Lexicomp On-Hand Arrives on the TouchPad
Lexicomp On-Hand launched for the HP TouchPad today, saying that they offer "the most comprehensive medical application available to the healthcare market."
The app provides a comprehensive drug information database for medical professionals.
“Our webOS app for TouchPad provides clinicians a larger, tablet sized view for easily viewing our drug information resources and especially specific content areas like charts and special topics,” says Steven Kerscher, Lexicomp’s Vice President and General Manager. “The HP TouchPad also offers unique user interface features, such as multi-tasking and card stacking - which are not available on other platforms.”
[Source: PRweb]
NewsRoom App Scales Back in Face of Financial Reality
Our favorite webOS RSS news reader app has scaled back its services due to financial reasons.
If you use NewsRoom (and you should), you love it because it has the best user interface and a suite of features that really make keeping up-to-date with your RSS feeds easy and fun.
However, one of its best features is its ability to "harvest" entire articles – not just the summary paragraph that most RSS viewers provide. They call it "content extraction." It accomplishes this feat by performing additional processing on their servers. And that, says NewsRoom developers, is starting to put them into a financial bind.
NewsRoom is developed by Trilett (http://www.trileet.com/)
On Wednesday, NewsRoom reported, "Our overhead to run the service actually exceeded the monthly sales last month. So, in effect, we are now paying to build and maintain NewsRoom."
To keep the service open for their Android and webOS users, NewsRoom has had to scale back the "content harvesting" features so that they now only harvest full articles on only the most popular feeds amongst their users.
For example, if you subscribe to the popular CNN feed, then you'll still see the full article. If you are one of the five people who subscribe to the weboscenter.com feed, you'll probably only see a summary paragraph (we'll get there one day!).
It's another reality that app developers must face. How will they maintain profitability on a product that continues to have server and maintenance expenses after the one-time $4.99 purchase price?
We wish the developers the best because it IS the best rss reader on the market. Truth be told, it is the most used app on my webOS Palm Pre Plus!
[Source: NewsRoom's On-App RSS Feed]
Skype Service Rolls Out for Verizon Pre2 Owners
Skype for Palm Pre2
Our little Pre2 received some love this week. On Friday, Skype announced that it's service was now available on Palm Pre2 for Verizon subscribers. The Pre2 now joins (finally!) the ranks of iPhone and Android devices that are able to use Skype's calling and messaging services.
From the Skype blog:
With Skype mobile built in, you can make free calls to friends and family on Skype, great value calls to landlines and mobile phones overseas, and send IMs to people on Skype anywhere in the world.
Will we see any Skype action for legacy webOS devices (i.e. the ones that most Palm users have right now)? We wouldn't count on it. But it's nice to know that moving forward, Skype will be a viable app.