Way back in March we reported on a virtual Enyo hackathon that took place both online and in person at one of the many webOS meetups across the country. Apparently it was such a hit that HP has decided to host an Enyo hackathon of their own at the Palm Campus in Sunnyvale, California, on August 4th. This event looks to be quite the geek extravaganza and one could expect to soak up a bit of knowledge from the Developer Relations team and even a couple awesome interns like Arthur Thornton (formerly of webOS Nation fame). 

All experience levels are welcome, although it would be beneficial if you have a background in Javascript or are already familiar with the Enyo framework. HP will be providing food and refreshments as well as prizes. So ultimately all you have to bring is yourself, a laptop, a mobile device for development, and some enthusiasm to get your hack on! Event details are as follows.

As with other hackathons, the idea is to work on your own or together to whip together a functional something, or at least the start of one, by the end of the hackathon. And then present it to everybody there, no pressure. The Developer Relations Team putting on this hackathon is open to all sorts of contributions, ranging from apps and sample code to improvements to Enyo developer documentation. The event is planned from 9:30 in the morning to 8 pm on August 4th, with presentations by notable webOS developers like Hal Saville and Ryan Rix. And, of course, food (pizza!), prizes, and drinks - we know that's what you're really looking forward to. That's the kind of stuff we look forward to as well, though the sure-to-be-awesome things whipped up by the attendees are also registering on our anticipation radar.

A blow-by-blow schedule and registration info are at the source link below. Get ready to hack!

If you are a parent and looking for fun apps for your kids, we have covered some great choices for you in not one, but two webOS app round-ups. In addition to those apps, we also want to take a look at a pair of Peg Puzzle apps from Pulse Apps. Just as their name implies, Peg Puzzle abc 123 and Peg Puzzle Shapes are reminiscent of those wooden peg puzzles toys, just with a little different twist that you can't get with a physical piece of wood. These apps are available on the TouchPad and normally run $1.99, but are currently on sale for $0.99 for the summer.

Both app are set up in a similar way. First you choose your puzzle category and then you have to match the six pieces of the puzzle from among the available pieces that are displayed across the top of the screen. Peg Puzzle abc 123 allows you to choose lowercase letters, uppercase letters, or numbers, while Shapes give you 8 themes (such as fruit, transportation, or music) or a random option that combines all the categories. The apps differ slightly in their gameplay in that abc 123 will give you 6 letters or 6 numbers (from 1 to 20) and you have to scroll through the entire alphabet or numbers to find a match, while Shapes presents you with one shape at a time just rotated 6 different ways, giving your children different skills to hone between the two apps. In addition, abc 123 will also speak out the letter or number as you select it and drag it down to the board.

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Although webOS 3.0 on the TouchPad brought the ability to set a orientation rotation lock, we have never had this functionality built into webOS phones. However, if you want to be able to set the ability to lock in our phone's rotation while browsing the web you need to check out Universe Browser by OpenMobl Systems. In addition to giving you some advanced features such as Google Bookmark sync, private browsing and the ability to open local html files, you can also now set your rotation lock with the single tap of a screen.

In order to set the rotation lock in Universe, you first need to add it as an onscreen button

1. Open Universe Browser
2. Swipe down from the top-left to bring down the Application Dropdown menu and select "View Options..."
3. You then need to decide where you want the button to go. There are five available spots, with the General section referring to the two buttons on the bottom-left and the Extended section for the three buttons on the bottom right.
4. Select "Orientation Lock" in your desired spot
5. Then, just swipe-up to minimize the View Options card and swipe it off the top of the screen to close that card.
6. Go back to Universe Browser and the Orientation Lock icon (  ) will now be there for you to tap whenever u want to set it (it will be highlighted blue when set)

Note that if you start browsing and the buttons on the bottom of the screen disappear, just tap the gesture area once and then tap anywhere on the screen and the buttons should reappear.

Universe Web Browser is available in the webOS App Catalog for $2.99 and is compatible with all webOS devices running webOS 1.4.5 or higher

If you've been itching to get in on the action and build yourself a little bit of webOS Community Edition, the folks at WebOS Internals have once again stepped things up to help. Building and compiling software, while fun for many of us, is pretty precise business. It's really easy to inadvertantly foul things up in your build environment, expecially if it's the same computer you use every day for work and play. Since most of us don't have an extra machine laying around we could dedicate to use for compiling, virtual machines are our best bet for a successful build process. With the release of the Community Edition, we get the feeling that plenty of people are going to be toying with the idea of throwing together their own build of webOS.

