HP webOS Developer Blog

By no means would I categorize myself as a gamer, but found Ancient Frog LE to be instantly addictive from the first time I fired it up. Ancient Workshop did a great job of offering up stimulating puzzle challenges with a mesmerizing visual experience, while keeping the learning curve low with a user friendly interface. The result is a gaming experience that’s perfect for light play while waiting in line, or killing time on a train ride home. In other words, perfect for someone who knows their smart phone isn’t all work and no play.

The developers over at Ancient Workshop did a great job of animating the frog with super fluid movements that are really captivating. Froggy footprints mark the trail that needs to be traversed, and the number of moves are displayed in a daisy at the top of the screen. The overall user experience is enhanced with subtle ambient forest noises in the background. Nice touch. And I like that Undo and Redo are called by simply swiping forward or backward across the screen.

This is a great example of what’s possible with a graphically rich app that’s ported to webOS with the PDK. If you’ve got a C/C++ app that you haven’t ported over to webOS and you’re feeling inspired, the PDK makes porting a breeze, and there’s still ample time to be a fast mover in the Hot Apps competition.

The new Hot Apps leader board has been live for a week, so we’ve had enough time to see some real movement. Several indy games are dominating the upper tiers. Saber Ultimate and Crusade of Destiny have taken the top spots.

A favorite of mine, Pixi Dust, is in the #2 free spot. Pixi Dust is a fun & free particle simulator that lets you use your fingers to create vortices of pixie dust. It can handle up to 10,000 particles at once which really shows off the power of webOS.

Galcon is holding the #3 paid spot. Galcon is an award winning iPhone strategy game now available for webOS. You play a space commander conquering and holding planets with the goal of taking over the galaxy. I used to play it all the time on my iPod Touch. Another great way to spend your free time.

There are still 44 empty slots in the free side, so get your PDK apps in the catalog ASAP. There’s still plenty of time to get enough sales to rank high on the leader board. A great cash bonus or cool laptop could be yours.

That’s right app fans, the Palm Hot Apps Leaderboard is back, only this time the million dollars is just for PDK apps. All those rad 3D games, crazy special effects, and essential beer simulators are at your finger tips on the webOS.
Oh yeah, and this time we added an extra tier at $50,000, and the bottom tier has the option of $1,000 credit at HP.com or a brand new HP ENVY 17 premium laptop.

The competition runs until September 30th, and as you can see there’s still plenty of space in the free column for you to earn a big bonus. And don’t think this is just for the big guys. In the paid catalog small game developer DVide Arts has just released Crusade of Destiny, the first 3D RPG for webos, and it’s already shot up to the # 2 spot. It’s definitely not too late to win. Good apps move fast through the rankings.

You can always find the leaderboard at http://palmhotapps.com/. We plan to update it every day, and just to make sure you can keep on top of it we’ve created a Twitter account specifically for the competition. Follow @palmhotapps to always have the latest Hot Apps news.

A quick summary of the rules. This competition is just for apps built with the Plugin Development Kit (PDK), an easy to use C/C++ toolkit for building webOS plugins and apps. The competition ends September 30th, and the app must be available in the catalog by then. The competition only counts sales after July 15th on devices running 1.4.5 or higher to give all developers a level playing field.
As before, Palm and HP employees are excluded, and you can only win once in the 100k and 50k tiers. See the full rules for more details.

It’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for! Today, Palm announces the winners of the Hot Apps competition. It’s been great watching as our developer community rose to the challenge, producing great apps for webOS. We hope you enjoyed the competition too, and that it helped you get more exposure for your apps.

You can check out the complete list of winners here, but we’d like to highlight the two winners in the $100,000 category:

Winner, Paid Apps – YouView Visual Voicemail Client

YouView Visual Voicemail Client by Syntactix is a visual voicemail client powered by YouMail. It replaces your carrier’s voicemail and provides a ton of handy features for handling your voicemail and other phone services. Extremely cool!

Winner, Free Apps – Pandora Radio

Pandora Radio by Pandora, is your free, personalized, streaming radio station, that customizes playlists for you based on the kind of music you like. A fantastic app!

Pandora

YouView Visual Voicemail

The competition was fierce and hard-fought. Congratulations to all of our winners!

Don’t forget that we’ve got a new Hot Apps competition just for PDK apps. It’s going on now, so submit your app soon!

With the 50% off sale starting last Friday, app sales have seen quite a boost and that’s had an effect on Hot Apps. The 1K bracket is seeing a lot of turnover. Even the 10K bracket is seeing some movement, including World Cup 2010 moving up 4 spots to #17.

There’s only six days left in the competition. I had planned to say that it’s too late to get into the 1K bracket with a brand new app, but this week an app came along to prove me wrong. FlightTrack went from nothing to entering the 1K bracket in about four days! It’s now at 194#. How did it do it? By offering an experience that no other flight tracking app has matched: beautiful interactive maps with real time updates. It just goes to show that a good app can do very well.

In Fast Movers the four vuvuzela apps (1,2,3,4) have done well, proving that the world doesn’t have enough noise making ability. And if vuvuzela’s aren’t enough for you there’s always Fast Mover A1 Horn Blaster 2010.
Another app zooming up the charts is Solitaire Collection, which has six classic solitaire variations including my personal favorite: free cell.

That’s it for This Week in Hot Apps. I’ll see you soon as our competition comes to an exciting finish.

My gaming preferences on my phone lean towards casual games — the kind of thing you can pop into for a few minutes while waiting for something else to happen. I’m a fan of things like Solitaire and Sudoku but I’m always looking for different ways to entertain myself during these waiting times.

One game that I’ve been happily wasting time with recently is ColorPhyll (get it here). The concept is simple: the board is created using blocks in six colors, plus black. Your job is to clear the board in a certain number of steps by choosing a color. Any sets of blocks that touch the black blocks are cleared from the board.

