Updated: Welcome news for developers tonight: Palm has just concluded a gathering of developers and journalists to officially introduce their new Developer Relations heads to the community, and made two big announcements to boot. Firstly, they've announced a new app distribution model that does away with any Big Brother review process. Developers can now upload their applications directly to Palm, who will then return a URL which can be used to access applications directly from the Pre - as simple as that. These URLs can be reposted anyhwere, and Palm says that "public feeds of these URLs and other relevant application data (such as reviews and ratings) will also be made available to the community to help applications find their market".

The second piece of news is possibly even bigger: if developers choose to make their apps available as free open source, then the $99 annual fee for selling in the App Catalog will be waived. (A $50 one-time fee will still be charged for each app uploaded into the catalog.) To cap it all off, every developer in the audience was given a free Pre and Touchstone with a month's free service from Sprint. "Just hack on it," were reportedly Ben Galbraith's words.

Update: Palm have just made the announcement official, also revealing their innovative new auction process for promotional places within the App Catalog. Palm have also delved into more detail on the Developer Network Blog, and a promotional video has been put up here. We've reposted the press release, along with some of the more interesting quotes from the blog, after the jump.

Updated: Palm Inc. has activated the commercial end of its third party software marketplace. Starting late this afternoon, some of the first official commercial webOS applications are now available for purchase from Palm's on-device App Catalog.

Some of the first paid apps to debut include:

• Air Hockey from Acceleroto - $1.99
• Who Wants To Be A Millionaire from Capcom Interactive - $4.99.
• BlockDrop by Daniel Farina - $4.99
• GolfPinFinder by AppJamers, LLC - $9.99
• Weatherbug Elite from Weatherbug - $1.99
• Checkers Pro from Keen Studios - $0.99

Update: And as soon as they were up, they're down again. A critical security bug has cropped up with the new system (discovered by WebOS Internals). More details will be posted as they come in. Paid apps are back, so Palm seem to have found a solution to the problem. Details on the security hole are posted after the break.

Two welcome new developments hit the webOS homebrew scene recently. First up: the WebOS Internals crew unofficially released their new AutoPatch feed for Preware into the wild for testing. AutoPatch, for those not in the know, is the culmination of Rod Whitby's original vision for an open standard for webOS patching and a lot of Eric Gaudet's (he of Virtual Keyboard fame) hard work, as well as contributions from the rest of the team. Once installed, AutoPatch will allow you to download, install (and remove) those webOS homebrew patches that have been properly packaged OTA direct to your device.

AutoPatch will be officially included in the next version of Preware's underlying Package Manager Service, and will include screenshots for patches as Preware already does for homebrew applications. In the meantime you can manually install the feed via Preware - you'll find it under the IPKG category, or else can just type 'autopatch' into the almighty List of Everything. AutoPatch also includes Eric's new Emergency Patch Recovery tool, which if need be can blast any modifications you've made back into cyber-oblivion.

True to their word that they would demonstrate the beta of Flash Player 10 for smartphones in October, Adobe have released a video of the platform in action on the Palm Pre, with all the multitasking goodness that we've come to expect from webOS. Presented in the video are three browser cards, each running one of the Flash showcases: streaming video (with proper landscape support), streaming audio and a game.

"We did a lot of work with Flash Player, to make sure that it integrates with the device, can tell when the device transitions from one application to another," says Adobe's Adrian Ludwig. "And that means we can minimise battery consumption, CPU consumption and actually have multiple instances of Flash running at the same time in different browser windows."

Palm Inc. has released its second webOS update in a week. Reports are now coming in that webOS v1.2.1 started showing up late friday afternoon and Palm has now posted the full details on its support site.

The update weighs in at 38MB and primarily brings back iTunes 9.0.1 synchronization support and resolves a number of critical issues for Microsoft Exchange users which were introduced in the v1.2 update. In addition to restoring media sync, the Palm Pre can now sync photo albums from within iTunes.

The full change list is posted after the break.