Anther great thing about using virtual machines is that they can be configured and shared -- which is exactly what's going on here. Provided you have an x86-based Mac (OSX 10.5 or higher) or Linux computer with enough "oompf" to dedicate a full CPU core, a full gigabyte of RAM, and 20 GB of hard-drive space, then you're good to go. 

Using all open-source tools (cue that warm, fuzzy feeling) like Vagrant and VirtualBox, you can set up a dedicated virtual machine with the same environement as everyone else at work on the project. This means easier troubleshooting, easier source patching, and less work overall than it would be with everyone doing their own thing. If you're thinking of jumping in and having a go with the TouchPad Community Edition project, this is where you need to start. Our thanks to WebOS Internals' WebOS Ports team for pumping out this WOCE Build Environment so we can all play nice - anything that makes it easier for our favorite homebrew developers to work together to make amazing things is something that we're totally pumped about.

Two weeks ago we reviewed Plex, an app that brings the digital media from across your home and the internet to your TouchPad and gave it and the service a thumbs up. We're all about content portability here, and we rather like bringing our music and videos from multiple sources together in one location and app. It's rather like Synergy, so you can understand our liking it. We like it so much we want you to experience the joy of Plex. And if you comment below, you just might be able to do so for free - we have fifty copies of Plex to give away!

Contest: We have 50 copies of Plex to give away. Just leave a comment on this post to enter. Contest ends next Sunday at midnight US Eastern Time, after which time we will select 50 random entrants to win. Please only leave one comment, multiple entries won’t count. Promo codes are only valid in countries serviced by the App Catalog, and users must be running webOS 3.0.4 or higher with the latest version of the App Catalog.

We're the types to vigorously defend webOS at the drop of a hat. But we'll also admit our favorite mobile OS has its faults, though we love it overall. What we never really fell in love with was any of the marketing done by Palm or HP, and there are plenty of decisions made along the way by both entities that we can't vigorously defend. But sometimes some arguments just make us throw our hands in the air and shout "So the @#$& what?"

Case in point, a recent list put together by MSNBC.com's Gadgetbox blog, listing the 20 worst-named phones and tablets. Both the HP Veer and HP TouchPad made it onto that ignominious list sharing space with a series of other poorly-selling devices, like the LG Lucid, Asus Transformer Pad Infinity TF700, and the Samsung Brightside, which we would like to point out is not even a smartphone. Also on the list is "the new iPad", which is just the iPad, or the third-generation iPad (i.e. the new one) and the Samsung Galaxy S II, Sprint Epic 4G Touch (from which Gadgetbox left out the comma and Sprint, making it an even worse name). Not on the list? The Palm Pixi. Seriously, TouchPad and Veer are a zillion times better names than that.

Also not on the list was a reason for the list to exist. We're not ragging on the list for including the TouchPad and Veer (and not the Pixi, which is seriously deserving of inclusion on such a list), but we have to wonder why anybody would put together such a list in the first place. The name is a massively small part of the device experience. Remember when the iPad was first announced and all of the juvenile feminine product jokes that followed (and still linger to this day)? A pad is also a piece of paper! You never saw Captain Picard snicker when he picked up a PADD from his ready room desk on the Starship Enterprise, did you? Nope, and Apple has sold well over 70 million iPads to date.

It doesn't come down to a name and snarky comments about confusing the TouchPad with a peripheral (or getting wrong how many days passed between launch and cancellation - 49). It's about the overall experience, the desirability, the marketing, the apps - the physical device, for Ruby's sake! There are plenty of marks where HP missed with the TouchPad, but we wouldn't say it or the Veer are worthy of inclusion on a list with devices like the HP iPaq Glisten (three slots for HP, best only by Samsung's 5) and eMatic eGlide XL Pro.

Sure, TouchPad and Veer aren't the best names in the world, but they're certainly not the worst. But don't feel bad - HP would have been guaranteed slots if they'd gone with names like Myte or TouchCanvas.

