PreCentral: webOS Developer Center update offers customer reviews and shorter promo codes

[News Reporter]

Hosanna! Updates to the HP webOS Developer Center! As we begged and pleaded in

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, there's a great need for shorter, more consumer-friendly promo codes. The kind you can easily re-type, you know, maybe 15 characters tops instead of something that rivals Microsoft's validation codes for having an excessive number of characters.

As we noted then, the current system of 32 alpha-numeric digits allows for 1.9 quattuordecillion (that's 1.9 billion trillion trillion trillion) possible codes. No matter how successful webOS possibly is in the future, it'll never got through that many promo codes. Developers now have the option of generating "printable" codes that are fifteen characters long instead. The codes are also a much much much easier to process five letters, five numbers, and five letters. That's still 20.6 quintillion possible combinations, so the chances of somebody successfully guessing a functional code are still more than remote.

There's been another update that's far more important for most developers: they can now read reviews left in the App Catalog by users from the developer portal website. The reviews expose not just the name, date, rating, and text of the review (like the App Catalog itself does), but also allow for on-the-fly translation and show the developer what version of the app that user had installed. This makes it easier to track down bugs based on the version (or see if somebody is just using an outdated version of the app and has been ignoring update prompts on their phone). The developer center reviews still don't make it possible for the developer to contact the user to address any issues they might have (be it PIBKAC errors or a legitimate problem with the app), but being able to review the reviews from someplace other than the App Catalog. It's a step forward, and hopefully the first of many.