinate actions between assistants or share events and data.

As for Chapter 11, Localization and Internationalization (yep, thats a word) is the name of the game.

In this chapter, you will GET an overview of the framework's locale support and learn how to localize your application. We will localize the News application to Spanish and we will walk through each step of the localization process. In the last section, we'll cover some of the Internationalization APIs available in Mojo.

Between what we know of the leaked SDK, and what's being published in Rough Cuts, the webOS platform is shaping up to be a-plenty powerful, and certainly seems to be giving developers the freedom they need to develop quality applications. Let us know what you think in the comments!

(Thanks to mahootzki for the tip and the joke)

It's that time again, folks!  Chapter 8 of Mitch Allen's Palm webOS Rough Cuts has just surfaced.  This chapter covers system and cloud services, which include a wide range of things such as alarms, sounds, power management and location services, to name a few.

While chapter 8 may be out now, it appears chapter 7 has caused a bit of a stir in our forums recently. This particular line from the book is the apparent cause of the commotion:

Both Contacts and Calendar will allow applications to add information that will get merged into an integrated view. They don't allow applications to read, delete or update any data that wasn't created by the same application.

Essentially this means we won't be seeing any today-screen apps anytime soon.  While a well-done today-screen app can be very handy, the above restriction does make some sense security-wise, especially if Palm wants to try to sell the device to business professionals.

That being said, another reason they may have done this does come to mind.  It's very possible Palm wants users to only be able to use the built-in Calendar and Contacts applications to get people used to them and like them. See, if Palm removes the restriction (even partially to just allow reading the data) then developers would be able to make replacement contacts and calendar apps (perhaps DateBk for webOS) and still be able to import synergy via the built-in calendar. Palm wouldn't want that kind of competition, especially while their own apps are still fresh and new.

We do hope Palm will eventually update the SDK to allow such things, but considering it was in chapter 7 of the book, this restriction will probably make it to the first public SDK release.  Not that its a completely bad thing.  Increased security during a new OS's release definitely has it's advantage and it's not as if the built-in Calendar and Contact apps look bad.  So far they look quite the contrary: beautifuly designed and extremely functional.

Ladies and Gentleman, chapter 7 of Mitch Allen's programming guide for the webOS is now live.  This time around we're getting nitty gritty with Application Services - namely what applications and services you can access from your app.  This is basically where the Pre gets a chance to shine when compared to the iPhone -- there appear to be plenty of hooks here for helping your app reach out to the rest of the data on the phone.

You can, for exampe: launch the browser, dial a number, turn on the camera and take photos (in-app), browse photos, pull up the map application with driving directions, add information to contacts and calendar, pull information from conacts, launch the email app with specific messages, open a specific file (but there is not a built-in file browser that we're aware of yet), launch the music player and the video player, and -- finally -- use the applicaiton manager service to launch any other app that's been opened to it (i.e. other third party apps).

If you're a user - your takeaway is that the apps are able to talk to each other and that's a good thing.  If you're a developer - your takeaway is that you should go read this chapter and see how easily it's done.

Thanks to mahootzki for the tip!

Chapter 5 of the Palm webOS book by Mitch Allen is now available from Safari Books Online.

Chapter 5 completes the review of the Mojo widgets with a look at Indicators, Pickers and Viewers, the Filter List and the Scroller. Not all applications will use the Mojo widgets because they're each designed for specific use cases. The widgets are just as simple to work with as the widgets that were previously discussed in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4.

First up, Chapter 5 talks about the Indicators. We're all familiar with Indicators. They show that activity is taking place even if it's not visible, and in some cases, to show some measure of the progress that the activity is making. I'm sure those of you who use a Windows computer are used to seeing that hourglass indicator, showing that something is happening. By reading in Chapter 5, we can get a feel for what the Indicator widgets will look like on the WebOS devices like the Pre.

Read on for a couple screen shots

Mojo has four indicator widgets, but they belong to two types:

1. Activity indicator, or Spinner, which spins without showing progress
2. Progress indicator, which shows both activity and progress

Below is an example that Chapter 5 shows of a Spinner on a Google News feed item.

Even though the Spinner is the only activity indicator, there are 3 Progress indicator widgets:

1. Progress Pill, a wide pill which is styled to match the View menu and the .palm-header scene style
2. Progress Bar, a narrow horizontal bar with a blue progress indicator
3. Progress Slider, which is intended for streaming media playback applications

Here is an example of a Progress Pill.

Looks familiar, huh? I'm used to seeing similar progress pills at the bottom of my screen on Web pages all the time.

Chapter 5 goes on to explain how the other widgets such as the Scroller, Picker, and Viewers work. You'll see examples of code views and read about how to put in and use all the widgets.

Even though I don't know a thing about developing apps, I found the reading to be pretty interesting, and it's written in a way that you can actually understand what is being discussed.

Head over to Safari Books Online and check it out. For $17.99 you can read Palm webOS, 1st Editon, Rough Cuts online.

Thanks to Chris for the tip!

We promised we’d tell you when some of the supporting resources around that announcement are now live.  So here you go.

• Register to attend the webcast with Mitch Allen on February 25th, at 10 am PT.
• Get access to the O’Reilly Rough Cut, so you can view the first chapter now, but also additional chapters as they come out.