I first started working on Beyond411 (then called Berry 411) in July 2004. When I began, the Blackberry was the leading and best smartphone platform, and there were no good local search applications for it. It was gratifying to help fill that gap and to build an app that both I and my users appreciated.

Many versions and users later, the world is a very different place. There are a number of great search apps for smartphones. Smartphones have exploded in popularity and diversity, and I no longer even have a Blackberry.

It’s been increasingly hard to give Beyond411 the attention it needs. RIM is releasing an ever-increasing number of models and backwards compatibility has suffered; most have issues running Beyond411. I really enjoyed being an engineer at iLike and now Google but that leaves less spare hacking energy. Lastly, keeping the web service up and running requires a certain amount of ongoing attention.

Rather than giving users a bad experience, I’ve decided it’s best to give users time to find alternatives and then end the service. Thanks to everyone who has contributed your suggestions and support through the years!

My story is a common one; AppleInseder reports that 12% of early iPhone 3GS buyers are Blackberry owners

Here are some the factors that pushed me to get an iPhone.

- The overwhelming momentum of Apple’s app store: Apple’s position in mobile apps is similar to what Microsoft enjoyed with Windows; I don’t believe RIM or any one else can catch up even if they match or exceed Apple’s features. There are a number of iPhone apps that I (and my kids) find fun and compelling.

- Poor developer support from RIM: My primary interaction with Blackberry developer support was when they forced me to change the name of Berry411 to Beyond411, part of their trademark enforcement of anything related to Black or Berry. Other than their friendly trademark police, I was disappointed at how little RIM had to offer to third party developers. They wanted a $2000 fee just to join their developer program, offered limited promotional opportunities, and seemed to subservient to the wishes of their carrier partners.

- OS Bugs and uncompetitive feature set: The Storm is no iPhone in terms of features or usability. Plus the OS has hanging bugs that don’t reproduce in the simulator; this makes my life as a developer miserable.

- Declining build quality: I can’t tell you how many Blackberry’s I’ve gone through. Gone are the tanks of old: as RIM has chased the consumer market, their phones have gotten cheaper and more fragile. The Curve I just replaced rebooted randomly; the two previous curves had broken USB connections, as did the 8800 before that. The Pearl style trackball is much more prone to gumming up than the jog wheel it replace. Recent keyboards are smaller and harder to type on than the older ones, again because of RIM’s wish to appeal to a broad audience.

In short, RIM is watering down the features that made it special, failing to keep up with the unique features of Apple and Palm, and losing the battle for the hearts and minds of developers.

I won’t pretend that there aren’t features I miss in the Blackberry. A virtual keyboard is no replacement a real one. Reading mail is definitely slower on the iPhone than the Blackberry– I have to wait several seconds the mail app to pull down new messages every time I launch it. For now I’m willing to live with these limitations in exchange for the other advantages. Blackberry could win me back, but it’s not easy to divide your loyalties between two phones.

Some Blackberry converts to the iPhone have asked me if I plan to create an iPhone version of Beyond411. Now that I’ve got one myself, that’s looking a lot more likely.

It was a longer and bumpier transition than I had hoped for, with a fair amount of downtime, but I believe the outcome will be a faster and more stable server.

Please let me know if you encounter any issues.

Update: Several readers pointed out that Berry Bloglines was returning 503 errors, this is now fixed. I also improved performance usingdnsmasq, a local DNS cache, since I discovered that ServerPronto’s servers periodically become very slow.)

This was a pretty good fire drill– several of the sectors on the disk started going bad, including some overlapping database tables, which meant that mysql marked the tables as crashed and was unable to recover them. Since the disk appeared to be on the verge of total failure, I had ServerPronto put in a new primary disk and OS install.

Luckily a combination of backups and surviving sectors retained pretty much everything important… I did temporarily lose some autocompletion data but this can be rebuilt and most folks probably won’t notice. I’ve improved my cron backup jobs to make sure that this is saved in the future.

It was a bit of drag (though still much better than in Windows) having to reinstall the necessary linux services as well as Rails, gems, etc.; I would really like to see future distributions of Linux include an easy to use system snapshot features. That’s one of the big draws of virtualization but it seems even without virtualization this is something that could be provided out of the box. (For all I know someone has created such a system snapshot tool already but it doesn’t seem to built into any distribution.)

Update, 11pm, 7/8/07 : Both Bogle’s Blog and Beyond411 are back up now. A total disk replacement and reinstall was necessary.

I’m getting hard read/write errors on the disk which affect one of the mysql table files used for autocompletions.

I fear the disk might be in the early stages of failing and I might need to migrate to a new disk and/or machine.

Here’s what the log files look like in case anyone is cleverer than I am at interpreting them; they don’t look pretty.

Jul 8 02:15:36 sp4507a kernel: Buffer I/O error on device hda3, logical block 748303
Jul 8 02:16:20 sp4507a kernel: hda: dma_intr: status=0×51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
Jul 8 02:16:20 sp4507a kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0×40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=19095468, high=1, low=2318252, sector=19095464
Jul 8 02:16:20 sp4507a kernel: ide: failed opcode was: unknown
Jul 8 02:16:20 sp4507a kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev hda, sector 19095464

This faq suggests that it’s a hardware error (e.g. bad sector.)

Update 2008-4-20: I am currently investigating some issues with the reverse geocoding service on geonames.org, this is is causing many GPS Lookups not to resolve.

This release retains the customary Beyond411 focus on performance. I use background GPS lookups and incremental location updates while the app is running to minimize the time that users spend waiting for results.

You can install the 4.20.3 release over-the-air from http://thebogles.com/beta/b411.jad.  Please note this is a beta release and you may encounter bumps in the road; let me know of any issues.

Of course GPS functionality is only enabled on Blackberries that support GPS, e.g. the 8800 series. To turn on GPS search mode, select GPS from the location drop down at the top right of the search screen.

Thanks to geonames.org for a reverse geocoding web service licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Note: Please note that the Blackberry Curve doesn’t support GPS. Some programs like Google Maps do “pseudo GPS” by figuring out which cell-phone tower you are communicating with, but Beyond411 does not have this capability.

Using the Yahoo web search API and Beyond411’s internal markup language BML, web searches are now roughly twice as fast as before; these speedups are similar to those already achieved in 4.0 for local search.

Context menus allow the user to choose between visiting the original and mobilize-optimized versions of a page, with optimization performed by Skweezer.

End-user privacy is significantly enhanced. Unlike Google mobile search, Yahoo’s search service does not correlate end user search using cookies or rewrite links to track the user’s browsing history.

The focus of this release was speed and usability of in the core usage scenario of yellow pages searches. Beyond411 4.0 now has the some of the fastest launch and search times among applications in its category.

Context menus simplify integration with the Blackberry address book and email. For more information and download instructions, please see the project page.

The new version is faster and easier to use than previous versions. Searching the yellow pages and showing driving directions are typically twice as fast as before (under three seconds on my phone); other operations like adding an item to your address book are also much faster. Context menus on address book items make the new version easier to use.

These improvements are enabled by a custom markup language called BML, similar to HTML. Rather than displaying yellow page results in the browser, the new version displays BML results using a built-in rendering engine.

BML combines the compactness of the custom, fixed feature protocols used in some applications with the flexibility of markup languages like HTML. New features can be added by updating the markup on the server without having to download new bits to the client. Native phone UI like custom context menu items can be specified in the markup.

Because of the scope of the new features, this is a beta release. Keep your hard hats on and please report any issues you encounter. A “Yellow Pages (classic)” menu item returns the old school results in case you are encountering any issues or simply want to compare the speed.

If you wanted to create an open platform for building network powered applications based on this style of UI, what would be the best markup language to use?

One possibility would be to redefine the interpretations of subsets of XHTML– perhaps nested lists with the appropriate CSS attribute could be displayed using a drilldown UI, for example.

Another, perhaps better option is to use OPML, which already has a lot of the right semantics and is considerably more constrained that XHTML.  A link node could link to another OPML document, a traditional XHTML document, or perhaps to application specific behaviors that run on the client device.

In the case of Beyond411, things like yellow page category menus and categorized plugins could be expressed very naturally as OPML hierarchical menus.

Update: 3.91 fixes an autocompletion bug and is a recommended update.

As I’ve written in the past, intercepting the user’s browsing session to reformat pages in this fashion has impacts in terms of privacy, functionality, and content ownership.

• Privacy: Unless users read the terms of service, users may not be aware that their session is potentially being logged by Google.
• Functionality: Some sites break after reformatting (due to cookie domain issues, for example)
• Content ownership: Advertisements and formatting on modified sites are potentially impacted or eliminated.

My objection is not to reformatting per se– obviously, Berry411 does exactly that, though only for a clearly defined and labeled set of pages.  My objection is the fact that the user has no ability to opt out of the reformatting and proxying in Google Mobile search, and that many users will be unaware of what exactly is happening.

For this reason, Google results as viewed through Berry411 now put control back in the hands of the users.  The default is not to reformat linked pages; a link at the bottom of the page allows the user to turn reformatting on and off and this setting is remembered persistently across sessions. 

(On a vaguely related note, there is one other new persistent preference available in B411 local search results– you can choose whether or not you want dialed phone numbers saved in your search history for convenient access. This option is available through the preferences link at the top of the page.)

This version adds IMDb autocomplete and search to the Google, Wikipedia, News, Images, and Techorati Searches of previous versions. 

Other additions:

• Shortcut key sequences allow you to quickly change the search type: “g:” for Google, “i:” for IMDb, “d:” for dictionary, and so forths.
• The “Edit Settings” menu item allows you change the network connection type to BES (if your company has a BES) or Direct (for using your carrier’s APN, which you should configure as described here.) 

I would appreciate input from users on the following question: is it better for BerrySearch to exist as a separate application from Berry411, or should Berry411 be a swiss army knife that does everything?

(Much of the context specific autocomplete in BerrySearch is now supported in Berry411 as well, in a slightly more complex form. For example if you begin a search in Berry411 with “g:” for Google or “imdb:”, the appropriate style of autocomplete is used.)

Please vote in the poll on this question.

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No custom code had to be written for IMDB reformatting, thanks to a few new advanced options in Berry411 search plugin configuration to strip images and apply the reformatting to linked pages on the same site.