Author: Andrew Huey

first few hours with the Storm

Stuff I’ve figured out in my first few hours with the BlackBerry Storm:

  • The free version of PocketMac that’s provided by RIM isn’t easy to get working with the Storm. I couldn’t quite do it, after playing around for a half-hour or so. I did see some indication on various forums that it was possible, but I didn’t want to waste too much time on it tonight. I did see some positive mentions of Missing Sync, which I may try out later this week.
  • On the PC side, the Outlook contact sync works fine. I didn’t try the calendar sync. I’m not sure if I’ll stick with the PC sync, or switch to the Mac sync. I’ll probably figure that out after I play with Missing Sync.
  • The Facebook app on the Storm isn’t nearly as good as the one in the iPhone.
  • Overall, the interface is a little weird, but I think I’ll be able to get used to it. I like the fact that you can switch between three keyboards: the SureType and MultiTap keyboards in portrait, and the full QWERTY in landscape.

recycling

I just packed up an old digital camera and my old Palm i705 to send in to Gazelle. I’m also going to toss my old MotoSLVR into the box tomorrow, after I get my new Storm. Gazelle will recycle the i705 and the camera, as they apparently have no resale value at this point. And they’re giving me $23 for the old phone, which I guess is more than fair. I haven’t used Gazelle before, so I’ll report back on whether or not I actually get the $23. Either way, I’m getting rid of some old tech that I really don’t need anymore!

San Diego four-day passes sold out

I saw this mentioned on a couple of blogs today. San Diego four-day passes are already sold out! I was thinking about buying one a couple of weeks ago, but I figured I didn’t need to be in a hurry or anything. It’s the hotel rooms that are usually the big problem, so I was going to wait until I’d figured that out before I bought my pass. Oops. I can still buy four individual one-day passes, but now I’m wondering if I should even go. Without the four-day pass, I can’t get into preview night, so that’s one thing already shot down. And I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to pick up the passes on Wednesday night, so I’d be stuck in the general chaos on Thursday morning, waiting in an undoubtedly long line. (And I’m assuming that I could pick up all four passes on Thursday, but I’m not sure about that.)

Hotel reservations open up next week, and, by the look of things, it’s probably unlikely that I’d get a decent room anywhere close to the convention center. I was hoping that the recession might put a dent in the ballooning of SDCC, at least to the extent that I could buy a four-day pass in late March, and get a hotel room at, say, the Embassy Suites, for a decent price, but it’s not looking like that’s going to happen.

Well, I’ve been going to the con for ten years now, so maybe it’s time to take a year off. I’m not sure what else I’d want to do for a summer vacation though. Maybe Tech Ed? What’s Los Angeles like in May? And does a programming conference count as a vacation?

BlackBerry Storm

I broke down and ordered myself a BlackBerry Storm today. I’d been vacillating back and forth between getting a BlackBerry or an iPhone, and I wasn’t quite convinced that the Storm was the way to go if I did get a BlackBerry. I’m not entirely sure I’ll like it, but I’m going to give it a shot. There is, of course, a two-year contract extension to go along with this, and an extra $30 per month for the BlackBerry e-mail & web plan. So, if I don’t like it, I’m pretty much screwed, though I might be able to trade it in for a Curve or something If I really hate it.

I’m optimistic though. Looking through various forum sites, it sounds like most of the problems with the early Storms have been straightened out through software updates. I’m going to keep my fingers crossed and hope for the best.

DreamSpark

Whenever I take a class at NYU, I always spend a little time looking around to see if I can take advantage of any student discounts on software or hardware, while I have a valid student ID card. In the past, I’ve picked up some random software from the NYU computer store, if there was something I needed, and they had it cheap. Right now, Microsoft has a great program called DreamSpark that allows college students to download certain developer tools for free. The authentication mechanism ties into NYU’s Net ID system, so you can authenticate yourself as an NYU student just be selecting “NYU” from a drop-down at the DreamSpark site, then logging into your NYU account. Pretty simple. I’m downloading Visual Studio 2008 Pro, SQL Server 2008 Developer, and Windows Server 2008 Standard right now. I’m not sure that I really need any of these things; I have access to all of them through my MSDN subscription at work. But, this way, I’ll have a set of licenses that are definitely mine, and not the company’s, just in case.