Like a senile old granny who could no longer be trusted to care for herself, dear old Palm OS was quietly shuffled off to the retirement village by former CEO Ed Colligan back in February. Since then, it's suffered the fate that befalls most seniors: completely ignored by relatives who just wish it would hurry up and die already, so they can get their hands on the inheritance. Fortunately for mad old FrankenGarnet and her condo full of stray cats, she still holds a special place in the hearts of a few... like the good people at MetaViewSoft, for instance.

MetaViewSoft recently released 2TwitMe, a fully-featured Twitter client for Palm OS. And when I say "fully-featured", I mean fully-featured: 2TwitMe supports everything (or will soon) that clients on more advanced platforms do, from automatic searches to profile views to plain old regular tweeting. It can run in the background and notify you of new tweets, it can capture pictures from your built-in camera and upload them directly to Twitpic, and it can preview web links for you without having to leave the app - an invaluable feature on Palm OS, given its non-multitasking nature. But is it worth seven of your Earth dollars? Read on for the full review...

It wouldn't be an OS update without things being broken, and webOS 1.2 hasn't broken with tradition. Many of the homebrew patches that were previously designed to work with webOS 1.1 have been borked by the changes in 1.2, and figuring out what still works and what doesn't is a mind-bendingly difficult job. Fortunately for those of us with less-flexible brains, WebOS Internals developer dBsooner has put together an official list of which patches and tweaks are 1.2 compatible.

We've re-printed the list after the jump.

It started with a report from Town Hall Research analyst David Eller, which took issue with Palm's definition of "sell-through". Rather than counting the number of smartphones sold to end-users, Palm instead counts how many have been bought by their carrier partners - a number which also includes those devices that are sitting in retail inventory channels, waiting to be snapped up (or not) by customers. Eller's "research" (and do note the scare quotes) indicates that there are eleven weeks' worth of inventory currently in the channel.

From there, the story was picked up by John Paczkowski at Digital Daily, who was content to simply note that Palm might have an inventory glut. Gizmodo ratcheted things up a notch when it ran with the question: "Is the Palm Pre Tanking?" And then the notoriously dour-on-Palm CrunchGear went a sensationalistic step further, conflating Palm's decision to abandon Windows Mobile development with the Pre's assumed "faltering" and declaring that reliable old cliche` that's been going round the traps for years: the End Of Palm is nigh. (They deservedly copped a beating in the comments from Palm fans.)

Well known programmer and DNA lounge dude, jwz, has posted an interesting article on his dealings with Palm and their "Kafka-esque" application submission process. In short, Mr. Zawinski has had an unusual time simply figuring out how to go about listing two of his webOS freeware apps in the Catalog. He begins with an account of how it used to be, and goes into good bit of descriptive detail on all of the "hoops" he's had to navigate in order to legitimately distribute an application.

But taking a page from Apple's play-book, Palm has now decided that they have to be the one and only gate-keeper for all the software on your Palm Pre, in a way they never did on the Treo, Centro, or any of the earlier PDAs.

So if you, a developer, want to get your software into the hands of your customers, you have to beg and plead and wheedle Palm to distribute it for you.

Correction: The new Funambol portal will not support the Palm Pre - at least, not from the outset. Kim has sent us a new statement this morning, apologising for the error:

I'm afraid I was mistaken, and Funambol v8 (launching tomorrow) will not, in fact, support the Pre. The official statement is: "Funambol has an established relationship with Palm and is unable to share any details at this time." However, Funambol does support a number of Palm Treo devices.

Shame, but given that Funambol is open-source and there is an "established relationship" with Palm, your correspondent feels confident speculating that an official announcement of webOS support can't be far away. Our original article is published after the break.

"By the end of next week" might have been a little pessimistic: webOS 1.2 is now available for over-the-air update. A friendly reminder: remove all patches and tweaks from your Pre before updating, because no one likes having to take their phone to the Doctor. And yes, developers, the Mojo SDK webOS emulator has also been updated.

Reportedly, the update does not fix the broken iTunes 9 sync, so it seems Palm are going to play nice with the USB-IF and let Apple dictate how their own hardware should work after all. In happier news, it also brings the ability to download files within the browser, email searching within the Email app, Amazon mp3 downloads over EVDO and proper cut-and-paste within web pages and emails.