minimal design

Please, note that I’m on Mac OS X. Although it should be similar on other systems, you might need to tweak some of it, especially the command line stuff.

It’s rather ironic that after switching from my iPhone to a Palm Pre, one significant advantage the Pre has is the availability of an app nowhere to be found in the iPhone App Store…

Being the geek that I am, one of the first things I did when I got my Pre was to install the webOS SKD and start poking around to see how hard it was to build an app with it. And while messing around, I found out it’s incredibly easy to install any app packaged as an ipk file.

First off, I got to give credit to the guys over at Precentral who host the Homebrew Apps Catalog. They also have a very good forum full of very smart people. That’s where I got a couple of critical pieces of info. Without them, I’d still be trying to figure it out… That being said, I’m not a big fan of their How To: Install Homebrew Apps. I haven’t tried it, but it just seemed sort of confusing, with many steps and extra stuff to install, when all you really need is the SDK from Palm itself. So here’s my simplified take on it. Those five steps took me less than 10 minutes:

1. Install the SDK and download the homebrew Google Voice app
2. Put your Pre in dev mode:
   • Type upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart
   • Tap the icon that appears on screen
   • Tap “reset”
3. Plug your Pre into your Mac and set it to “Just Charge”
4. Restart your Pre
5. Open the Terminal and type: palm-install -d usb /app/location/app_name.ipk

If you get an error that says “Connection refused” type this in the Terminal (enter your password at the prompt):

sudo chmod 644 /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.palm.novacomd
sudo /opt/nova/bin/post-install.sh

That’s it! You should now have a (not so pretty) bright green icon in your Launcher. As of v.0.4.2, gDial Pro is already very good and perfectly usable on a day to day basis.

Hope that helps!