Blackberries and RSS Feeds
A couple weeks ago the guys at FeedBurner released a beta version of their RSS Reader for the Blackberry platform (which according to Steve is a pretty straightforward port of the same version they released for phones using MIDP 1.0). I downloaded it this morning to my 7280 on the AT&T Wireless network (no Blackberry Enterprise Server yet, working on that...), the installation went flawlessly and I was able to download and view feeds within a couple minutes. Couple reflections / things that could be better:
a) when viewing a feed that hasn't been updated yet (i.e. a feed that hasn't been downloaded yet), I get a Java error: "Uncaught exception: java.lang.illegalStateException" and the application exits. I'm sure this will be fixed by the time the application goes live, but make sure that you choose 'Menu --> Update" for each feed before you try to view the feed.
b) Pushing the scroll wheel in to view the menu defaults to the 'Exit' option. Is there a way that this can be modified so that 'Exit' is not the default?
c) The 'escape' button doesn't work on all the screens; I think this is as simple as providing a key listener for the escape button on each screen (ie: the 'Preferences' screen, the 'Register' screen)
d) Thinking differently for a second: the Blackberry is really good at reading and writing email right? So why not make a version of this application that can read and write feeds that you want to read and then save those to a server and have the server email you the text of a post (example: rss2email), thus taking advantage of what the Blackberry does well: email. This implementation is only slightly different than what Bloglines does right now... you enter all the feeds you want to read, Bloglines will go out and retrieve the feeds every n minutes and then you read them from any computer. Using a server-side aggregator instead of a desktop aggregator saves the publisher some bandwidth, the server can splice and dice the feed into something readable for the Blackberry and you can read your feeds in your email client. As a sidenote, there's an interesting discussion over on OreillyNet about RSS and email.
e) I know it's possible to add options to the menu; it would be nice to be able to browse a blog using the browser, have the browser auto-discover feeds and then have an option in the menu to add the feed to your list of feeds. This would probably require some hacking in the browser application provided by Blackberry, so it may not be possible, but it sure would save alot of keystrokes.
Finally, it's interesting to hear Steve mention that "... any application that looks remotely like a WAP stack .." was given alot of criticism at a meeting he attended recently and that more and more of the applications being written for portable devices have to be rewritten for each platform to take advantage of the particular nuances of each device.
September 27, 2004 in Code, News, Software by ajohnson
Comments
Thanks for the comments, feedback, and ideas - most of this stuff will be handled by the new UI we put on this for the final release. In this release, we were really looking to figure out what the deal was with network connectivity - namely, most carrier-installed blackberry gateways don't allow XML content-types (but are fine with XML itself) - so we take care of this via FeedBurner Server, but more importantly there's an irreversable setting that occurs in version 3.6 of the firewall software if you choose incorrectly to use a WAP proxy that is necessary if you don't run MDS on your enterprise server. you literally have to re-install the OS in most cases if you make the wrong decision, and this is quite troubling.
Posted by: Steve on September 27, 2004 9:57 AM