There is significant progress being made in making the installation process for these homebrew apps much easier and pain-free. There is now a working desktop installer for Windows (still needs a little polishing though) that does a lot of the work for you. All of this is still not really ready for the mainstream but serves as a strong indicator that there’s a healthy developer community working away on apps for the Palm Pre. Even better, once Palm decides to open up the developer program a little further, these apps will soon be available right from within the App Catalog. Excited? So are we!

The first is “Pimp my Sound,” an app that allows you to customize your device-wide notification sounds. You can have any mp3 or other music file replace the default notification sounds on your Pre. And you can do this for each notification. The second is a basic Tip Calculator that is quite configurable with regards to the percentage, whether or not the tax is included, etc. 

We know you’re itching to get your hands on these, but there are several issues regarding the installation process and the uninstallation process (primarily the fact that you can’t uninstall at all!) that we’d like to see smoothed out before we start pushing these widely. Until then we’ll keep an eye out for more exciting progress on homebrewed apps.