Home Brew Apps -- How To In 10 Easy Steps

[tercero12]

@xenophonite:

It just not a "good idea" because it protects the phone from bad code. Don't get me wrong, webOS is impressive. But any professional computer programmer will tell you that the most surprising things are run on bad code.

There's also the case of security. If you have rooted your phone and you have some sort of telnet/ssh access on it, you can bet there's lots of people out there running bots that try to guess that password and get into your phone (computer). If it's just a bot, it's less likely to know to remount root before applying its payload.

I've had a server up for 2.5 years now with denyhosts installed. It captured a VERY LONG list of IPs from which people/bots have tried to login and get root...most of them from China.

[livewire1337]

sweet now ill start working on creating my javascript app for the pre!!

[taalibeen]

My wife and I eat out a lot and I often use my phone's calculator to figure out what the tip should be.

I decided to create a Tip calculator app to simplify it. It also allows me to see, without re-entering the bill total, what the tip would be at different rates.

Here's some screenshots-->

Tip 'Em in the launcher:



Here it is running:



Here it is with a bill amount entered and tip calculated:

[xenophonite]

Congrats! would you mind sharing the code?

[Stuffed]

Nice tip application. The only change I'd make would be to add a total line under the Tip line and add the bill and tip together. That would make it easier to fill out all the fields on the bill.

[jzieman2]

that looks great, taalibeen. Where do you begin scripting something like that? Did you follow the examples of other apps - or can you use javascript from the index.html file?

[antonio3]

maybe add Total like stuffed said... and then possibly a "split bill" option including the tip.. just an easy divide Cheers!! and it looks great!!

[taalibeen]

Thanks for the idea about including the total, and about the split bill. Both of those are excellent suggestions.

I'm gonna share the code later today. Anyone suggest a place I can upload it to so I can just put the zip file up?

[backslide]

Originally Posted by taalibeen

Thanks for the idea about including the total, and about the split bill. Both of those are excellent suggestions.

I'm gonna share the code later today. Anyone suggest a place I can upload it to so I can just put the zip file up?

pre dev wiki: Welcome to the Pre/webOS Development Wiki

[meyerweb]

Originally Posted by tco-jt

General Disclaimer: Use at your own risk. This may cause issues, void your warranty, cause aliens to abduct your sole.

If aliens take my shoe, I'm comin' after you!

[PreGame]

How does the App Catalog add new programs? When a new one is downloaded/installed does it use pkill?

[deesugar]

How hard would it be to take existing web apps or js apps and just modify them to work on the Pre?

And in a similar way couldn't you take games from PlayScreen and convert them to apps that you could play anytime without needing to be online?

[bananachunks]

Originally Posted by deesugar

How hard would it be to take existing web apps or js apps and just modify them to work on the Pre?

And in a similar way couldn't you take games from PlayScreen and convert them to apps that you could play anytime without needing to be online?

not hard at all. For my own curiosity, a few days ago I pulled Wild West Slots from playscreen using HTTrack. Pretty much right away it's ready to throw in a directory with a .json and it's good.

[Ricyteach]

Originally Posted by SirataXero

I was thinking we could use VPN software (or whatever linux uses, pardon my ignorance) to get access to our home computers and stream media such as music or videos without having to save them to our Pre.

You can already do this via the Pre web browser if you set up an orb server on you home computer, which is very easy to do.

Just go to orb.com and follow the directions. It's pretty sweet.

Note that videos through orb don't seem to be working very well on the Pre yet, but music is working just fine, and orb has said they are working on getting the Pre problems fixed.

[SirataXero]

Originally Posted by Ricyteach

You can already do this via the Pre web browser if you set up an orb server on you home computer, which is very easy to do.

Just go to orb.com and follow the directions. It's pretty sweet.

Note that videos through orb don't seem to be working very well on the Pre yet, but music is working just fine, and orb has said they are working on getting the Pre problems fixed.

Oh wow... that's awesome! I didn't know about that... thanks!

I'll definitely look that up when I get my Pre.

[taalibeen]

Originally Posted by bananachunks

not hard at all. For my own curiosity, a few days ago I pulled Wild West Slots from playscreen using HTTrack. Pretty much right away it's ready to throw in a directory with a .json and it's good.

This is the MOST awesome post yet!!

I had tried to play some of the Playscreen.com games, and found that they sucked because of response time. It just wasn't accurate.

Still, I wanted to test your theory.

I downloaded HTTrack, went to the Playscreen site and used HTTrack to download the site Torpedoes Away - See more FREE Games at MyNuMo - Palm Pre Version.

I downloaded the image file for the game and used IrfanView to resize it to 64X64 and saved it as icon.png -->

I named the folder that the actual games was downloaded into via HTTrack as com.playscreen.app.ta.

I created an appinfo.json file with the following contents:


{
"title": "Torpedos Away",
"type": "web",
"main": "index.htm",
"id": "com.playscreen.app.ta",
"vendor": "PlayScreen",
"icon": "icon.png",
"version": "1.2.0",
"removable": "true"
}

I then placed the directory com.playscreen.app.ta on my Pre in USB mode, started up a shell and did a cp -R com.playscreen.app.ta /var/usr/palm/applications, rebooted and the game was installed.


**Those are not step by step instructions, I'm assuming you have done the rooting and have a enough understanding to fill in the blanks **

But the REALLY cool part is that now that the game is local to the PRE, its actually PLAYABLE!!!

Holy sweat socks Batman!! I'm gonna download all the Playscreen games and have fun on my Pre!!

[mdklein]

Originally Posted by wli224

Kaze0, I second that. Being able to rapidly clear the cache without having to restart LunaSys would be great. Anyone have any ideas?

I put this on the wiki.

It seems to trigger a rescan/rebuild of the Launcher panel.

luna-send -n 1 palm://com.palm.applicationManager/rescan {}

This will definitely add/remove any application to the launcher, but I have not finished testing if it will reload the application javascript.

I'd imagine at the minimum you could move the application's directory outside of the palm application directory, send command, move back, repeat.

I'm hoping to make more progress on this today.

//edit: replaced old hacky method with cleaner rescan method.