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I was planning to skip the BlackBerry Bold and wait for the Javelin (the updated Curve), but decided to go ahead and get the Bold for a variety of reasons:

1. I wanted 3G
2. I wanted a faster processor for JavaScript, etc. in the browser
3. I played with it a bit and found the keyboard wasn’t as bad as it looked
4. The screen rocks
5. The device I really want (touchscreen WebKit browser with a BlackBerry keyboard and OS) is a ways out still

After using it for a day, I’m pretty pleased with it.

Applications

I run pretty lean on the BlackBerry. I mainly rely on e-mail and the browser, but there are some apps I install. All are free.

• TwitterBerry - the latest version is really nice.
• Google Maps - just keeps getting better. Love the GPS integration.
• Gmail - for quick pruning of my junk mail and web service notifications.
• Google BlackBerry Sync - OTA sync for my calendar, don’t sync contacts (yet).
• Google Mobile - mainly to track upgrades for Google Maps, Sync and Gmail.
• Yahoo Go - this is primarily a Flickr uploader and browser for me, but I should also mention that the graphics look stunning on the Bold.
• WeatherBug Direct - the icon looks like crap on the Bold, but it’s handy.

Notes

Some quick thoughts from the day and set-up.

• Set-up was easy.
• The battery life seems good (70% after a day and in bad coverage for much of the time).
• The included belt-clip case is a big improvement over the classic plastic holsters.
• The GPS really is pretty handy (over cell tower triangulation).
• The keyboard isn’t bad - the ridges on the keys make it work.
• It’s big - wide. It makes the iPhone feel tiny.
• The screen is gorgeous (though I was seeing some weird image banding in places, need to test more).
• The Zen theme seems to have a fatal flaw - the icons on the abbreviated home screen don’t update with status properly so you don’t see the little alert indicators.
• Network speed seems pretty good so far.
• Wifi was easy to set up. I used it until I switched the SIM card into the device, then turned it off. Not sure I’ll be using it much.
• If you’re doing anything that is more than a 1 step process, go to a real AT&T store instead of an authorized reseller. Trust me on this one.

Questions? Let me know in the comments and I’ll try to answer them.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Google Code is now hosting the SVN repository for Carrington. Carrington is an elegant WordPress theme framework from my company, Crowd Favorite.

Get the details on the Carrington web site.

Popularity: 8% [?]

I’ve heard from a number of people that have had trouble with the digest features in the current version of Twitter Tools. I’m guessing that there are a couple of bugs in there that are causing the problems.

At this time, the digest features of Twitter Tools should be considered experimental and should not be relied upon.

It was important to get the 1.5 version of Twitter Tools released because the 1.5 betas had a bug that was causing Twitter Tools to behave badly. Apparently that haste has resulted in the digest features being released before they were fully baked.

Unfortunately I’m not sure when I’m going to be able to attack these problems due to other current commitments¹. I welcome patches from anyone who may have time to check this out and find solutions. The SVN repository is publicly accessible. Please send patches to me through the contact page.

The problems that I’ve heard:

• Digest posts created properly but not published.
• Duplicate digest posts being created.
• Digest posts not appearing at the correct time.

The way I think the digests should work, at a high level, is that digest activity should get kicked off after the plugin connects to Twitter to download tweets. It should check to see if anything needs to happen and do the right thing. There is already (working) code in place to make those checks one at a time and only once every 10 minutes. We just need to get the digests working properly.

Thanks in advance to anyone who is able to send in a patch, and to everyone for your patience while this gets squared away.

UPDATE 2008-11-17: A fix has been committed that may solve the duplicate digests. Thanks Greg! Download the latest to give it a try.

1. Crowd Favorite is in the happy position of being quite busy, and hiring. [back]

Popularity: 8% [?]

Twitter Tools, my WordPress plugin that creates a two-way integration between your blog and your Twitter account, has been updated to version 1.5.

This version has an important bug fix for a problem in earlier betas of 1.5 that didn’t properly throttle requests to Twitter.

If you are using a 1.5 beta - this is a must upgrade situation.

There are also a bunch of new features:

• Weekly digests.
• Updates to match Twitter API changes so that “in reply to” links are properly created
• Ability to exclude @replies from daily and weekly digests and blog posts
• added support for hashtags (linked to search.twitter.com)
• Made URLs in blog posts clickable (using the tweet to blog post feature).
• abstracted all API endpoints and URLs so that it can theoretically support any service that implements the Twitter API
• Fixed the duplicate custom field issue for people running WordPress 2.6+.
• Numerous other tweaks and fixes.

The download and more information are available on my WordPress Plugins page.

If you have any trouble with this, please open a thread in the WP Support Forums and e-mail me a link to the thread.

Enjoy!

Popularity: 10% [?]