It looks like it isn't just bluster from Palm when it comes to thinking differently about its app approval policy. Besides taking a pretty healthy stance on applications that deviate from its current standards, today 10 new titles have shown up for download... a Google Voice app being one of them. gDial Pro, a piece of software which started its life as a homebrew application, is now an official part of the beta store. The program lets you access Google Voice's full feature set (including a dialer), and no one seems very bothered by it. Here's hoping Palm keeps up the flow of new software to the Catalog (they're eating for two now) and they keep a healthy distance from rejection letters.

[Via PreThinking]

While Palm is busily engaged in a game of domination with Apple to see which one can keep iTunes sync working or broken the longest, the Pre homebrew community hasn't been sitting idle, introducing two new and painless ways to get homemade software up in your handset. The first is a desktop app called WebOS Quick Install that works on Mac, PC, and Linux, allowing installation with just a drag, a drop, and a click. The other is called fileCoaster, enabling users to download and install IPKs right on the phone itself, plus other files too. Two great apps for fans of unofficial softwares and good tidings for a warm future of basement innovation -- only a month after the first custom apps came to light.

Palm has done its darnedest to keep the riffraff away from webOS development while it finishes up its Mojo SDK for webOS development, but the floodgates have finally opened with an opportune leak of Mojo to Torrent-vill. Naturally, Palm will still be locking out unapproved developers from releasing their creations to the App Catalog for the time being, but this should hopefully give the everyman a chance to hone apps in anticipation of a day of approval -- and should really beef up the homebrew community in the meantime. The other good news is that Palm is actually adding developers to its "early access program" at a fairly rapid pace, announcing that it doubled its membership this week, and plans to double it again next week. It's all coming together.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Update: The original leak was strictly Windows-style, but PreThinking notes that it's available for Mac now as well.

According to Dieter over at PreCentral, real, honest-to-goodness usable apps are starting to "trickle out" for the Pre / webOS. Apparently utilizing a loophole in the operating system which allows unsigned apps to be sideloaded through email, homebrewers have taken to the interwebs with small utilities like the tip calculator (pictured above). This comes just a day after a group of DIY'ers figured out a workable solution for getting software onto the phone without rooting, so obviously Pre hacking is moving along at a healthy clip. These are -- of course -- very early applications, so don't expect perfection, and there seems to be some concern that Palm might want to patch up this hole, as it leaves the phone vulnerable to less altruistic endeavors. While the latter point is reasonable to consider, we do have a piece of advice for the folks at the front of this movement: don't wait and worry on how Palm will react to this stuff. It's important to push platforms like webOS, and the Pre needs all the love it can get on the development side right now.

Read - Right now: Install a Homebrew App without Hacking
Read - Homebrew Apps Tricking Out, but be careful

There have been no shortage of custom apps hitting the Pre already, including a number of old favorites, but all have required a little bit of roto-rooting ahead of time to lay the groundwork for such non-authorized code. That might change in the very near future thanks to the work of a trio of dedicated deviant coders going by the handles xorg, simplyflipflops, and Shaya Potter. Over the span of just a few days they managed to figure out how to package and sign custom apps in such a way that anything can be installed on a completely stock phone -- the only catch is they're waiting to see what Palm has to say about it before they release a full how-to. Since the company has its own plans of making most developers wait at least a few months before setting them free we can't imagine the response is going to be: "This is totally awesome, please tell the world our secrets." But, we'd be happy to be wrong.

[Thanks, Bo]

We've seen a tremendous explosion in the webOS hacking scene ever since the Pre's firmware image leaked out -- between the easily-accessible restore more, Linux foundations and the directly-accessible HTML / CSS / Javascript application code, we've already seen everything from minor tweaks to full on NES emulation to Sprint activation hacks. In short, things are wide open at the moment, and people (including us) are excited by the possibilities -- but that doesn't mean Palm has to play along. In fact, two recent developments have us worried for the future of this happy little scene -- first, Palm's apparently forbidding the Pre Dev Wiki from posting any information about data tethering during the Sprint exclusivity period, and apparently threatening to have the site shut down if it happens:

We have been politely cautioned by Palm that any discussion of tethering during the Sprint exclusivity period (and perhaps beyond-we don't know yet) will probably cause Sprint to complain to Palm, and if that happened then Palm would be forced to react against the people running the IRC channel and this wiki.

Yeah, that's pretty aggro for a company that needs to court all the developer support it can. We're not sure what'll happen after Sprint's exclusivity runs out, but we can't imagine any other carriers are going to be thrilled about hacked tethering options either, so we'd say Palm's going to keep the pressure on until unlocked GSM webOS devices hit the scene -- and we can almost guarantee that tethering hacks are going to make it into the wild regardless of Palm's actions.

Even worse for hackers, Palm's taking an unusually aggressive approach to webOS system updates -- they're mandatory. According to the support docs, webOS updates are automatically downloaded in the background within two days of being available, and they're required to be installed within a week of the download -- after seven days and four install prompts, the phone will give you a ten-minute countdown and then automatically begin installing the update. Sure, we can understand why Palm would want all of its devices to be updated, and we know that a lot of webOS system foundations are in flux while the Mojo SDK is being finalized, but forced updates seem extremely heavy-handed to us -- it's one thing to try and maintain control over a platform, it's another to keep it with an iron fist. Of course, it's probable that we'll see a hack to bypass all of this extremely soon, so maybe it'll all work itself out, but we'd really like to see Palm develop an official policy friendly towards hacking and homebrew and stick to it -- the Pre and webOS have attracted a lot of talent in the past two weeks, and it'd be a shame to lose it.

[Via PreThinking; thanks, Justin]

Read - Pre Dev Wiki tethering policy
Read - Palm webOS updates support doc

Sure, once you get Doom onto a device there isn't much stopping you in the homebrew department, but we thought the implementation of an NES emulator on webOS outside of the Classic environment was worth noting -- even if it happens to be astoundingly easy to pull off. All it requires is a quick trip to root on the device a compile of the FCEUltra NES emulator for Linux and bam, it's good to go. Hit up the read link for instructions (we're sure we're simplifying things just a tad) -- and no, the incredible appropriateness of using a Contra ROM to kick things off hasn't escaped us.

It's begun. Although lacking a general release of the SDK, the first homebrew apps have emerged thanks to last night's leaked WebOS root image. The first application puts a stake in the ground by displaying a simple "hello world" on the screen. Unfortunately, the code overwrote the pre-installed Sprint Nascar application... oh wait, that's probably a good thing. Devs have also started tampering with existing code to disable the shutter sound on the camera while leaving the rest of the sounds enabled. Now why would somebody want to do that?

Update: New image from an excited developer that shows scm6079's work over at PreCentral evolving with a 5-second photo timer and more. We're being told that several members of the Pre hacking team consist of old-school PalmOS hackers from the Samsung i300 days. Now if Palm can just lure back the rest of its developers smitten by Android and the lure of App Store riches then they might just make something of this fledgling smartphone platform.

[Thanks, Scott M. and C.J.]