HP webOS Developer Blog

You’ve made a great app. You know that if someone just tries it, they’re going to love it. And they’re going to tell everyone they know about it. For developers that offer paid apps, anything that makes it easier for someone to try their app can make a world of difference. Today, we’re giving developers another way to do just that.

Developers now have the ability to generate promo codes, giving you new ways to market and distribute apps. You can use promo codes to easily offer free review copies to press, or exercise your creativity by doing giveaways for special campaigns.

No matter how you decide to use them, you have a lot of flexibility in what you can do. We also give you easy ways to track and manage promo codes, which is especially helpful if you offer multiple apps:

- Generate up to 1,000 promo codes for each major release of your app, which are valid up to 60 days.
- Create promo codes for campaigns – for an unlimited number of campaigns
- Track and manage codes: View status, revoke codes, download code histories

So, what are you waiting for? Make it even easier for people to try your great app.

Log in to your account to start creating and managing promo codes. For more information on using them, check out our help article.

Building on the excitement and good times we had at webOS CONNECT London, the fun continues with a pair of upcoming webOS CONNECT events in Paris and Berlin, slated for May.

Whether you’re an experienced webOS developer or someone that just wants to learn and see what all the webOS buzz is about, these events are the perfect opportunity to:

- Meet Richard Kerris, VP of webOS Developer Relations and others on the webOS team
- Learn from best practices of other webOS developers
- Network with the webOS community over some good food and fun

With the webOS 3.0 SDK out in Early Access and all-new webOS devices coming, there’s so much to talk about and we want to bring everyone together to share in all of it and have a good time.

Register now and plan on bringing a friend or two. We’ll see you there!

With the upcoming release of the Pre 3 and TouchPad, we will have two new webOS devices that offer different screen sizes and resolutions than we’ve had before. While these devices will be able to scale & display current apps correctly, developers who want to take advantage of the additional screen real estate will still need to update their apps accordingly. For orientation-independent devices like the TouchPad, it’s becoming especially important to ensure applications also scale & display correctly based on device orientation. One way to obtain this result is by using the CSS3 flexible box layout model.
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“Meet the Team” is a series to help you get to know your webOS Developer Relations team. It’s a friendly and fun behind-the-scenes look at the people whose main mission is to serve and champion webOS developers everywhere.

This week we chat with Josh Marinacci, one of our developer advocates. After you check out his interview, you can follow him on Twitter @joshmarinacci and check out his personal blog.

Q: To start things off, what’s your title? And what does that really mean?

When I joined the webOS Developer Relations team I wanted to do three specific things: teach others how to code great looking webOS apps, bring outside feedback to product engineering, and fight for the interests of developers. This last one in particular really seemed lacking from other mobile ecosystems, so it felt like a good spot for me. The title Developer Advocate really seemed to encompass all of those things. It’s also wide enough to cover the many diverse tasks I do from day to day. One day I might be teaching at a conference and the next I’m helping debug a 3rd party app. Then I might build a site for a developer contest before writing some sample code on a new API.  I love my job because I get to do so many different things.  Life is never boring here.

Q: I know you often give talks at all kinds of developer events – what topics do you enjoy covering the most? By the same token, what do developers like hearing the most about from you?

I love talking about usability and user interfaces. Making better client side software has always been my passion. I spent 5 years at Sun working on the various GUI toolkits (Swing, JavaFX, NetBeans) as well as a variety of open source projects; almost all centered around UIs in some fashion.  Mobile apps are even more interesting to me than desktop apps because they are so focused. Rather than building a big app that has to be all things to all people you can make something small and highly polished that really meets a particular need.  And mobile apps are far more personal, so there’s more gratification from a job well done.

So far, my talks have been well attended, so hopefully developers like hearing me ramble on these topics.

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It hasn’t been that long since we made the webOS 3.0 SDK available in Early Access, but webOS developers everywhere are already hard at work creating apps for the HP TouchPad.

We want to give developers all the support they need to get great apps ready in time for TouchPad’s big summer launch. So, as we speak, we’re kicking off the first in a series of developer sessions that provide in-depth, hands-on experience developing for webOS 3.0 and TouchPad hardware.

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As the Editor-in-chief of the HP webOS Developer Portal, I get to see a lot of apps – games, utilities, productivity apps, you name it. I’m always impressed by the imagination shown by our developer community. Today, I’m going to share with you three of my favorites. These are my “go-to” apps, the ones I use every day to make life easier and more enjoyable.

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Last week was a quite a week for webOS developers. We made the webOS 3.0 SDK available in our Early Access program, giving developers a head start on creating apps for TouchPad’s summer launch (get to it!).  We also launched a new and improved HP webOS Developer Center, providing developers with an even better resource for all their webOS efforts. To share the news, we went across the pond and joined an extensive roster of speakers at the webOS CONNECT community event in London.

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