Zhephree

HP and Palm are notorious for over-promising and under-delivering, and I’m sure all the personnel changes over at HP haven’t help the matter any. HP has suggested and promised a lot of things, mostly prior to the hardware cancellations. There are a lot of little tiny things, though, that get under my skin as a developer and so I want to make these requests to HP, no matter how in vain they may be.

1. License Enyo for Use on Other Platforms. Enyo’s an awesome framework. It’s quick and easy to develop apps in days, not months. It’s already open source. License it under some Apache-like license so we can distribute our apps on the web, or on iOS and Android. There’ll be no new webOS hardware for the foreseeable future, so the users we have now are the only ones we’ll ever have, and that number gets smaller every day.
2. When Submitting Apps, Disable the Final Submit Button After I Click It. Seriously. It’s not that difficult. 
3. Display the “What’s New?” block of text SOMEWHERE. When submitting an update to an app, under the field for the main Catalog description of the app, there’s another field for developers to enter in what has changed in that update. This text is not displayed in the App Catalog, nor on web listings of apps. I presume this is so the App Review Team knows what to look for, but it’d be a big help for the end users as well.
4. Speaking of Web Listings — Bring Back the RSS Feeds for the Catalog. I totally understood when you guys disabled them. You wanted to build a bigger, better online representation of the App Catalog, probably more like Android or Windows Phone or even iOS have done. But then all the HP garbage happened and this probably got shelved. That sucks, but now the only way to find new apps is on a device. Turn on the Feeds and let PreCentral and webOSRoundup take things from there.
5. Make App Download Counts Readable for Those without Calculus Degrees. Just because I’m a developer doesn’t mean that table is easy to read. Fix it. “Design decision” or otherwise, it’s stupid, ugly, and broken. 
6. License Enyo for Other Platforms. I cannot stress the importance of this enough. Just like all those engineers that worked on webOS itself don’t want to see the thing they spent years making fall by the wayside, us developers don’t want our apps to fall into obscurity either. We’re almost all small, independent developers. We can’t afford to rewrite entire apps for new platforms. Let us easily port. Remember how much you guys pushed the whole “iOS Developers! Easily port your games to webOS! Only takes a few hours!”. How great would that be for webOS devs?

This is a short list with arguably 5 items on it. Two of them (#2 and #3) you can make happen in one afternoon. The others will take some time and logistics planning, and I get that.

Give me a kick ass wedding gift (or Christmas gift, or failing that, birthday gift) and make these 5-slash-6 things happen. The actual list of things the community wants from you is much bigger and has many more lofty requests. These are manageable. Make it happen.