Good news, webOS Nation: Theme Manager is now available! The Enyo-based app by Janne Julkunen (better known around these parts as homebrew master coder Sconix) is now available from WebOS Internals and stands ready to safely install, remove, and mix-and-match your themes.

Thanks to AUSMT, Theme Manager is 100% update safe, meaning you shouldn’t have to panic about removing themes before installing an update to webOS. The app can manage both ZIP- and IPK-packaged themes, both side-loaded and downloaded. Themes are even applied in the background by Theme Manager, though a quick Luna Restart may be required afterwards for the changes to take affect.

Have multiple themes and like to switch things up? You can actually mix-and-match parts from multiple themes – a wallpaper from here, icons from there, a boot logo from that one, and system menus from the other one. You can even just pick an aspect or two from a single theme and add them to the default theme – just pick that one part of the theme you like and hit the apply button.

We’re working on adapting our own themes gallery here at webOS Nation to be Theme Manager compatible, in the meantime developers interested in packaging their themes for compatibility can find instructions on how to make that happen at the source link below.

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Welcome to "Homebrew Week" for PreCentral’s Tip of the day. We will be focusing on some simple Homebrew apps, patches or hacks that will help you add some key functionality to your phone. No advanced knowledge is necessary, as long as you know how to use webOS Quick Install and Preware. 

One of the great aspects of webOS is the level of customization that you can make to the base Operating System, without any real coding knowledge on your part. While you can install the SDK to get access and manually tweek various file, tools such as webOS Quick Install and Preware make the job really easy. For this tip, we are going to review a number of (non patch) styling modifications that you can make to your device to really personalize it as your own.  Keep reading after the break to learn how

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Here’s some of the latest talk in the forums:

• User gsx decided that they wanted to add a custom Carbon overlay to the back of their Pre, and created a step-by-step guide if you should decide to.
• Palm’s developer relations team has done an excellent job with the Facebook app over the last several months, but cmoneyct wants to know if you still use the full-on site instead of the webOS app.  
• Themes.  Many of you know them, some of you love them, and member pelikan3 is wondering if they’re worth all the trouble.  
• radiorob123 is in the market for a new smartphone and has the million dollar question: buy a Pre Plus now, or wait to see what’s just around the pike in terms of new webOS hardware?

We look forward to seeing you in the forums!  Not a member?  Join us!

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Preware Main Screen

Preware is a free Homebrew Installer from WebOS Internals for your Palm Pre or Pixi. Preware lets you download Homebrew Apps, patches, and themes directly to your phone. Once Preware is installed you do not need to be connected to a computer because Preware does it’s magic "Over The Air."

In a few minutes you will have access to hundreds of free Homebrew Applications, Patches, and Themes right from your phone!

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Welcome to Round Table, which is in fact not a table at all. Round Table is a continuing series on PreCentral where we pose a question to the staff and they provide their thoughts and insights. The question could be something simple like “what’s your favorite webOS app?” or something a bit more complicated, like “what do you want from the next Palm device?” Or maybe we’ll just end up chatting about our favorite sandwiches, you never know. This time around we’re looking back at six months of life with the Palm Pre and webOS.

Check it all out after the break: What was the most important event for Palm in the last six months, and what will be the most important in the next six months?

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There is a whole world of wonderful improvements that you can add to your Palm Pre or Pixi including homebrew apps, patches, and themes. You can be up and running with WebOS Quick Install in a matter of minutes! Come join the 280,000 PreCentral members already in on the secrets!

You can make the LED light up when you have missed notifications and have Email and Messaging work in landscape. You can fix the clock, save your battery, add a Virtual Keyboard, and get a real music player. And that is just the beginning…

• Homebrew Apps are applications in the last stage of development ("beta testing"). Try them out and give your feedback.
• Patches add missing features to the Messaging, Email, Calendar, Phone, Browser, and other apps.
• Themes customize your screens and icons for hundreds of your favorite teams, games, logos, and more.

The usual warnings apply. These apps, patches, and themes are under development – use with care. If you have any problems, see the Help section.

In a matter of minutes you can be in on the fun…

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Two quick programming notes.  First, PalmCast Live is moving to Tuesday nights, 8pm Eastern. We were going to poll the readers on what the best night would be, but turns out that polling the hosts was a better idea – we can actually do Tuesdays, Mondays not so much.

As usual, we’ll hit up all the latest news. We’ll also talk through the new PreCentral.net webOS Theme Gallery we announced over the weekend. We did tell you how to install themes too, but as long as we’re on the subject we’ll mention that Preware has been updated to support direct install of not only Prethemer.com themes but also themes from PreCentral.net. The webOS Theme spec is a bit of a work in progress, but we invite developers to join the discussion on that.

Have questions for us? Tweet them in to @precentral with the hashtag #palmcast and we’ll answer as many as is reasonable.

The PreCentral.net Store, our sponsor, will be providing one live watcher his or her choice of any of the Mobi Products Custom Protector Case for the Palm Pre.

We’ll see you right here Tuesday night, 8pm Eastern.

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We are proud to announce the PreCentral.net webOS Theme Gallery!  Like our Homebrew App Gallery, the Theme Gallery consists of user-contributed themes to help you make the most out of your Palm Pre.

The gallery has themes that were made with Jason Robitaille’s excellent – and brand spankin’ new – Web OS Theme Builder desktop application. They are available to all PreCentral.net members as a zip file download, which you can then install via Jason Robitaille’s excellent – and also newly updated – WebOS Quick Install tool. We have a full How-To article all written up to help you through the steps.

We have to give huge thanks to the members of the Pre community who helped make this possible: Jason Robitaille, madolen for his huge batch of Pre themes to get us started, Sarah Peterman for her incredible work organizing and fostering our webOS Themes Forum, and to everybody who has been creating themes in the forums.

One quick note: themes basically work by replacing system files on your Pre – mainly graphics files – and so are a use-at-your-own-risk affair.  As with patches, you should always remove themes before installing any webOS update, the good news is that the new version of WebOS Quick Install makes it easy.

Go on and take a look! After the break, some nitty gritty details for you developers out there.

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Now that our Theme Gallery is live, we thought we might show you how to install the suckers. We’ll start with some disclaimers – installing themes will replace some system files (images) on your Pre, so we strongly recommend you uninstall them before an update. You’re going to be going through a very similar process to the one we described when we told you How To Install Homebrew Apps on your Pre, including putting your Pre into developer mode.

If that doesn’t scare you off, here’s your how-to!

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If your an iPhone user dying for a Pre, but won’t be able to switch over to Sprint because of a nasty contractual obligation, you may be in luck (somewhat). A Palm Pre theme for the iPhone has been spotted on a private forum that turns your iPhone interface into something that looks very [...]

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