What attracts me to this game? Simple game play for one, and there’s no complicated learning curve to get going in it so it’s really good for this kind of casual “in and out” type of game usage. I happen to really like the fact that there’s no timer, no leaderboard, no top score or “score to beat” — it’s not really a competition style game, it’s really a form of solitaire that isn’t card based. It doesn’t matter if you put the app in the background for a few minutes or come back to it hours later.

It’s also a nice game in that you have to think through your strategy, but it isn’t a game that forces you to focus on it or concentrate — like a card-based solitaire, it’s easy to pop in and play part of a game, pop back out and do something else, then pop back in again later and pick it up where you left off. Not all games lend themselves to that.

The strategy isn’t overly complex, but the proper move is many times not the obvious one. The levels are designed so that you are likely going to finish one or two moves before the deadline — or one or two after.

This probably isn’t a good game if you’re a seriously competitive, “gotta do this in fewer moves, gotta beat the clock” type, but if you’re looking for a nice, well-thought out casual game to spend some time with, I think you’ll really like it. It’s challenging enough to keep you interested, but doesn’t require you to sit down and focus on it.

The implementation is clean and the graphics are simple but everything works well together. The only weakness to the game is that the levels are all manually designed and baked into the game, so over time you’ll get familiar with them — but there’s plenty of game play for the price, and hopefully the developer will update the game with new levels over time.

Overall, highly recommended.

This week’s fast mover is another great creation from Inglorious Apps, FlickrCam. What does it do? Very simple: it uploads photos to Flickr in the background in a constant stream as you take them.

I really like this app because it’s simple and useful. Many times I want to take a bunch of photos and only upload the good ones. Other times, however, I want to document an event as it is happening. Imagine you are at a developer conference watching Mini Kiss rock out on stage and you want to share it with your Flickr friends immediately. (Yes, this actually happened to me). You want to spend your time taking cool shots, not worrying about saving and uploading them. With this simple app you can.

Thanks to the multitasking nature of webOS you could use this at a party to take a constant stream of pics while also texting or tweeting. My only complaint about FlickrCam is that it only uploads to Flickr. I wish it would post to Twitter or TwitPic as well, so I could share photos live over multiple accounts, not just Flickr.

This is another gem of an app from Inglorious Apps. Be sure to check out some of their other apps like Crushed, MediaVault, and Notes.

There’s nearly two weeks left in the Hot Apps competition, which is still enough time to get on the leader board. Apps have done it in less than a week, so keep those apps coming!

This week the world is only talking about one thing: the World Cup. And not just on TV; quite a few World Cup related apps have popped to the top of the charts this week.

• World Cup 2010: keep track of the event with live results.
• LIVE Soccer Football Scores FREE
  : key plays for important international matches with option to view details of each key play
• Soccer 2010 can you score higher than other countries in this simple soccer game?
• World Cup Manager
  The complete guide to the FIFA World Cup 2010 in South Africa!
• Vuvuzela
  The Vuvuzela is the one and only fan tool for the soccer world cup. With this app you always have your Vuvuzela in your pocket.

Other apps zooming up the charts this past week include:

• WordBox Free find words by connecting three or more adjacent letters on a 4×4 board within a time limit
• SleepTimer

  Simply set how long you want your music to continue to play, and SleepTimer will automatically stop your music for you.

• News Radio for webOS
  a webOS app for viewing and listening to NPR News and Information. Read news from popular NPR shows and listen to the streaming audio when available.
• People Finder for Google Latitude has continued rising, now hitting the 1k bracket at #158.

The competition has only two weeks left, so keep coming back for great Hot Apps.

About a month ago the Palm Developer Relations team had a vision of a tool for discovering great apps. The HotApps website is pretty good, but we wanted something actually on your phone with a focus on finding just the really great apps. Since then three engineers from the team, Ben, Kevin, and Josh, joined forces with Chris, a talented graphic designer, to build a brand new tool that we call Featured Apps.

When we set out to build Featured Apps we knew it had to look great, be extremely responsive, and always keep itself up to date. To do this we spent most of our time in a few crucial areas, and built some reusable code along the way that we’d like to share with you. Over the next we weeks we will publish a series of blogs describing how we built:

• an aggressive image cache that prefetches images from Palm’s CDN

  

• a modified image viewer with smooth scrolling, drop shadow effects, and a full screen view

  

• a modal menu panel in the header, similar to the Facebook app

  

• anonymous hooks into Google Analytics to see which parts of the catalog are most popular
• a scaleable webservice based JSON with background notifications.

Until then, enjoy exploring more great apps.

It’s a new week in Hot Apps, and great apps continue to rise to the top.
Free Music Ringtones is still burning up the charts, now reaching #4 after only a few weeks in the catalog. Sports Live is now up to #76. I really enjoyed the hockey version of this app during the playoffs. It’s the easiest way to keep track of your favorite teams. And right now the app is on sale.

Other Hot Apps this week include: Notes reaching the 10k bracket for the first time,
DigiBar Pocket Bartender and
Radio Hibiki have entered the 1k bracket, and AuctionMate Pro and Dropboxify have continued to rise to 114 and 117 respectively.

In fast movers we’ve seen a lot of apps pop up to the top in the last week. Of note this week:

• Chuck: get your wise wisdom on life from Chuck Norris
• MTV News-Free, just released from MTV Networks
• Seafood Watch: find out which seafood dishes are safe and sustainable.
• TXT Group: a group SMS app with attachments.
• Puzzle Kitchen: a fun and addictive puzzle game
• People Finder for Google Latitude: what it says on the tin.

That’s it for Hot Apps this week. We are down to the final three weeks of the competition, so tune in text week to find out who’s in the lead.