As you know summer is upon us and we are sweltering under the blistering summer sun. We at webOS nations would like to know what you are doing between the family reunions, vacations and over the top weddings? Why not fit in a webOS meet up between those family functions?

It would be a fantastic way to spend with friends to catch up on what’s new and exciting with Open webOS. You could chat about all the new apps coming in to the App Catalog. Meet other developers and speak to people working on open webOS at some of the events. The world is your webOS oyster.

So get out of the hundred degree heat, grab a drink, and have a great conversation with your local webOS family. And if you happen to be in the Dallas area, there's going to be a TouchPad+Pre3 raffle basket!

Here's what's coming up in the world of webOS meet-ups:

• Sunday, July 15: Chicago
• Saturday, July 21: Dallas
• Friday, July 27: Boston
• Sunday, August 5: Nashville

In this year of 2012, technology is everywhere. We have more processing power in our pockets than we did in entire offices just a decade ago. We have robot vacuums and minature digital cameras and anything and everything that we can justify attaching a laser to we do. Flying cars can't be far off. And yet, we still find our businesses and governments relying on a most antiquated of technologies: the fax machine. We're busy people, we don't have the time to run down to the nearest FedEx Office to send a fax. Thankfully, to assuage our antiquated communication needs, there's a handy TouchPad app available: PamFax HD.

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As we described in our previous tip, you can add a script to the Save/Restore app that will allow you to ZIP up your entire saverestore backups right from within the app. This can be beneficial because it will keep historical copies of your backups and also allow you to easily backup your save/restore data to a cloud service like Dropbox or box.net since you only need to backup that one .zip file. Unfortunately, the way that Save/Restore is built, this zip creation script will not automatically run by default during your daily auto-save. This is because of the requirement that you need to run a backup of the script at least once beforehand for it to be included in the auto-save, but since this script does not save a backup to the regular location (but rather your root USB folder) the app does not realize it has been run. Therefore, you need to "trick" the app to thinking that it has been run by creating a mock backup.

You can do this on device using a File Manager app like Internalz (regular or Pro) or Gemini File Manager, or even attach your device to a computer and accessing USB mode. For the purposes of this tip, we will use Internalz Pro on the device itself

1. Open Internalz Pro
2. Navigate to /media/internal/saverestore
3. Swipe down from the top-left to access the Application dropdown and select "Create Directory". Name the directory "org.webosinternals.saverestore" (without the quotes)
4. Open ANY other directory within /saverestore (it doesn’t matter which one) and find an existing .zip within it (again, it doesn't matter which one if there are multiple).
5. Tap on that file and select "Copy". Find "/media/internal/org.webosinternals.saverestore", highlight it and tap "Select".

The app will now think that a backup exists for this script and it will now run in our auto-save. Again, be aware of how many of these zip files have been created on your device since these files can get rather large and eat up your storage space if you have dozens of them on your device.

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Kevin from CrackBerry.com, Phil from AndroidCentral.com, Daniel from WPCentral.com and Rene from iMore.com talk Google I/O, Windows Phone 8, WWDC, BlackBerry 10, 7-inch tablets, and media streamers. This is Mobile Nations!

• Our podcast feed: Audio | Video
• Download directly: Audio | Video
• Subscribe in iTunes: Audio | Video
• Subscribe in Zune

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There's something to be said for playing a real physical board game. The feel of the dice, the satisfaction of moving your pieces, being able to ponder the board in front of you and how best to proceed. But there's something that's not so satisfying: keeping score on a sheet of paper. But, as they say, there's an app for that: Tallier. Made by Ewac Software, Tallier is a basic score tracker at its core, but it offers much more beyond a simple tally.

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Here recently we have kept all of our readers up to speed on the cool new features being added to webOS Community Edition by various webOS developers across the interwebs. So far we've witnessed fast card switching gestures, tabbed card stacks, and alternate keyboard layouts (for our many friends overseas). Well the fun is far from over as developer Eric Blade of GVoice fame has delivered yet another cool addition to webOS Community Edition!

