I have created a 4 minute screencast showing how to convert videos and movies so they will play on the Blackberry Bold, Curve 8900 and the Storm.
I reference Lifehacker and the post Top 10 Free Video Converters. You can find a list of software there. I myself prefer Clone2Go Free version which is demonstrated in the screencast. Hope this helps!
It has been some time since my last post in the series, Essential BlackBerry Bold Applications. I have another post of apps planned soon after this one, there have been a bunch of great releases lately that I am excited to share. This post will be dedicated to a suite of apps from the same developer, REXwireless.
I first heard about REXwireless while browsing the Crackberry forums. A few users were talking about productivity applications and highly recommended the applications from REXwireless. After checking out their website and finding there was a fully functional free trial, I thought it couldnt hurt to try the software myself and see if I was missing anything. I am glad I did. I will explain each of the products and how they are more useful than the stock RIM apps.
Todo Matrix: This is an advanced to do list application, greatly expanding on the capabilities of what the regular RIM Todo application does. Todo Matrix allows and requires organizing your todo items into categories and sub categories (called drawers). You can easily view items from each category or subcategory, view tasks by due date, overdue, priority etc.
Todo Matrix greatly extends the available status’ available in the stock application. You can place tasks on hold as well as a number of other useful selections and set up to 3 alerts for each task. What I enjoy best about Todo Matrix is that it handles large numbers of tasks efficiently. I no longer just put my high priority tasks in the Todo app and check it every couple days. I put everything I need to get done including reminders about little things that I typically forget about (dishes, recycling, etc). I then check my tasks much more frequently throughout the day and get more done.
Another very nice feature that both Idea and Todo Matrix support is data injection. This feature adds a menu item to your web browser, email, calendar, sms messages etc and allows you to send your selected data, page url, etc automatically to Idea or Todo Matrix without the copy/paste and task switching. This has become a very useful feature as you can easily create a note or todo task containing the information contained in an email or webpage.
Todo Matrix has many advanced features, my favourite being a great search mechanism and the ability to sync and edit tasks on the web via REX Desktop. It also includes task handling methodologies from Stephen Covey and David Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done’. You can view the list of features here as well as find a trial on their website.
Idea Matrix: This app is very similar to Todo Matrix except it is used for advanced note taking. This has replaced the standard Memopad app for me. It allows categories in the same way as Todo Matrix.
Idea Matrix supports an advanced search function that shows seach matches on the fly as you enter in search phrases. This is an amazing feature that really helps when you start managing a large number of notes. I use a whole section dedicated to keeping a list of peoples names that I am likely to forget. It is awesome that I am able to search these!
Notes can also have alerts associated with them and can be password protected which I found useful for my banking information, which I always like to have in my PDA but am always cautious with. Idea Matrix can also be syncronized to the web and edited with REX Desktop.
Alert Matrix: This becomes essential as the number of incoming emails/sms messages increases to the point where your Blackberry is buzzing or flashing red every 5 minutes. You know those days where you are just tired and turn your Blackberry onto Quiet Profile and turn it upside down? Yeah well if you set up Alert Matrix then you can save yourself from some of those times.
With Alert Matrix you can make profiles for your contacts so that emails/messages from certain people or that satisfy your filters can get a special ring, vibrate or led alert. For those times like where I mentioned above you can also enable filters for the particularly annoying people that send you massive ammounts of email. Alert Matrix will intercept the email and disable the alert before your berry notifies you. FABULOUS. It is also possible to have high priority alerts that can cause your berry to beep/ring whatever even when you have it set to Quiet Profile.
REX Connect: This is a small but useful app. I dont know of any other Blackberry developers other than REX Wireless that offer so many high quality apps. REX Connect gives you menu options to send the contents from Emails, memos, calendar entries, clipboard, address book entries and all the other REX Wireless apps to other applications. The following diagram illustrates:
For example, in my calendar I can select a Meeting entry, press menu and select REX Connect. This opens a small dialog which I can select any of the applications in the above picture. If I choose SMS my contacts pop up and I choose a friend to send a SMS with the calendar entry. REX Connect populates the text message area with the information from the calendar entry, allows me to edit it and send it.
This is another app that you really need to use before you can imagine how useful it might become. Thankfully REX Wireless offers full trials on all their software. They have a detailed website including tons of information about each application including screencasts, white papers on task management and more. From the dealings that I have had with them thus far, their support staff are top notch also.
