Zhephree

Ok, guys, I just submitted my second app to Palm. The cool part is: I started writing it last night. It’s also a paid app. More on that later.

The new app is named neato!. Yes, the exclamation point is part of the name. What is neato!? neato! is basically my webOS interpretation of Chrome to Phone for Android. Only, neato! has a few extras and advancements. The guys at PreCentral’s prayers have been answered. (Also, you should always pay attention to my comments I make on PreCentral and webOSRoundUp: Chances are, I’ll give hints to my new apps! As evidenced here.)

If you aren’t familiar with Chrome to Phone, it’s an Android app and a Chrome web browser extension. Once paired together, clicking on the Chrome to Phone button in your web browser will open the current web page almost instantly on your Android phone. It’s a pretty cool idea.

Here’s where neato! improves on CtP:

There’s no browser-specific extension. neato! generates a unique bookmarklet that you drag to the bookmarks bar on your favorite browser of choice. I’ve tested neato! on Firefox 3.6 (Mac & Win), Safari 5 (Mac), Chrome (Mac & Win), Internet Explorer 7 (Win). I suspect it’ll work on pretty much every other browser too.

neato! will also take whatever text is selected on a web page and send it to the phone. A scene will pop open on the phone with a text field populated with the same text you selected on the web page! You’ll be able to edit the text before you copy it to the clipboard.

Google Map URLs open to the same view you see on your browser in the Google Maps app on your webOS phone. The same goes for YouTube links.

Coming in the next version:

When selected text is a telephone number, open the phone dialer with the phone number ready to be dialed.
When selected text is an address, open it in Google Maps

neato! is smart to conserve bandwidth and battery power. When neato! detects that your phone’s screen has turned off, neato! will disconnect and stop waiting for messages. When your screen turns back on again, neato! will reconnect and be ready to listen again!

Hopefully it gets approved by Palm soon. I’ll let everyone know when!

Oh, and the app is priced at $1.43. I made this a paid app for two reasons: 1) some actions take place using my web server, which will lead to more bandwidth usage for me and more costs. 2) the technology behind neato!, PubSubHubBub is powered by PubNub. PubNub is a free API layer for PubSubHubBub, but they start charging me after 5000 hits, so the cost of the app is to offset those future costs. Hopefully I can bring the cost down one day, but for now, it’s at an easy $1.43.

Here’s some screen shots: