kdmurray.blog

The crossroads of life and tech

Daily Archives: May 17, 2009

Flippin’ Email

This is the third post in my series of reviews of the BlackBerry 8230.  These were originally written in April, 2009 on an internal blog and are being reposted here.

003-black-pearl-flip-thI’ve been a BlackBerry user for the past 6 months or so, and before that I had used a couple of other Windows-based smart phones. The biggest difference that I noticed when I moved to the BlackBerry was that the device seemed to be designed around being a great email tool. All email functionality seemed to be very well thought out, and synchronization with my corporate TELUS email account was flawless.

With the Flip, I decided to point my Gmail account at the device in hopes of using it for my personal email, this is where I ran into my first major snag with the device: Email synchronization.

003-emailUp to this point, whenever I’d been using the BlackBerry email client, it was leveraging the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES). BES is what allows the BlackBerry to securely interface with TELUS’ internal mail servers. Using BES email is perfectly synchronized and changes in my inbox show up on the BlackBerry in seconds.

003-gmailWith the Flip, I set up my Gmail account using the built-in wizard. Because the email client on the phone is the same as the one I was using on my Curve I expected everything to work the same way. It doesn’t. Because the link to Gmail is working over an older (and unencrypted I’d bet) POP3 connection there’s no way to synchronize the status of messages (whether they’ve been read, deleted, flagged etc). This causes all mail downloaded to the BlackBerry to essentially be a copy of what was in the inbox when the message was downloaded.

I’ll talk about another way to get your email working on the Flip (for Gmail at least) in my next post. But for now my email experience, for personal email at least, has been less than ideal.

Stack Overflow – Where Experts Exchange Information

soLast year a new Q&A site for developers called Stack Overflow was opened to the public. We covered the site a bit on an episode of the AGP a few months back, but I just realized the other day that I hadn’t posted about it here.

The site is focused on the interaction between software developers which is truly how most of us learn the best — by working with, interacting with and drawing on the wisdom of other developers.

The site draws on a whole bunch of different elements that set it apart from other Q&A sites.  Creator Jeff Atwood describes Stack Overflow as a free Q&A site that’s built and maintained by the community of developers.

While the site was built to answer developers’ questions, it also has some stiff competition in the form of the Experts’ Exchange.  Most developers know about EE, and are annoyed by the fact that the site purports to charge money for access to the answers to development questions.  As it turns out, it’s all available for free, you just need to look around a bit harder to find stuff.

Stack Overflow has been built with transparency and ease of use in mind since its inception; the model is to get as many eyeballs on a question as needed to get a good answer.  Good questions and good answers are up-voted by the community — similar to the way Digg works, except it’s harder to game the system.  Up-votes provide reputation points which at lower levels unlock some of the site’s features.  The site also gives out badges for meeting certain goals on the site, based on the ability to get badges or special goals on Xbox live.

Jeff Atwood’s passion is around developing software from a more human perspective. Much of the design of the site for Stack Overflow, and the code behind it are based on driving positive behaviours within the developer community.  Instead of lots of hard-and-fast rules, there are easy ways to do good things, and more difficult ways to do things that shouldn’t be overdone.

As a side-note, Stack Overflow’s codebase is written in C# using the ASP.NET MVC framework, and has been in use since the very early CTP days of MVC.  It’s a great example of the power that can be brought to bear on the web with this toolset.

I love the site, it’s been a great resource for me for the past year or so, and I highly recommend it to anyone who has a development dilemma that they need to solve.