Surprise! 72 homebrew apps now for Palm Pre

Homebrew apps — now the Palm Pre has a place to get some. The smart guys over at PreCentral have built a very functional homebrew gallery for Pre applications. These applications are user submitted so they may be rough around the edges but their numbers are growing fast. Currently there are 72 apps waiting for you in the gallery.

Using a section of the Palm Pre SDK, applications can be loaded onto devices for testing. As such, all apps in the PreCentral gallery are beta versions for testing purposes. Regardless, there are some great looking apps, something that the Pre has lacked in any real numbers.

To get an app onto your Pre, it takes 2 steps to set your phone up. First, users must download webOSInstaller and then a program called Filecoaster. From there you can enter URLs in Filecoaster and the Pre will download the app file residing at that URL. Not a horrible way to go about it.

The apps are an interesting collection. You’ve got a fart application (no app collection is complete without it), a notification customizer, business calculator to augment the basic onboard Pre one, and some games. Now these games remind me of the old Palm games. There a minesweeper-esque game, hangman, magic 8-ball, snake, tic-tac-toe and the like. The hope is these apps will make it into the official App Catalog, but for now it is a fun way to get some more app love.

To me the standouts from a “Hey, I need that” are MyNotifications to further customize sounds, Go To Tool a neat looking geocaching tool, and dkGoogleVoice. Taking the last one as an example, this app was listed 7/31. Since then, it has been updated four times, the latest was yesterday and included a bunch of fixes. If this app is indicative of the attention being put into the Palm Pre app catalog, we are in store for a wave of apps soon.

Kudos to PreCentral for getting all this together in one place. Check it out for yourself.

Homebrew App Gallery: [PreCentral]