Collab-Or-Ate

Nine out of ten search hits that land on my blog are related to the five posts I’ve made about my Blackberry Pearl. Ok, who am I kidding, it is ten out of ten. So to satisfy those visitors, I’ll give an update.

Give it up. Just buy the iPhone.

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article that begins…

If you’re a BlackBerry user, you’re probably getting tired of hearing about all the things Apple’s iPhone can do.

“Yes! yes!” I thought. Finally, the Mossberg has a Solution! So I eagerly read the article titled “Ways to Unlock The Potential Of a BlackBerry” thinking that I would finally have a leg to stand on in front of all these gleeful, satisfied iPhone users.

Ug. So the article covers such things as:

“Pressing the Space bar works like Page Down on a computer keyboard, moving down one screen per press.”

I am pretty sure most Blackberry users have figured out how to use the keyboard. Ok, next cool iPhone-like trick:

“Shortcuts in BlackBerry messaging can be a real boon when you’re trying to get work done quickly. While looking at a list of emails, hit “C” to immediately start composing a new email.”

Sorry, that doesn’t cut it as something that will impress iPhone users. Next!

“To reboot your BlackBerry without removing its plastic back and taking out the battery, press ALT, Right Shift and Delete simultaneously.”

Ok, so you are saying the Blackberry is about as hip as the PC? Grrrrreat. I get it.

… isn’t happening yet. Yea. So I upgraded to Notes 8 with great enthusiasm last week, and OMG, it is SO awesome. (Caveat: I’ve been using Notes 7 for a year, so my ability to determine what is truly “awesome” for an email client may be somewhat distorted.) But seriously, Notes 8 is a great, great upgrade.

Until you try to sync your Blackberry with it. Oh well. RIM still has to come out with a patch so that the Blackberry Desktop Manager works with Notes 8. You can read about it on the blackberry forums. So my calendar and address book will suffer for a while until someone figures this out. There’s no way I’m going to stop using Notes 8.

It is Friday afternoon and I can’t help but think, where has the week gone?? How many times have you asked yourself that?

If you are on a Mac, there’s a new application you can use to track what you do on your machine throughout the day. Maybe it can help you get a better answer to the eternal question “where does the time go?” It can definitely show you some interesting visualizations of how and when you use different applications on your machine.

The tool is called Slife, from Slife Labs. From the website:

Slife is a new application for the Max OS X that lets you visualize and organize your computer activities like never before. Slife observes your every interaction with applications such as Safari, Mail and iChat and keeps tracks of all web pages you visit, emails you read, documents you write and much more.

From what I keep reading and seeing from the “MySpace” generation, there is a strong desire to share status with friends, family, and even loose contacts. And Slife Labs has an add-on tool to allow you to share your Slife captured actions and publish them to your contacts. So if you want to share more information with your friends about how you are spending your time, SlifeShare offers you a new way to do that:

A Slifeshare is an online space where you share your digital life activities such as browsing the web and listening to music with your friends, family or anyone you care about.

It is all very interesting stuff and reflects the current trend of capturing and sharing life data.

Since switching from a Mac to a PC, I’ve been on a hunt for an RSS Reader that is as good as the Mac’s NetNewsWire. Simple, clean, and customizable interface. A thin-client for reading about 150 feeds that I’ve lumped into about 6 categories. I have finally found it in RSSOwl.

Sage: Although this seems to be the most popular choice amongst the people I’ve polled, Sage is completely unacceptable to me. When I load a feed that has 20 unread posts, all 20 are loaded into the right-hand viewer screen. That seems great and super-efficient, until you realize that all 20 will remain marked as unread until I have taken the additional, unnecessary step of clicking on every single one of the post titles in the lower-left-hand screen. Why do I have to click on a title to mark it as read when I have already read it? My second complaint about Sage is that when I click on a folder containing multiple blogs, I cannot see the posts of the blogs within this folder. I follow a blog and its comments through 2 RSS feeds and I want to see the comments and posts together, time sorted. This is not possible in Sage. Next!

