No tricks here, just some tasty treats for our PreDoodle fans!
We’ve put together some Halloween Palm Pre wallpapers from unpublished, secret PreDoodles for your enjoyment. There are 15 free Palm Pre backgrounds to choose from featuring quirky little Halloween cartoons such as a Chubbs the Chubby Rat, Corny Candy Corn, Little Frankie and more.
Don’t be afraid, download them all! (insert creepy laugh here) See the PreDoodle Halloween wallpapers after the break…
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.
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!
If you hadnt noticed, we’ve been all over the Homebrew app scene here at PreCentral.net We love them much, we’ve created a dedicated forum for Homebrew apps! For now, there are only a few and also for now, you can install Homebrew apps without having to root/hack your Pre.
To post an app, you simply need to get developer access from us — just shoot us a quick message from our contact form and select "Developer Access." If you’re a member, you will now see a handy "Email attachment" link next to the app so you can install it directly on your Pre.
We’re expecting that Palm will be issuing updates to the webOS – especially since as of right now the direct-install method doesn’t have anything in the way of dialog boxes. But Palm has said they’d allow sideloading so hopefully this loophole can mature into a legitimate method instead of being shut down – in that vein we defer to xorg at the Pre Dev Wiki, who writes:
The development world is drawn to the openness of WebOS. I hope you find a way to keep it that way. Keep liberty for all and only exercise security where needed.
I recommend that you keep the email link launching in the next release, with a new feature that would prompt the user that it may be dangerous to open an ipk link, just as other email package do for other platforms. Or have a Preferences setting in the mail application that allows downloading ipk, with default off but allows consumers to turn it on with a warning. Continue to have warnings with .ipk downloads. This is how you can have a balance of liberty and security. Please keep homebrew alive even before the SDK release. Thank you.
Expect the app section to fill out quickly and if you’ve developed a Homebrew app, don’t forget to get in contact with us to get it posted.
Also new to the forums: the ability to email yourself wallpapers directly! Again, if you’re logged-in, there’s a handy email link next to image attachments you can use to have them emailed to you for use on your Pre. Check it out in our Palm Pre Wallpaper Forum.
Not a member of PreCentral.net? For shame: sign up now!