Recently I’ve been trying to dive back into software development. My job in IT has stunted that growth a little bit, where I have more of a reactionary role, so when problems arise I act, when there aren’t any problems, the day becomes excrutiatingly slow. Going back to software development is my passion that I hope to be my career one day. What I’ve been doing lately is thinking of ideas of applications that would not be useful to myself, but to others as well. I’m a pretty avid twittering, been apart of the twittering game for about a year now and just love the simplicity of what it is and how many different ways people use twitter to either, communicate their own ideas, post interesting links or just get news (I’m a little of all three). Though it has some issues, my current phone of choice is the BlackBerry Bold, but what has been lacking is a decent twitter application for the BlackBerry platform. Although there are a decent amount of applications out there, twitterberry, socialscope (currently in private beta), blackbird, twittermail, twibble most are lacking in some way. I am setting out to create my own BlackBerry Twitter client which I will aim to complete a working product within two months. I have very little experience in working with external API’s and am not very familar with any REST concepts, hopefully the thoroughly documented twitter API reference will do me some good.
Category Archives: Software
So roughly using the Bold for almost two months, what do I think of it? My first issue is with the Bold or BB OS’s issue of not being able to install applications outside of the alloted 128 MB of RAM space. RIM really either needs to do 1. either give their devices a lot more RAM or 2. give their devices to install apps into either external storage cards or the internal memory space. I know they do this for security purposes, but their smart they should be able to figure out a secure solution, I mean what harm can one really do by installing applications into the internal memory (don’t answer that). Now don’t get me wrong the Bold is probably one of the best devices I have ever used cause things just work on it and things are real zippy, but I’m a pretty heavy user of the Bold and after having multiple applications open using newsgator, google maps, email… the RAM gets eaten worse the Firefox before version 3.0. There is no way to view a running processes to see which one if the hog and stop it, all you have is just clearing the browser cache and this memory cleaning thing, that I have no clue what it does and does not seem to work (Options -> Security Options -> Memory Cleaning). At times it feels like *gasp* using a Windows Mobile device, yes, you heard me right, Windows “slower than a snail, terrible memory management” Mobile. I have done many battery pulls to try to relinquish the lost memory more times now than I can count and waiting 3+ minutes for a phone to start back up is ri-dic-u-lous.
Other issues:
IMAP is pretty much broken, I don’t know if it is an issue with Gmail IMAP or just IMAP email handling in general (I’ve only used IMAP with my gmail account), but it is broken like no other. I don’t receive all my email and it tends to lag when marking an email as read, if it even marks it as read and I had no way to access all my folders. I have since reverted back to general default email settings, which is POP I believe, cause I actually get emails that way.
No fun applications at all. Don’t expect an iPhone like experience on this thing cause it really is great for managing your data and such, but other than brickbreaker or wordmole, don’t expect to be playing Metal Gear on this thing. Another thing is there is no easy way to install applications to this thing, don’t go expecting to simply load up an app store and simply search and install what you’d like from your phone. You are gonna have to search on a desktop to find an application that suites your needs, then you can either connect your BB to your computer or use the god-awful web browser to enter in the url and manage to navigate to it somehow. The impending app store may solve all these problems, but I have a feeling it probably won’t.
Approximately 1/2 of my lock ups, freezes and slow downs can be attributed to one thing, the web browser. It isn’t as bad as say Pocket IE, but its pretty bad. I mean on the surface it renders pages like its original pretty well, that’s if you manage to load a page without it locking up. But you can install Opera Mini on the Bold, so there is an alternative. I am really just waiting for Mozilla to release Fennec, the mobile Firefox browser.
The last issue, which some may or may not consider an issue is (I hate to say it), but the Bold just isn’t “fun” enough. I look at all the cool apps for the iPhone and I get pretty jealous, over the past year or so the iPhone/iPod Touch has really become an amazing platform for development. As much as I dislike some of the choices that Apple has made (ummm… Copy/Paste anyone) it is the phone everyone wants because of its applications and usability. I know plenty of people that have trouble getting around the BB, but know very few that have the same issues of usability on Apple’s mobile platform.
What I think RIM needs to do is throw out the book and create an OS along with great hardware that encompasses modern day techniques of UI. I’m not saying that they should scratch what they have with their current iterations, afterall they are the venerable email workhorse, but they should consider putting the effort into crafting a new platform that will herald in new users that would actually wow them not confuse. We’ll see what 2009 brings, CES next week is only that start of what I predict to be a very interesting year in regards to the common man.
So I finally got a chance to test out Google Chrome… initial verdict is that it is so so. For the most part, it works with a lot sites that I throw at it, some it doesn’t handle too well and it is missing many of the essential features that other browsers have in strides or maybe I just haven’t figured out how to use it.
Styling and Shortcuts:
So shortcuts are all generally the same as Firefox, which is a great thing, since I’m just about a shortcut freak. I’ve been known to stop using applications if they don’t have shortcuts. The clean fullscreen style look is really nice, it gives it this strange inverted fresh feel that has been lacking in many browsers.
Performance:
I thought this multi-process thing was a great paradigm when I first read about it, but I have some reservations about it. Right now I have about 15 tabs open in one window and bringing up the task manager I seek 10 “chrome.exe” processes running. I’m not sure where the other 5 are, but it takes up roughly 215 MB of ram. Opera with 17 tabs, takes up roughly 96 MB. Firefox with a whooping 32 tabs across two windows and 14 plugins installed eats up 457 MB. Granted, these aren’t true benchmarks, I’m just making a note of all this so do with it what you will. Chrome hasn’t really chugged along on my machine, but my thinkpad is handling it all (all browsers at the same time) pretty well.
I currently have version 0.2.149.27, so it has a ways to go. If Google keeps this thing on track, it has a wealth of possibilities. But my prediction now is that everyone and their mother is gonna create a competing browser now, which could be a disastrous thing.
