alice Crazy World: internet killed the pornography scriptPorn and internet/mobile devices alike have provided all sorts of political activists and snake oil peddlers with loads of content for their pet theories – both of the aforementioned things have been able to gain significant attention in the mainstream press.

It now looks like these two groups turn on one another – the snippet below is from a very popular outlet for snake oil theories:

The pornographic movie industry has long had only a casual interest in plot and dialogue. But moviemakers are focusing even less on narrative arcs these days. Instead, they are filming more short scenes that can be easily uploaded to Web sites and sold in several-minute chunks.

So: porn with scripts is good. Porn without scripts is bad. This tells us: porn is good, internet is bad. Can you all follow me? Not really? No issue, just sing along :)

Forgive the slight influx of sarcasm, but I am thrilled to see the two groups duking it out in talkshows. After all, there can be but one source of all evil – but is it porn or the internet?

Guys and Gals: it’s time for an inofficial and unrepresentative vote: porn or phones?

Image: Wikimedia Commons / Manfred Werner – shows Alice Schwarzer, member of the “we hate porn” gang

O’Reilly has just changed the release date of it webOS book silently – visiting the book’s page on Safari now shows the following:
webos book delayed OReilly   webOS book delayed

In the past, the site looked a bit different:
webos sample code OReilly   webOS book delayed

Palm OS developers did not have much to do with Unit tests so far. For all those new to the topic: an unit test is an automated piece of code which the compiler can run whenever it has compiled a program. This code tests various features of the program and compares their output to reference values.

Unit tests are extremely useful for keeping an eye on specific modules of tghe program which have a clear interface to the rest of the app – and are supported in webOS. O’Reilly has just sent out the following invite:
webOS unit test OReilly runs webcast on unit testing for webOS

The webcast takes place on the 14th of this month – further information can be had at the URL below:
O’Reilly WebCast info

Palm apparently wants to expand the App Catalog in an extremely aggressive fashion – the following statement has been forwarded to me by various developers who are members of the Early Access team who claim to have found it in the Forums:

We are pleased to announce a limited expansion of access to the Beta Application Catalog for our SDK early access partners. Starting today, you can submit your application for consideration to be included in the Catalog.

Requirements
The Application Catalog is currently beta and does not have e-commerce enabled, so the applications you submit must be distributed for free. During the beta phase, you cannot sell your applications, nor offer subscriptions (however, you may generate revenue from sponsorships or in-application advertising).

For this phase, we will be reviewing applications with preliminary submission guidelines, which include:

How To Submit Your Application
*Send an email to REDACTED@palm.com. In the subject of your email put your name or your company followed by the name of your application. For example:

Subject: XYZ Company – Flap Jack City

or

Subject: Joe Programmer – Social B

*In the email, submit a description of the application. This is not limited to 500 characters as mentioned above. Indicate which webOS services your application integrates with (e.g, location based services, calendar, contacts, notifications/alerts, etc.).
*Send 4-6 screens shots of your application. If you are taking screen shots of your application in the emulator, please crop the image to the dimensions of the emulator window. Any application screen shots or product descriptions you submit will be for our internal use only and will not be shared with any third party.
*If you have multiple applications you would like considered, send a separate email for each application.

What Happens Next
Your submission will be initially screened by members of our engineering and developer marketing teams. We’re looking for apps that show off webOS and offer a superb user experience. If it is selected for further consideration, you will be provided access to our Application Submission tool to upload the application itself and asked to sign an App Catalog License Agreement. After we receive your app, we will do a more detailed review which could result in feedback for things to fix or change. Once we are satisfied with the quality and user experience, your app will be uploaded to the App Catalog.

Status and Feedback
Unfortunately, we will not be able to provide you with status during the review process. What you may receive from us is feedback on your application UI or technical issues should we encounter them. We may also have suggestions for webOS features you should consider implementing to enhance the app.

We look forward to receiving your submissions!

Even though Palm still hasn’t opened the App Catalog to random submissions, this move definitely is a step in the right direction. Developers now see that their efforts are not in vain, and that they will be given access to the store in the near future. From my personal point of view, this message is one of the best things I have heard from Palm’s for quite some time. If the approvals happen fast and en masse, the boys could resusciate their economy – let’s stay tuned to see how it all plays out!

DataViz has provided Palm with office solutions for literally ages: while their offers were not necessarily the most feature-rich, their products always were superior in terms of speed and ease of use.

The Pre includes a Document viewer powered by DataViz – the company has just posted the following:
palm pre documents to go Documents to Go hits webOS

Looks like the Pre will get document editing sooner rather than later – stay tuned to see how it all plays out…

Telefonica Germany has just informed us about having scored the following exclusivities:

  • Germany
  • Ireland
  • Spain
  • UK

According to them, the device will drop at the beginning of Q4 2009 – prices have not been specified. However, the German subsidiary has just launched the page below:
pre telefonica Telefonica Germany launches Pre portal

This page contains a selection of twitter posts, news stories and other Pre related content, and furthermore allows users to sign up to receive further information. Don’t ask me which German news service is powering this though – it definitely is neither TamsPalm.de nor Nexave…

Further information on that page can be had here:
www.o2online.de/goto/palmpre

The folks at BrightHand’s have just released their mindshare stats for June. Their statistics are traditionally slanted towards tech heads, and tend to show what power users are really interested in.

