12th
“Blowing off steam” an open letter to Research In Motion (Part One)
For reasons not necessarily relevant to this post I recently switched from an 4GB Apple iPhone 2G to a T-Mobile branded Blackberry Curve 8900. This is my second attempt at switching to a Blackberry and this time I intend to give it my best try.
Coming from an iPhone I understand that there are things that will work differently, I understand that I may need to change the way I think about doing things on my phone that are substantially different from the conventions I am used to on the iPhone. I am doing my best to understand where these differences are and adapt to them. That being said, I wonder what my fellow Canadians in Waterloo are thinking sometimes when they designed this OS and some of these applications. I tried to switch to this very same phone last summer and failed miserably mainly because of some minor pet peeves that were deal breakers for me (at the time the biggest one was lack of threaded SMS). Since then some of these issue have been addressed but today I wish to challenge RIM and Facebook to seriously consider the following suggestions regarding the Facebook for Blackberry Application.
The following is taken from a review I posted on the Facebook for Blackberry page:
1. Notifications should sync with facebook so that if you receive a notification on the blackberry device and check it, it it marked as viewed the next time you log onto the facebook website and vice versa
2. Notifications do not work for “likes”
3. Clicking on the Message icon within the app should show all messages currently in your facebook inbox regardless of read status and have a button to allow to compose a new message.
4. Notifications for “Pokes” are inconsistent.
5. Wall posts/comment threads are unintuitive. When viewing a stream of comments on a wall post simply put the original wall post at the top and then the comments in chronological order. This will be much easier to follow than the current implementation where the original post is at the top followed by the most recent comment, followed by a comment input box followed by the thread in reverse chronological order
Other suggestions:
Possible UI tweaks like moving the news feed filter to the menu or as drop down on the News Feed button in the top navigation.
Thanks.
Fellow Blackberry users did I get all of the Facebook for Blackberry application quirks and peeves? Click here to comment.