Kindle iPhone App

I downloaded the Kindle reader for my iPod Touch earlier this week. I don’t anticipate that I’ll use it much, since I do have an actual Kindle, but I wanted to play around with it. Given the limitations of the iPhone form factor, the app works reasonably well. I suppose I could manage to read a book on it, but I’m not sure I’d want to.

I think that releasing this app right now was a good move on Amazon’s part. There do seem to be a lot of people who are comfortable reading on the iPhone. A good number of e-books have been released as iPhone apps, so apparently there’s a market. Amazon might as well pick up some sales this way, and maybe the app will eventually drive some Kindle 2 hardware sales, as people get used to buying and reading e-books, and decide to step up to a dedicated device.

I’m a little surprised that they don’t support reading newspapers and magazines via the iPhone app. Maybe it’s a rights issue. If I was going to read anything on the iPhone, it’d more likely be newspaper and magazine articles, rather than full-length books though.

iPhone app store

There’s an article up on LifeHacker about the first year of the iPhone app store. Here’s a statement I heartily agree with:

The little things: We’ll keep saying it until it’s fixed. It’s ridiculous that a phone that can remotely control your computer and work as a WebDAV server can’t be made to monitor a folder full of text notes and sync its own Notes application to it.

I’m still looking for a really good note-taking app that allows you to use it offline, then sync it back to your computer and/or the web. FrontPocket is working well for me, but it still doesn’t allow me to do much offline. Actually, FrontPocket may be the “killer app” that finally convinces me to switch from the iPod Touch to an iPhone, just so I’ll have constant access to my Backpack data.

FrontPocket review

I just installed FrontPocket on my iPod Touch. I stumbled across this program yesterday while I was working on my MobileMe issue. FrontPocket is an application that gives you (almost) full access to your Backpack account on your Touch (or iPhone). This is something I’ve really been looking for since I got the iPod Touch. I was hoping somebody would get around to coding something like this, and now someone has!

The program uses the Backpack API to access the info in your Backpack account, and pull it down to the iPod over the air. It caches the info locally, so you can still have access to it when you’re not connected to WiFi. I just did some testing, and it doesn’t look like the program automatically sucks down your whole Backpack account; it seems like you only have offline access to stuff that you’ve previously viewed online, and only the version you’ve most recently viewed, not necessarily the current version on the web. And it seems like you can’t add new notes or edit existing ones offline.

While online, you can add notes, edit notes, add journal entries, and add reminders, so you can do pretty much anything you’d want to do. The program does not, though, render Textile or HTML, so you’re just viewing the text of your notes. And URL links are not active links, so you can’t click on them and have them open in Safari or anything like that. (And, of course, the iPod Touch still has no copy & paste functionality, so you can’t just copy & paste an URL out of FrontPocket and into Safari.) Oh, and it doesn’t render photos that you’ve stored in Backpack either.

So, overall, there are a number of limitations to this app that I really wish they could find a way to fix. Some of them are likely related to limitations in the Backpack API. Others could be fixed, though they might be non-trivial. The app’s only on version 1.1, so maybe we’ll see some new stuff added in the next iteration. (I wonder if there’s an open source Textile rendering engine out there somewhere that they could convert for use on the iPod/iPhone and just drop into the app?)

The thing I’d most like to see is a full sync option, where my entire Backpack site would get pulled down to the device. I’d even be OK with having to press a button in the app to initiate the sync, though it would be cool if it could be done automatically in the background.

The app does have calendar functionality, by the way, but I don’t use Backpack calendar, so I can’t say much about that works. I haven’t seen any indication that it integrates with the standard device calendar app, though I wouldn’t expect it to; Apple probably hasn’t made it easy for third-party apps to update the built-in ones.

more fun with MobileMe calendars

Okay, I thought I had everything straightened out, but it just seems that the combination of Outlook and the way I’m generating my “birthdays” calendar on the Mac is not happy. It seems like things go wrong on the MobileMe site after going from iCal, to MobileMe, to Outlook, and back to MobileMe. It’s that last part, after Outlook does whatever it does to the calendars and pushes it back to the web, where everything goes wonky. If there was a way to just push the calendar to Outlook, and not let Outlook push it back to MobileMe, then I’d be OK. I wouldn’t mind treating the calendar as read-only in Outlook. Oh well, I guess I’m going to have to de-sync the calendar on my PC for now. I’ll leave the contact sync going, since that seems to work fine.