Conclusion: I have spent alot of time introducing these apps from REXwireless but you really need to give them a try for yourself. They may not seem as intuitive as many other Blackberry apps are at first but once you memorize the shortcuts you will be thankful for the advanced functionality these programs offer.
If you sign up for the trial versions of Idea and/or Todo Matrix be sure you try out the REX Desktop which is a web interface to your data. Nice to be able to quickly copy/paste and enter large pieces of data especially for Idea Matrix.
Bundle and education discounts are available for all of the above mentioned software. I strongly recommend all of these applications if you are looking for more functionality and increased productivity on your Blackberry. Check out the REX Wireless software over at their website for more details.
So currently I am hosting 4 SVN repos on the same box as our web server. The server is maintained by me and gets backed up not nearly enough. So before I have a disaster and lose months of work I began looking to at least store my code somewhere safer. In my search to find SVN hosting this is what I found which can hopefully save you some searching:
The Free and Open Source Contenders:
Let me know of any others in the comments and I will add them.
*Prices and information accurate as of February 2009.
Over the last couple months I have started using Twitter every day. It took me 2 or 3 times trying it before I thought it wasnt completely useless and waste of time. Now that I am subscribed to a few news services that I find interesting like TechCrunch, Engadget, CBC News (but not interesting enough to add to my RSS feed), I can watch the headlines and click if I want but I wont cry if I miss it. Within a couple weeks Dell UK started following my Tweets. Very strange as I have never said a word about Dell on Twitter, nor have I ever owned a single Dell product and nor am I British, I am Canadian.
After I began Tweeting myself occasionally which has now become usually every day, there have been times where I have vented frustration with a particular product or company to my twitter followers (there are also times I have congratulated software companies ofcourse).
A month or two ago, one of my domains was expiring. GoDaddy (Dont Click!! NSFW 
) was my registrar but after seeing some of the latest advertisements and seeing the company owner’s shameful blog I decided it was time to take my business elsewhere. I disabled domain auto-renewal and followed the instructions sent in the email to start the process of a domain transfer. A long story short is that GoDaddy charged me for the renewal of a “business” registration even though my domain was no longer with them. I became quite upset and vented my anger to my Tweeple, one of whom shared my dislike for GoDaddy and urged me to fight the charge (which ofcourse I did and got my money back within a week).
Not more than a few days later I received an email from someone at GoDaddy that found my Tweet online. Due to the very public nature of twitter, anyone can use Twitter Search to find just about anything. This gentleman (who was very polite and professional, unlike the company owner) had looked up my file, found the error and suggested a solution (which was already in process via support tickets), urging me to stay with GoDaddy. I thanked him and told him I appreciated his help but explained why I was changing registration companies. I never heard back.
I had another experience when I was speaking to the author of XBerry Live!, Xbox 360 program for the Blackberry about Cloud Hosting solutions offered by GoGrid.com. I knew he was a customer and I was interested enough and asked him some questions that I did not see answered on the company website. When I awoke the next morning, I had several more @replies from a GoGrid employee / cloud computing evangelist offering me more details and a $100 cupon. Wild! This guy found me and my conversation with another faster than I would have got an answer to a support inquiry!
I had another experience very recently. It was my sisters birthday recently and I wanted to send her a funny E-card. JibJab was one of Googles first page results and after previously seeing a delightfully stupid JibJib video of myself dancing with my wife and members of her family I thought it might be worth a laugh. I found a funny card but could not send it until I became a member of JibJab, or so that page told me. I signed up and returned to the card I found, unexpecting another message stating I had to have a $16 paid membership to send that particular premium card. Fine, I thought, Ill settle for a less funny free one as I do not send E-cards very often. After spending another 5 minutes looking for a unexisting free e-card I wondered what was the point of a two-tiered membership if the free membership provides absolutely nothing! Again I vented my frustration to the Twitterverse looking for comfort. Within HOURS this time, @JibJab replied to my post sending me instructions to find the free cards, which were only to be found via a small, single text link contained at the bottom of the page beside the copyright notice.
I dont know what to think. Should I be impressed that these companies are taking such an interest in their products? Messaging users on a single mention of their company? Is this pro-customer or are companies doing this just as a public way and cheap way of damage control and to find potential customers? It also makes me rethink how smart it is saying certain things on Twitter, especially when I have experienced the very public nature of what I say, not expecting others that I do not intend to speak to to listen and respond to me. There are products now out that allow you to follow a person on Twitter, receiving everything that users says without actually subscribing (or sending the email alert) to the user. SCARY! I like Twitter but I really hope they give us some more security and privacy options in the future.