TouchPad "Add Launcher Pages" tweak appears in Preware 12

Despite all the added functionality in webOS 2.0 to modify and customize your App Launcher pages, webOS 3.0 on the TouchPad stripped all of that away and locked you in to four tabs with pre-defined and uneditable names. As we reported a couple of weeks ago, some progress was made [by this author] to hack the launcher to add/remove and rename your existing launcher pages, but it would not be possible to create a standard patch to install due to the way that the Launcher was coded in webOS 3.0

As is typical of the webOS community, nobody was willing to take "no" for an answer. After documenting my findings on the WebOS Internals Wiki and our PreCentral Forums, other developers dug further into the issue to find a way to bring these much needed tweaks to webOS 3.0. Last night, Rod Whitby from WebOS Internals posted a package in Preware called "All Launcher Tabs" that will add a "GAMES" and "HOMEBREW" tab to the launcher, just before the "SETTINGS" tab. This is not a patch, but rather a script that needs to get packaged like an App in order to run using an advanced installer like Preware. To find this package, you can either just do a search in Preware for "Add Launcher" or navigate to Available Other - Linux Application - Utilities. Once installed, this will NOT add an icon to your launcher, but rather just give you those extra launcher pages. To remove the pages, just open up Preware and uninstall the package and all the icons on those new launcher pages will be reverted to the "DOWNLOADS" tab.

Obviously, this is not yet a robust "Advanced Launcher Configurations" solution that will allow you to choose how many tabs to add/remove or even allow you to choose your own names. But just as we have progressed in 2 weeks to having a safe (and presumably OTA compliant) method to add a few more predefined pages to the launcher, who knows what the next few weeks will bring. And there are still the manual tweaks that have been documented on the Wiki for you to follow. And perhaps in the near future we will soon see a fully-featured "Launchah" app that will allow you to customize the launcher until your heart's content. In the meantime, if you like this latest release from WebOS Internals, don't forget that they always appreciate a donation for their hard work!

Oh, and remember that pesky bug that we reported on that wouldn't allow you to move icons from one launcher page to another after performing these tweaks? It turns out that the bug had nothing to do with these tweaks at all, but rather a bug in webOS 3.0. To prevent this issue, always make sure to press the DONE button on the top-right of the page when moving apps as opposed to tapping elsewhere on the screen to exit "edit" mode.