It seems that Eric has tweaked our already awesome notification area to make it even better in the form of bigger notifications. This is beneficial not only to developers but also to users. You see, some apps could benefit greatly from more real estate in the notification area so that they may provide a broader spectrum of controls. As Eric shows us with the picture included in this article his app GVoice has already benefited from the extra area with the callers full name and  buttons for call back and send message. We could also see that this modification to the notification area could be a huge help for a bunch of apps. Case in point, an app like Music Player Remix could accomplish some pretty amazing things like adding or removing a song from a playlist from within the notification area. Everything from games to Twitter apps could really leverage this to their advantage.

In the end we are happy to see so many of our developers roll up their sleeves and add their contributions to webOS Community Edition. We can only imagine what kind of wizardry is on the horizon as it seems that some cool new feature is being added daily. HP has given our community a unique opportunity here and we'd have to say that the webOS community has capitalized on it thus far!

* Images Removed Per Request of Transparent House *

We've known for some time that HP had numerous webOS devices in the works after the Pre3, Veer, and TouchPad, including but not limited to the TouchPad Go seven-inch tablet and a keyboard-less slab phone that we assumed to be the Stingray, along with other device codenames such as Windsor. HP was well under way with all manner of work to promote these upcoming devices when the surprise order to shut down webOS device production came from on high. As with almost any company, HP partnered with outside contractors to market the devices, including the Transparent House firm. We've seen their work before with HP: they produced the online promo videos for the devices introduced at Think Beyond and the Veer teaser video, and today we're getting a good look at other things Transparent House produced for HP but never got to distribute.

Posted eight months ago onto Transparent House's Vimeo page was a set of eight videos. Seven of them cover the unannounced and unreleased TouchPad Go tablet (or, as the marketing materials call it by it's development codename: Opal), serving as little ten-second snippets showing the tablet in what amounts to B-roll footage. But that eighth video? That's an interesting one… it's a 19-second clip of a keyboard-less webOS phone performing a slow spin so you can see all sides. The name: WindsorNot.

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The Fourth of July falls on a Wednesday this year (as in, tomorrow), so we're going to have some additional celebration savings on either end, for the ultimate webOS accessories sale!

To save 15 percent on your orders, which includes all webOS accessories -- cases, batteries, chargers, Bluetooth, everything! -- all you need to do is use coupon code j412 at checkout. Offer ends midnight PST on Thursday, July 5. That's all there is to it. Jump over to the webOS Nation Store and let the savings begin!

Take me to the webOS Nation Store so I can take advantage of the savings!

Ever find yourself watching a war movie and wondering just what those solider actors are saying when they're screaming "whiskey echo bravo oscar sierra!" into the radio? It's the phonetic alphabet, and it's meant to make communicating clear and garble-free when needed, plus it allows for some cool callsigns like Tango Seven. With Soldier Talk Play Edition by Aclass Apps you can take whatever you type into your TouchPad and translate it into the phonetic alphabet, and then have the app speak it out loud for you. Normally this app would run you close to four dollars, but this week you'll have a chance to win one of 50 copies!

Contest: We have 50 copies of Soldier Talk Play Edition to give away. Just leave a comment on this post to enter. Contest ends next Sunday at midnight US Eastern Time, after which time we will select 50 random entrants to win. Please only leave one comment, multiple entries won’t count. Promo codes are only valid in countries serviced by the App Catalog, and users must be running webOS 3.0 or higher with the latest version of the App Catalog.

The WebOS Internals' homebrew app Save/Restore is great to backup your important application data in case you ever need to webOS Doctor you device, swap it out with a new device, or even transfer data between a phone and TouchPad. When Save/Restore runs, it created individual folders and files for each app it backs up and stores them in the /saverestore folder on the USB drive. However, there are two drawbacks to this type of backup. First, there is no easy way to quickly backup all those files in the cloud using a service like dropbox or box.net. And second it only saves the most recent backups so if you needed to go back more than just a day or two in backups, you can't. One way to combat this is to create a single archive of the entire /saverestore with all its subforlders. 

While you can now use an app like Archive Manager to ZIP up those files, there is also a little easter egg within Save/Restore that will allow you to do just that, which will then make it easy to upload a single file to a cloud storage service. All you need to do is copy the "ZIP creation" script to the Save/Restore script repository and then run the script whenever you want to create the backup archive. The easiest way to accomplish this is to use Internalz Pro, by Jason Robatille, which is available in both Preware or webOS Quick Install. 

