Some enterprising folks have started to load so-called “Homebrew” apps on to their Pre’s without going through the Palm Pre Apps Catalog. This practice, also known as “sideloading,” is not yet completely bug-free or easy to use, but progress is being made and hopefully the process will become pain-free enough for it to be widely adopted. I won’t quite detail how to go about this just yet, since the process isn’t mature enough and we certainly don’t want you destroying your precious Palm Pre in the process. But here are some screen shots for a couple of quite useful apps.

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.