Palm Developer Program leaders start walkin’, say hello to self employment.

Man, HP just can’t catch a break. Since the acquisition of Palm, it seems like we’ve heard of new Palm/HP employees defecting for various reasons almost weekly. Well, chalk another two ex-HP employees up on the list. Except this time, they’re a bit more important.

Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer, co-Directors of Palm’s developer program, are saying good-bye to HP…

We knew it was coming, rejoice it is here: Android 2.2 (Froyo) released for G1 [Alpha]

Now before you get all frothy at the mouth, turning over every little pebble for the download link, we must stress that this is an alpha — expect bugs.

Thrown together by infamous Android dev, Cyanogenmod and the many talented folks over at XDA, G1/Magic owners can finally relish in the Froyo limelight.

One thing you should know is the list of non-working functions: WiFi/GPS, camera, some wallpapers, external audio and flash. It seems kind of lacking now, but the list of working items should prove adequate: calls, 3G, LEDs, call audio, gapps and the notification bar. Don’t be too bummed though. These guys are fast — really fast. As of writing it appears to up to the 15th build of this particular ROM so there’s no need to worry about stagnation.

If you’re up to it, jump on over to this forum thread and get caught up to speed.

G1 to see Froyo afterall? Android employees say yes.

It’s one thing for developers to look at Android and say that any updates can easily be ported to older hardware. But it’s an entirely different story if Android employees themselves get caught saying the same thing under the radar. According to the Android Police, a quick chat session they had with Android employees after the I/O event had wrapped up for the day is pretty alarming, if not somewhat common knowledge.

Untethered, all encompassing iDevice “Spirit” jailbreak coming soon. (This Friday?)

Jailbreakers and liberators unite! Untethered jailbreaking for any and all iDevices is coming very soon by way of the Spirit Jailbreak. Like the title says, the jailbreak will be untethered meaning there’ll be no need to babysit your USB cord/computer whilst cracking open Apple’s shackled beauty.

The iPhone 3G and 2nd gen iPod Touch can multi-task natively after all.

Some of you in iPhone still rockin’ an older iPhone 3G or 2nd gen iPod Touch may have been a bit put off after the iPhone OS 4.0 preview. Multitasking was definitely the big thing there and unfortunately for the owners of the devices listed above, they won’t ever see a single part of it. Apple will try to rationalize that it is because of lower spec’d internal hardware. But a solid 1 year+ of jailbroken iPhones running Backgrounder just fine calls Apple’s bluff and exposes it for what it is — a sham to get people to upgrade when they don’t have to.

So it’s with a bit of surprise yet utmost glee that I share with you this bit of information: The iPhone 3G and 2nd gen iPod Touch can in fact multitask and do so natively in OS 4.0. This little treat was discovered by a developer who goes by “cdevwill” on Twitter, posted the following:

wow looks like multitasking can be enabled on the 3G if you just set multitasking=TRUE on the capabilities plist in SB (N82AP.plist)

That’s great news for owners of those legacy devices who are ok with jailbreaking. For now, editing that particular .plist isn’t for your general noob. But give it a time. I’m sure a simple app will pop up in Cydia that will take care of all the under the hood tasks for you. Though an even better solution would be a simple app that could do this even on an un-jailbroken iPhone/iPod Touch.

It’s definitely an interesting development in the early stages of OS 4.0. Stay tuned…

RedmondPie

Twitter close to revealing new layout?

Since Twitter’s inception, the main profile page hasn’t really changed. Conversely, other aspects of the popular micro-blogging site like the login page have. On top of physical looks, numerous actual features have been added, with the more recent (and prominent) one being geo-tagging.

A new posting on Dribble by Twitter’s lead designer, Doug Bowman, shows what is a fairly revamped UI — and a nice one at that I will add. It has that typical Mac-like styling I think. You know, the muted colors, matte finish, and rounded, soft on the eyes corners free from harsh jagged edges. I think it looks awesome.

Any official announcements as to a global rollout are no closer to us than Pluto is to being reclassified as a planet. *sigh* Don’t fret. It gives us something to look forward to.

Along with the revamped UI, Twitter is also hard at work upping the feature set. It’s no secret that they are challenging 3rd party Twitter app developers as the founders want Twitter.com to be the defacto standard, doing away with the need for individual desktop clients. Anyway you look at it, a great web portal is universal and carries over to any platform or OS unlike dedicated apps.

Needless to say, the next 12-18 months for Twitter will be some of the most interesting yet for the company and end users alike — 3rd party developers, perhaps not so much.

What are your thoughts on the new direction the styling and the company overall is going?

Switched > AlleyInsider > Mashable

iPhone OS 4.0 gets the jailbreak treatment. [Video]

The Dev-Team doesn’t really waste much time these days. The iPhone OS 4.0 developer beta/preview was just released yesterday — not even 24 hours ago — and already it’s succumbed to the talented jailbreak community. The video below captures the whole shebang in all it’s glory.

If you were thinking of singing up as a dev just to get an early crack at the 4.0 goodness, the brains behind this latest hack, “MuscleNerd” says that the 4.0 beta is extremely buggy. Makes sense, being a beta and all with a scheduled release still several months away. But I digress, some just have to have it…now!

Are you one of them? If you take the road to milk and jailbroken honey, be sure to share your experiences with us.

Video

iPodnn

Android 2.1 unofficially officially spotted on Droid Eris. Download available!

The oft forgotten about Droid Eris may be the slightly less pretty (read: ugly as sin), fat ugly step sister, but that doesn’t mean someone out there doesn’t have some love for it. (Everyone needs some lovin’, right?) While the bigger and more powerful DROID sucks up most of the attention with it’s egotistic male machismo-like attitude, any and all good news about the “lesser” CDMA Android device for VZW goes to deaf ears. Well folks, if you happen to contain one of those red headed step children in the palm of your hand, today is your day.

Some of the ever talented folks at XDA got there mitts on a unofficial official Android 2.1 firmware for the Eris. Mind you, it isn’t perfect and is lacking a few things — namely Live Wallpapers — that other 2.1 builds contain. But really, it’s not worth getting all upset about — it’s XDA for crying out loud. Just about anything you could ever want done with the coded word has been done by these people before. With that said, all you want is that precious Eris 2.1 firmware, am I right?

Head on over to XDA and pick up your copy now.

PhoneArena > Android and Me > XDA

On again off again on… Apple removes “Explicit” category from iPhone dev tools.

Well, that was a short lived “fix”. The new explicit App Store category that was displayed yesterday has been effectively killed, for now. To many who were part of the 5,000 victims of the boobie ban of 2010, such a category seemed like a warm welcome. It seems that at this point however, Apple is fresh out of “warm loving feelings” for the “others” in the App world. To fall back on, there is that comment Gizmodo garnered from Apple in response to a distraught iPhone developer that stated: “if we do add an Explicit category, it won’t be anytime soon”. So that’ how it is, huh?

Naughty iPhone devs: are you ready to get off this raging roller coaster of emotion?

Macnn