SharpReader: I used SharpReader for about 2 months and have found it to be much better than Sage, but not a clear winner. It has the logical 3 pane layout where you select a blog (or a folder containing multiple blogs!) and that shows you the titles and you click on the titles to read the post and to mark the post as read (one click does both!). It runs as an icon in your task bar, so you can access it easily and it doesn’t take up a lot of room. My complaints are that there are very few customizable options for how the display works and it causes some bad display flickering on my machine when it is updating the feeds or refreshing its view. The feature that I don’t particularly like but can’t turn off is that when it updates my feeds in the foreground or background, it has pop-up windows that end up covering the entire right-hand side of my computer screen and making my entire desktop flicker like mad until I click on some other application. Basically, I’d say it is an acceptable alternative to Sage, but kind of rough around the edges.

RSSOwl: This reader was recommended on the Simple Dollar a while back and I finally tried it out last week. It is just like NetNewsWire, but free! It doesn’t have any of the annoyance/bugs that the other 2 have and even has tabbed browsing, if you want. Or you can turn tabs off if you don’t want them. And you can customize the point at which you move your RSS reading over to your preferred browser. And you can adjust the colors and fonts of the post reader window. Basically, it is what I want: a client that can handle the organization of ~150 feeds in ~6 folders, allowing me to efficiently read many posts, plus it has some additional customizable features that make it enjoyable to use.

The cool thing about tracking your own website’s hits is that you can tell what people were looking for when they came to your site. But sometimes you are in the situation where you know the answer to their question, but the answer is not on your website. So I’m going to give a little bit more to the blogosphere tonight and answer some of the questions that random internet readers had, but couldn’t answer by reading my blog:

“mac does not detect blackberry”

In my experience, my Mac did not detect my blackberry until I had the proper version of Pocketmac (the one for the 8100) installed on the machine. And then I had to use the USB cable, not Bluetooth.

“blackberry pearl copy addresses from sim”

*UPDATE* You can copy your phone numbers from your SIM by going through the Blackberry set-up wizard. It will prompt you to copy your phone number over. That’s the only way I know of to do it.

When my phone was broken, the T-mobile customer support person explained to me is that the SIM card doesn’t support the Blackberry format for address book entries (because the SIM card only stores name and number), so there isn’t too much point to copying things back and forth. It is much better to use your computer’s address book as your backup. So hopefully you have a copy on a computer you can sync with.

“blackberry 8100 html tables”

In case my post wasn’t clear about this: don’t check the browser option to load HTML tables. It will make page loading much slower.

“recalibrating ipod nike”

To recalibrate the nike+ipod widget you just have to follow the menu options for recalibrating and run a set distance on a measured track (found at most high schools and universities). You can recalibrate for running or walking. I just did it for running and it vastly improved the accuracy. I think if I had also done it for walking, it would further improve accuracy.

Ok, here is a quick, but hopefully information-full, post on the Pearl. I’ll cover syncing with the Mac (iCal & Address Book) and syncing with the PC (Lotus Notes 7 Calendar, Address book and To Do List).

But first, don’t drop your Pearl!

I dropped mine on Wednesday morning while riding every Bostonian’s least favorite subway line, the Green Line. Of course, the reason I took out my phone was that there was a broken down train up ahead and we were going to be stopped for a while. But I digress…

The phone had a “clean” fall — it didn’t tumble and landed flat on its back. And this broke the phone. Cosmetically the phone was still perfect, but the screen wouldn’t light up and the keys wouldn’t work. So I had to get a new phone! T-Mobile charges you for shipping the new phone to you ($15 for 2nd-Day UPS) and, if the damage is your fault, they charge you $100 for a replacement phone. The two times I called T-Mobile customer support and said “my phone is broken” to the voice prompt, I got a very fast response. I have no complaints about their customer support and the fees are high, but not unfair, I guess.

I got my new phone yesterday and spent this morning’s ride on the Green Line setting up the phone the way I had the old one. The software on the phone has been upgraded and the biggest change I can detect is that the contrast between the background screen and the application icons seems to be greater, which is good. A few of the set-up wizard options are different. The phone figured out over the network that I already had a Blackberry configured for email and it asked if I wanted to switch to checking those same email accounts on this new device. That couldn’t have been easier!

Ok, so syncing:

In my first few weeks of owning the Pearl, I was using a Mac, so I used PocketMac to sync with the Pearl. PocketMac is an independent software tool for syncing with the Blackberry and works pretty differently than the standard Blackberry Desktop Software for the PC. Here’s what I thought of it:

The positives:

• Very easy to set up.
• No errors or confusing log messages.
• In general, this is my experience with most Mac applications (if you disagree, try switching to a PC!!). The software knows how to find iCal and Addressbook and you don’t have to do any special configuration.