1. Open Internalz Pro
2. Navigate to /media/cryptofs/apps/usr/palm/applications/org.webosinternals.saverestore/contrib 
3. Tap on the "org.webosinternals.saverestore" script and select "Copy". Find "/var/svc/org.webosinternals.saverestore", highlight it and then choose "Select" to copy it.
4. Now, you can open up the Save/Restore app, wait for the data to load and choose "Save Application Data". Scroll all the way to the bottom and you will find "ZZZ Save Restore Zip Creation". It has the "ZZZ" in the name so this will be the very last script that is run if you "save all"

Once you run that script, a file called saverestore-99999999.zip will be created in your root USB directory (/media/internal/), with the 99999999 being replaced by the current date and timestamp.  Depending on the size of your archive and what apps you have installed, this file can get rather large, so be aware of how many of these files are on our device and clean them up if you no longer need them

Unfortunately, this zip creations script will not run automatically if you have set up Save/Restore to auto-save every day. Luckily there is a work-around for this, but you will need to wait for our next Tip of the Day for those instructions

 

On Thursday we talked about one of the first projects to come out of the webOS Community Edition. The newly-open-sourced code for major chunks of webOS 3.0.5 had within two days brought us the fast card switching gestures that we'd been pining for for far too long. But with access to parts like the LunaSysMgr, what else the homebrew community would come up with was a huge and excitingly open question.
Well, here are some more answers. Coming from the mind and keyboard of Andrew Holbrook (dukiedrew) is something we're actually quite impressed by: tabbed card stacks. With this modification, a simple swipe in from the left side when in an app of the screen scoots your current view to the side a bit to load a vertical column of the thumbnails of the other app cards in that card stack. Tap on one of the thumbnails and it and your current app swap places. Swipe back to the left to dismiss the thumbnails column and get back to your app.

Holbrook's work isn't limited to just card stack tabs - he's also worked up how to cycle the webOS card spread around the ends so you can keep swiping past the end of your cards and jump to the far end of your open apps. If you've got a lot open, this could be an easy way to navigate everything. Video of the infinite card view and tabbed card stacks is above.

After the break is another video, this one from Måns Andersson. As a Swede, there's not a lot of support for his preferred keyboard layouts built into webOS. Again playing with LunaSysMgr, Andersson was able to add additional layouts for Dvorak, Swedish Dvorak, and Swedish QWERTY to the standard international webOS keyboard layouts, including a button on the Swedish keyboards to quickly switch between Dvorak and QWERTY.

All of this work was completed thanks to the webOS Community Edition and the quick work of WebOS Internals' WebOS Ports team. It's all open source, and all done free-of-charge for you. We wouldn't discourage you from sending a donation the way of WebOS Internals - without your support they can't pay for servers and test devices and the like, and this kind of awesome stuff becomes that much more difficult to do.

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If you're in the market for a new Verizon smartphone, want webOS, and don't feel like stalking eBay for a rare (and potentially expensive) Verizon HP Pre3, then we've got the next best option for you: a Verizon Palm Pre 2. And it's cheap, which is something with which we'll never argue. Today and today only, DailySteals.com has the Verizon Palm Pre 2 available for $69.99, plus $4.99 for shipping. That price is for the straight phone, no contract required - heck, you don't even need Verizon service if you don't want it. Being that this is DailySteals.com, this less-than-$75-shipped price is good only through the end of today, so if you've been sitting on the fence about upgrading that old beater of a Verizon Pre Plus or just want to grab a spare smartphone should your current one give up the ghost, you should act quickly.

HP's getting back into the tablet game, albeit somewhat tepidly after the debacle of the TouchPad launch and cancellation and Microsoft's recent unveiling of their own Surface tablets. The news comes today that HP's planning to move forward with at least one Windows 8 tablet, though they'll be going with their long-time processor partner Intel for the tablet instead the mobile-oriented ARM chips.

