Dossy's Blog

Blackbird 0.5 is out of beta and is now available. Help spread the word and let your BlackBerry-owning friends know about it!

What’s new in this release?

• Tweet detail view now shows the user’s avatar.
• @usernames are now active links to the Twitter user’s URL.
• Timeline data is now cached in persistent storage.

Here are a few features I’m going to try to implement for 0.6:

• Cache avatars in persistent storage to speed up the UI and reduce bandwidth usage.
• Add key accelerators “t” and “b” to jump to the top and bottom of the message list, and “n” and “p” to go to the next and previous messages, respectively.
• Add an option to automatically refresh data in the background or continue to manually refresh data from the Twitter API.

Are there any specific features you’d like to see implemented in 0.6? Have any bugs to report? Let me know about them in the comment for this entry.

UPDATE: Beta build 0.5.23 is now up, where ALT-click on 71xx-series BlackBerry handsets should bring up the context menu on timeline views, so that they can be refreshed, etc. Everyone who has a 71xx handset, can you please test the build out and let me know if this solves your problem? Thanks!

Tags: Blackbird, Twitter, BlackBerry, free software

This is my BlackBerry Curve 8310 tethered to my MacBook Pro over Bluetooth:

Not the “high speed 3G EDGE” I was expecting. Is this really the height of technological achievement for 2008? Where’s my flying car? Jeez.

Tags: mobile, BlackBerry, Mac, Bluetooth, tethering

It was only a few months ago that Brad linked to Twitter Karma over at DownloadSquad, but a few days ago Christina surprised me by putting Blackbird at number 5 on her list of 10 awesome BlackBerry apps. She writes:

Blackbird — I used to use Twitterberry to update my Twitter status from my phone, but now I’ve switched to Blackbird. The interface is cleaner and it feels faster. I miss the user icon pictures from Twitterberry, this is still my favorite way of using Twitter.

Man, I love those DownloadSquad bloggers! Thanks for the love, Christina.

Tags: Blackbird, BlackBerry, free software

About a week ago, I mentioned on Twitter that I was working on a Twitter client for BlackBerry smartphones called Blackbird.

After an initial limited release to a few people, I think it’s ready for general use. I’ve already stopped using TwitterBerry and TinyTwitter, now exclusively using Blackbird and I don’t miss a thing.

If you have a BlackBerry and are a Twitter user, I’d love it if you’d go and install Blackbird and let me know what you think! It’s still fairly new and it’s my first BlackBerry application, so I’m sure there’s lots of ways I can improve it.

Tags: BlackBerry, Twitter, Blackbird

I’m selling a BlackBerry 8830 World Edition Verizon phone on eBay for a friend. The auction will end next Friday, February 22nd. If you’re interested in it or know someone who is, please go and bid on it.