Updated beta version of my #webos BART app now available: http://tinyurl.com/2fb5ct5

I can be acquired in the beta feeds, here: http://developer.palm.com/appredirect/?packageid=com.pyen.bart.arrival

This time, I've added automatic refresh and removed the manual refresh button to simplify the UI. Right now, the refresh is every minute. I have a feeling that might not be often enough. Please tell me if you think that the refresh interval should change.

I've also fixed some misc bugs. Yay progress. :-)

Beta version of my BART arrival times app available: http://tinyurl.com/2fb5ct5 #webos #palm

The app (BART Arrival) gives the next arrival times for BART trains at a given station. It will use the GPS to determine the closest station to your location, or a station can be manually selected.

It's called BART Arrival, since someone already took Next BART for a BART app on Android or iOS (don't remember which at the moment).

It still needs a bit more work (especially in the design department, but my CSS skills are growing slowly...), but its definitely useful at this point. If you do use it, feedback is more than welcome.
(Man, the Palm Beta feeds are slow right now, the app just became available, and I posted it on Wednesday night...)

Why webOS rocks for developers (and even general techies)

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via youtube.com

While it may not translate to mainstream success, this is one of the big reasons I really like webOS. Not only did HP/Palm invite one of the leaders of the homebrew community to speak at an official event, in the Q&A, someone from Palm asked him "What can we do to make things easier for you?" The webOS dev community is awesome, and Palm's support makes it even more so.

And while Google might like open source and letting devs muck around in the internals, the Android handset makers seem to sing a completely different tune.

Update: Something went horribly wrong with this post. It looks fine in the editor, but it's all screwy when seen on the site. You can click here to view the video on youtube.

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Why my Palm Pixi hard resets in my pocket

I've figured it out. (for backgroud, see my earlier post: http://blog.ajani.org/an-open-letter-to-palm) The short of it is that if you have a Pixi or a Pre and set a password on your phone, you need to be very careful!

I set a passphrase on my phone because I had to in order to get my work calendar on my phone, and because the phone would occasionally unlock in my pocket. Now this would be a great idea, except after 8 unsuccessful password attempts, the phone is automatically wiped, and it doesn't reset the counter, nor does it relock the phone after an unsuccessful attempt. It even counts just hitting the enter button on the phone's screen as a password attempt, even if nothing has been typed in. All which adds up to a simple scenario where the phone will wipe itself in your pocket.

Palm really needs to implement a better unlock: just swiping up isn't good enough. I guess for now, I'll just have to not have my work calendar on my Pixi, and I'll just deal with it unlocking. However, it's time to go and enter things in on Palm's feedback form and go and find someone internal to HP that can make sure they get the message.

I am so much happier now that I figured out what's broken. At least I know that it won't do it again. :-)

An Open Letter to Palm

Dear Palm,

I like your phones. I like the Pixi's form factor, I like the screen, I even like the keyboard. And the touchstone is the coolest charger ever.

I also like your OS. WebOS has a lot of nice design touches and the UI is well thought out and polished. Developing for WebOS is also very nice and easy, and I love how open everything is: I can browse the source for all of the apps. That's neat.

It's these things that let me work with the slowness and the memory leaks and hope that WebOS 2.0 will bring fixes for these things. These are things I can believe in. I can even deal with AT&T's complete failure to provision WebOS updates in a timely fashion.

However, today, my phone decided to hard reset itself in my pocket for the 3rd time in the 3 months I've had it. To make things even better, the 2nd spontaneous reset was yesterday. This is an issue that I can't excuse. Randomly deleting everything on my phone just isn't nice. The only reason this is even remotely bearable is because of your backup service. However, the lack of the ability to back up system preferences, pictures, music, and web pages added to the launcher makes the backup service not quite good enough.

After the first occurrence, tech support claimed that the hard reset is something that could happen in your pocket because it involves holding down two keys on the keyboard and the power button at the same time. While that's possible, when I attempted a hard reset myself after the first occurrence, it didn't have the same behavior as the spontaneous reset: the spontaneous reset makes the phone unusable for like 10 minutes at a black screen with a circle in the center. At the bottom of the screen is text saying not to remove the battery. The grey circle in the center has a while progress bar that goes around it and the phone reboots when it completes the progress bar. When I did a manual hard reset, it immediately rebooted and was reset.

I guess I need to call support again, however, I don't know how far I'll get or if I even trust the Pixi not to do this in the future. I'd really like to trust that my phone won't randomly delete my data, but I don't know how to regain that trust.

So Palm, we'll see what you do about this. As an HP employee (and Palm fan) I do have a bit of a vested interest in seeing you succeed, but this episode isn't making me feel positive about those prospects.

Your rather disappointed customer,

Bem