Some exciting developments in the Homebrewed Palm Pre Apps community this past week: at 31 apps, there are now more homebrew apps than official app catalog apps. As you must know by now, homebrew apps are applications that aren’t available through Palm’s official app catalog, but need to be installed (“sideloaded”) through other means. Some of the new ones are quite exciting, including an app to play good old Tetris and an “active screen” app that modifies your Palm Pre homescreen to show calendar events, latest news, the weather, and other widgets.

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!