This month’s list looks as follows – the position in the brackets show the last month’s position of the device:

  1. iPhone 3GS (-)
  2. Palm Pre (9)
  3. Nokia E63 (1)
  4. BlackBerry Curve 8330 (3)
  5. iPhone 3G (-)
  6. HTC Touch Pro 2 (4)
  7. HTC Touch Diamond 2 (-)
  8. Nokia XPressMusic 5800 (-)
  9. Samsung Alias 2 (-) (the device with the customizable keyboard)
  10. Nokia E71 (2)

Last month’s list contained the following devices, which fell out of the list:

  • Samsung Impression
  • Nokia N97
  • LG Incite
  • BlackBerry Storm
  • BlackBerry Bold

preThinking reports that a variety of Palm developers has just received an email si,ilar to the one quoted below:

What was send to Early Access Developers:

We are pleased to announce a limited expansion of access to the Beta Application Catalog for our SDK early access partners. Starting today, you can submit your application for consideration to be included in the Catalog.

Even though I don’t want to accuse the preThinking heads of anything, I have to admit that my current information does not indicate like this. Multiple developers I know well have not received this email as of this writing, even though some new houses were added to the Mojo program recently.

Seeing that Palm’s IP manager is a master of canary traps, I can only repeat my old message like a broken record: be careful what you publish! Everything you get your hands on could be a canary trap!

Ideas, anyone?

Palm has traditionally had a disproportional share of hardware quality issues – some analysts claim that the Pre is no different. Of course, claims are one thing – which is why I was more than happy to see the boys at Engadget’s perform a little stick poll.

In total, 10k users were asked – their results were as follows:
pre customer satisfaction Palm Pre customer satisfaction

Doesn’t look too healthy now, does it?

Visualization by yours truly

firefox russia FireFox 3.5 releasedDon’t ask me why this didn’t get more headline space – Mozilla has recently released the final v3.5 edition of its FireFox browser. This puts an end to a somewhat difficult development period – the new version is said to bring the following improvements:

* Available in more than 70 languages.
* Support for the HTML5 video and audio elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio.
* Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
* Better web application performance using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
* The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing.
* Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
* Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
* Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, canvas text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.

I have been using beta releases of FireFox 3.5 for quite some time, and have to admit that I am extremely happy with it due to the insane speed increases seen on the latest version – if anyone of you uses FireFox on a non-Windows-9x machine, definitely get the update installed ASAP!

Further information can be had here:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.5/releasenotes/

O’Reilly has just released what is likely going to be the last chapter of their webOS book – it is chockfull of sample code:
webos sample code Final chapter of WebOS book released

As usual – further information can be had here:
http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9780596802097

pre sdk mac os Palm Pre SDK   available for Mac OSPalm used to be extremely popular among Mac OS heads due to their excellent Mac support (especially when compared to Windows Mobile handsets). Unfortunately, the Mac version of Palm Desktop was eventually abandoned…which caused various eekers and happened to make the boys at Mark/Space insanely rich. Mark/Space has since released a plethora of other successful products, and no longer is dependent on Palm – which unfortunately can not be said about Palm (who still need Mac heads).

Seeing that every iPhone developer owns a Mac, Palm’s decision to develop a Mac OS version of the SDK makes perfect sense. Having them leak it makes even more sense…the rest of the story is at PreCentral:
http://www.prethinking.com/home/2009/6/29/palm-pre-mojo-sdk-leaked-for-mac-users-too.html

Rumors about Telefonica having an Europe-wide exclusivity have surfaced multiple times in the past – and it looks like they were spot-on at least for the UK.

The Guardian (a very popular UK magazine) reports the following on its web site:

O2 already has an exclusive deal with Apple to stock the iPhone and grabbing the Palm Pre is likely to further cement its position as the UK’s largest mobile phone network. Reports of a tie-up between Palm and O2 first appeared in May and Carphone Warehouse is also expected to stock the Pre.

O2 is believed to have seen off fierce competition for the device from Orange, which it also beat to the iPhone at the last minute.

As of now, the carrier has neither confirmed nor denied this – let’s see how it all plays out…

Tapwave’s long-deceased Zodiac handheld started the zodttd development group…which has since expanded to other platforms.

Palm’s Pre is the latest victim:

The Palm Pre uses some of the same hardware as the iPhone 3GS and Pandora gaming handheld and it is fast! In this short video below you can see Wipeout XL running on the Palm Pre. Download links will be provided shortly, see the notes below as to why. In the meantime, check out http://predev.wikidot.com/rooting and get a headstart on rooting (or as iPhone users say, jailbreaking), your Pre!

The video is below – get further info here:

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