5 Useful BlackBerry Apps For Web Developers

Earlier this year I decided to get myself a BlackBerry, not because it was the newest craze around but simply because it seemed able to suit my most basic business needs. The EDGE network I am on (Digicel Jamaica) is fairly reliable, I get good enough connection speeds and my data plan sees very little downtime. With my BlackBerry, not only am I always connected to my playground (the internet) but via RIM’s push email service I have access to my emails on the go. No more late responses to clients or missed project opportunities. These features alone at first seemed good enough for me. I soon found myself however wanting to do more. Have you ever found yourself in a position where you needed to urgently change one single line of css in a stylesheet or a few arguments in a php function and you were stuck somewhere without access to a computer? Read on, I’ll show you how you can do some pretty useful stuff with these five BlackBerry apps. Bear in mind, these apps are not listed in any particular order.

 

1.  BBNotePad

BBNotePad is a text editor for the BlackBerry that has some pretty decent features considering it’s free software. The Latest version, 1.1.2, allows you to open and save files in both the BlackBerry device memory and in the SD memory card (if you have one). With this nifty little app you can open ANSI, UNICODE, UNICODE-BE and UTF-8 encoded files. The only drawback to using this free text editor is that it only allows you to save files in UTF-8 encoding. I encode all my pages in UTF-8 anyway so that little caveat I don’t mind at all. I’m sure you can see the potential uses of this app. Its certainly not a full blown source code editor, no bells and whistles but it surely can help you out in a tight spot. For more information and download links see here.

 

2. MidpSSH

With MidpSSH you can remotely access your server from your BlackBerry. This app gives you the power to manage your server and files just as if you were sitting right in front of your bash console. The program features include SSH1, SSH2 and Telnet support, VT320 terminal emulation, the ability to compose and save macros and the ability to save session profiles. The one issue i’ve come across using this app is that sometimes it responds very slowly. Everything else however works right on point. What I love about MidpSSH is that when I run it, my entire BlackBerry screen goes black looking just like a DOS or UNIX console. Trivial maybe. Way cool definitely. Did I mention that this app is completely free? You can head on over to the MidpSSH homepage and grab the app here.

 

3. Mobile File Manager

This app comes courtesy of the folks over at Rove. Mobile File Manager as the name suggests is a file manager. What makes it special however is that it is a file manager for the BlackBerry that has FTP, WEBDAV and SFTP support. Yes, you can use it to download your web documents to your phone for editing on the go and upload them to your server when you’re done. Of course you can also transfer images, pdf documents, audio files, the works. To use Mobile File Manager you’ll need to have either a BES connection or have the correct TCP settings for your your mobile provider. It won’t work over the BlackBerry Internet Browser Service as RIM by default blocks the FTP port (21). For download and more information go here.

 

4. Bolt

Bolt is a mobile web browser that is not a mobile web browser in the sense that it is capable of far more than your average mobile web browser. The default BlackBerry browser often garbles pages not formatted for viewing on a mobile phone. Using Bolt, you can see web pages *almost* as you’d see them using any standards compliant (so you know I don’t mean IE) desktop web browser. Bolt also packs some pretty cool features such as page magnification and limited video streaming capability. The main thing I love about Bolt is that like its namesake, its lightning fast. Download and more info here.

 

5. BBMetaBlog

Most web developers maintain a blog. Trying to post to your blog through the default BlackBerry browser is quite a pain. Enter BBMetaBlog. BBMetaBlog supports the MetaWeblog API so in theory it should work with just about any blog system that supports the XML-RPC platform such as Wordpress. On serching the web for a wordpress client for the BlackBerry, I came across this post over at Christina Warrens’s blog detailing how to use BBMetaBlog from your BlackBerry. Unfortunatley I can’t get it to work for me but quite a number of folks throughout the blogosphere sing its praises. I’ll definitely keep trying though, the idea of being able to blog efficiently from my BB is rather enticing. If you’re interested in trying out BBMetaBlog you can check it out here.

 

So there you have it. These apps are all free and available via OTA and desktop install links. Do enjoy. If you know of any other apps that should have made this list feel free to leave a comment and let me know about them.

Tagged as: BlackBerry, mobile, Web Development