The negatives:

• PocketMac offers very few synchronization options. Your only option is to copy everything on the computer to the phone and vice versa. For example, with the calendar, there is no ability to control which events get synced, so I had to transfer several years of old calendar data to the phone.
• Conflict resolution was not very clever. On my initial sync, I had duplicate entries for almost every address book entry because I only had phone numbers on my SIM card, not addresses. PocketMac treated each entry as a different person. What I would have liked to have had happen is the phone number from the phone override the phone number in the computer and have the 2 names merge into 1 person. Or at the very least, been prompted on how I would like to merge each duplicate entry. Instead I had to go in by hand and copy each of these phone numbers individually and then delete the duplicate entry and then re-sync.
• Recurring calendar events are not handled well at all. In fact, I would say this is a bug in the software. When you have a recurring iCal event and you have deleted one instance of the event (say your weekly meeting doesn’t happen the week of Thanksgiving), PocketMac does not register this canceled event and keeps it in your calendar. So on the phone, I began to have all kinds of appointment conflicts between cancelled meetings and replacement meetings. (The error did not migrate into iCal, thankfully.) This is a real pain, especially considering the first issue I had, where you can’t specify which categories or dates of events to sync.

So in short, PocketMac does the job syncing your Pearl with your Mac, but it is pretty rudimentary.

Is syncing with a PC better?

I’m now living in Lotus Notes world, so I can only offer an opinion on how the Blackberry Desktop Software syncs with Lotus Notes 7 (the calendar, the addressbook and the to do list). I would say, the software behaves like a lot of PC applications I know: the software was confusing to set up, has about a million little ways to set options, and produced an indecipherable error which took some internet surfing to solve, but in the end the software offers a more full-featured syncing solution than on the Mac. I’m pretty excited about being able to sync my To Do list, since I’ve never been able to use my phone’s To Do list at all. When there are duplicates or any unusual syncing events, you get plenty of dialogue boxes providing you lots of choices. In exchange for the graceful simplicity of the Mac, you get to control everything on the PC.

In terms of the indecipherable error…. I couldn’t get the calendar to sync at all when I first tried. The desktop software reported there was an error and I should look in the error log. The error log said “Internal Error #4238.” Uh….. not so helpful. After some trial and error and a lot of internet surfing, I figured out it was because Lotus Notes was trying to get my calendar off a Notes database on my company’s intranet, which I was not connected to at the time.

The solution: Make sure that your Notes is looking at your local copy of your calendar/email/etc. I did this by specifying my location as “Island” in the lower right corner of the Notes 7 window. How not intuitive is that? Even if Notes isn’t running, you have to do this. So that is annoying, but it works.

Another Notes specific thing is you have to quit and restart Notes for any of the BlackBerry calendar events to appear in the calendar.

And finally, some general comments on the Pearl’s applications….

Josh asked me in a comment on my previous Pearl post about the browsing. It is OK, but in a head-to-head competition with the Treo’s browser, the Pearl takes about 10 times longer to load a page. Maybe that has something to do with different settings between the devices, but I’d say in general it is SLOW. (But when you are sitting on the Green Line with nothing else to do, slow is better than nothing. :) I briefly set the browser to render HTML tables — don’t do that. It makes loading much slower.

The IM interface isn’t very IM-like. It took me about an hour to realize someone had IM’d me on the phone and I forgot to log out because it wasn’t obvious that I was logged in. I’m not so interested in IM’ing on the go, so that isn’t a big deal for me.

The camera takes good pictures for a phone. There is some sort of flash that maybe, sort of works.

The calendar is a pretty nice interface, with a couple different ways of browsing (week, day, month, and a compressed list of events). The one thing that bugs me is that you can’t see the category of each calendar entry. (You also can’t see this easily in Lotus Notes, which is even more annoying, so now I have no way to see personal vs. work related events. I guess I’ll just stop categorizing anything.)

You can pick a couple different “Themes” for your top level device screen. I really like the “BB Dimension Today” theme because it shows you your last 2 email messages, your next 2 calendar events, and up to 2 missed calls.

In the 48 hours I lived without my Pearl I missed it, so I guess that means I recommend it. Just don’t drop it!