We wondered earlier this month when Microsoft unveiled Surface what affect that would have on their OEM partners, and if SemiAccurate is, well, accurate, it seems that Surface might be making those OEMs nervous. HP, Microsoft's single biggest customer, apparently has decided against producing an ARM-based Windows RT tablet in protest of both Surface and the licensing charges Microsoft wants in exchange for the slightly-hamstrung version of the Windows OS. Of course, it's also worth noting that HP burned some bridges with ARM partners after their cancellation of the TouchPad and Pre3 - both ran ARM chips from Qualcomm.

HP told The Verge that their plans for going with Intel chips thanks to feedback from customers: "The decision to go with x86 was influenced by input from our customers. The robust and established ecosystem of x86 applications provides the best customer experience at this time and in the immediate future." With HP being a huge enterprise provider, we're not surprised at all by the decision to go Intel-first, and ARM-later-maybe. But we also won't be surprised to see Microsoft pushing hard to get the ARM-happy Windows RT onto more devices moving forward.

How does this matter to us at webOS Nation? Really, it doesn't matter what HP decides to go with for their tablets, as the Linux Standard Kernel that's going to be used in Open webOS will run on all variety of hardware, including x86- and ARM-based chipsets. When exactly we can expect to see those tablets, well, that's still up in the air.

This week marked our 2 year anniversary of writing a daily webOS Tip for our then-PreCentral.net and now-webOSNation.com readers. Despite a roller coaster of a year since our last anniversary, which saw the release of the TouchPad and TouchPad Go, the release of the Pre3 and then the subsequent cancellation of the Pre3 after former-CEO Leo Apotheker decided to shut down the webOS Hardware decision, and then all that waiting until we learned about Open webOS (due out later this year), we have continued to bring our faithful readers tips to getting the most out of their webOS experience. While we have scaled the tips back from every day to just three times a week, we have also expanded them to include some functionality in our favorite apps that the average user may not even be aware of. 

To mark this anniversary, we would like to bring you some of our favorite and most used tips from the last year.  Continue after the break for that extensive list of tips

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Finally.

We've been waiting a long time for this one and we're glad to see it finally here: gesture-based application switching is becoming a reality thanks to the work of homebrewer Eric B (ekdikeo) and the webOS Community Edition open source release. The modification came quickly after this week's release of the Community Edition for webOS 3.0.5, and the tweaks to LunaSysMgr allows users to swipe in from the bezel on their TouchPad to switch to the next app card without having to go into card view, swipe over, and tap to bring that app to full screen.

It's a simple tweak and something we've been practically begging for for over a year now. When the app switching gesture will make its way into a release that mere humans can make use of, we're not sure, but we're eagerly awaiting that day. Video after the break.

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Sometimes you just need a quick classic game to fill some idle time in your day. In the old days you'd grab a piece of paper and set up the four lines for tic-tac-toe, or if you were feeling particularly ambitious you might lay out a grid of dots for a game of dots-and-lines. Thanks to the magic of tablets, you can make a quick game tic-tac-toe happen, or if you're in that particularly ambitious mood you can turn to Dots Lines Squares for the paper classic.

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Many of  you familiar with the Android world may have caught the news that a cavalcade of devices received RC1 treatment from the CyanogenMod team. "What the hell does that mean?" you ask. Well, in a nutshell it means that these 37 devices took one step closer to what the CyanogenMod team considers a "stable" release. Either way, many of us with dual booted TouchPads rushed to the various forums on the interwebs in hopes that we too moved to the next step in the beta process but alas we are not quite there yet.

We're not left in the cold, as the newest CM9 official nightly build has a bit of functionality that has been missing for some time now. The newest build finally has mic support so we can utilize all the nifty apps and cool Android voice functions. We have found in our testing that it is hit and miss as to which apps work and which ones don't though. For example, trying to do a voice chat in Gtalk results in a force close of the app whereas voice chat in Skype works like a champ. So don't expect everything to work as intended for the time being. 

This functionality is yet another step forward in the progress toward a stable build for CM9 on the TouchPad. All that lacks now is a little polish on the mic service and getting the camera support up and running. These two bits have been an issue since the move from CM7 to CM9 but the CyanogenMod team are obviously hard at work to remedy both of those issues. Hopefully, one day in the near future we will have a fully stable release of CM9 to ride shotgun with Open webOS 1.0. In the meantime we will be more than happy to run the nightly next to webOS Community Edition in the very near future!