I got a BlackBerry Pearl. After happily living with my Ericsson T68i for about 4 years, even I had to admit it was “virtually an antique.” It was time to upgrade. My criteria were:

• A “candybar” style phone (a non-flip phone). I hate flip phones. They are too thick (ok, except for the Razr) and are designed to be worn on your body, which is something I would never, ever do.
• The phone must work in Europe (GSM).
• The phone must be able to check email. These days that means it must be capable of checking SSL POP mail (such as gmail). My T68i wasn’t able to do any SSL encryption, so I lost contact with my email about 2 years ago.
• Address book syncing between my computer and the phone. At this point, my address book on my phone only had phone numbers and on my computer all the phone numbers were out of date.
• Calendar syncing would be nice.

My technical advisor (my husband) recommended either the Motorola Q or the Pearl. I went with the Pearl, in part because I am not a fan of “Microsoft’s familiar and trusted Windows Mobile software.” I also did not anticipate ever integrating the phone with Exchange Server. I am very happy with my choice:

• It takes about 5 seconds to set up simple email checking (e.g. gmail). It takes about 10 seconds to set up more complex email checking (e.g. SSL POP corporate email).
• You can customize phone, email, IM, and SMS alert profiles to your heart’s content.
• The interface isn’t terrific, but it is OK.
• I am enjoying having my calendar much more than I thought I would.
• Google Maps for BlackBerry is very cool.
• The phone quality (what? this thing is actually used as a phone?) is good.

If you are curious about the Pearl, I have a nice treat for you. I have the experience of syncing the phone with both a Mac (using PocketMac, syncing with Address Book and iCal) and a PC (using BB’s Desktop Manager, syncing with Lotus Notes 7’s address book, calendar, and tasks). Read my later post for my issues with both synchronizations options.

I'm still an enthusiastic user of the Nike+iPod Sport Kit and the nikeplus.com website.

Some updates:

• I had to recalibrate the device because it said my 3 mile run was 3.5 miles. After calibration on a track, it now says 3 miles is between 2.99 and 3.01 miles. Definitely accurate enough for me!
• The Flash website is “flashy” but I really wish I could get my data off of it so I could graph it the way I want to. That being said, it is really cool to be able to see my pace chart and a graph of all my runs so far, with lots of mouse-over details, all within seconds of plugging in my iPod.
• There is a section on the website for setting goals which is pretty inflexible. For example, I have two running goals right now: run 20 miles every week and run a half-marathon 8 weeks from now. I can't enter those goals in a reasonable way because all the goals have to be either 4, 8, 12, or 16 weeks to accomplish. But, again, that being said, it is cool that I can put as my goal 80 miles in 4 weeks and have the site keep me up to date on how I'm doing towards that goal.

• I've attached the widget to my Brooks running shoes with some velcro adhesive. But there's already a product you can buy to attach it and remove it more easily, the Marware's Sportsuit Sensor+ for iPod nano.

Above are some screenshots of my data. The first image is my last long run, the next is of my runs from the past 3 weeks, and the third shows an example of the mouse-over highlighting.

(If you are looking for a running goal, the Applefest Half-Marathon and Half-Marathon Relay is the most fun race I've ever participated in. I highly, highly recommend it.

Go Team Gelato! )

The Nike+iPod Sport Kit was released last week and I'm officially addicted. This $30 gadget gets your iPod Nano to talk to a widget (aka an accelerometer) on your running shoe, and then the ipod talks to you, telling you how far you've gone. As you approach your workout goal (time or distance), it increases the frequency of updates, motivating you to pick up the pace. When you get home and plug your iPod into your computer, it syncs your workout with nikeplus.com's tracking program. It also syncs with nikerunning.com, the fully-featured training log web site that can track all sorts of workouts and fitness goals (so I definitely recommend using this site instead).

I discovered the best feature today when I finished my workout: a voice broke in said “Hi! This is Lance Armstrong and I want to congratulate you on breaking your personal record for the mile.” Excellent!

For the music enthusiasts, the music integration is a little weak. The best it offers is that you can pick a “Power Song” and whenever you hold the center button down, it will play. It seems like a no brainer that it should figure out how long your power song is and start playing it that length of time before you are projected to finish your workout. This morning I tried to do this manually and, just as I was rounding the last bend of my run, I went from Kylie Minogue's “Can't Get You Out of My Head” back to my significantly less motivating NPR's On The Media podcast. Oh well.

If you run and if you own a nano, I highly recommend picking up the sport kit! For more information and convincing reviews, check out the Engadget review roundup. The blogosphere has plenty of info on how to attach the widget to any pair of running shoes.