“Welcome to the fastest mobile experience on the planet!”
By now, all of you CrackBerry Users and Abusers should be sporting this on your BlackBerry. If not, what are you waiting for? A month ago CrackBerry.com announced their lovechild with Viigo and presented us with Viigo – CrackBerry.com Edition.
If you’re not familiar with the wonderment that Viigo offers, they’re fellow Canuckleheads that provide users with an amazing portal to mobile content. Experience unparalleled access to Sports, News, Entertainment and many other RSS Feeds (RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication and Rich Site Summary), even the latest from CrackBerry.com!!
Viigo has seen many leaps and bounds in its time. I had only embraced it when it was first posted in the Blogs, and soon I realized I wished I had installed it long ago.
This will probably double as a Viigo 101, so let me get my prof hat on.By the end of this, you should be comfortable with Viigo and be ready to follow Kevin’s adventures at CTIA Wireless 2008. We have a lot of ground to cover so buckle up kiddies, it’s going to be a wild ride!
Living Life Untethered
Let’s start with the basics:
You can download Viigo – CrackBerry on your PC
http://viigo.com/partners/crackberry.html
or take the short cut and download right from your BlackBerry Web Browser
http://getviigo.com/crackberry
If you are a first time user, you’ll have access to CrackBerry Feeds automatically, covering Blogs, Forum Posts, CB Store software (best sellers) and CrackBerry.com's Twitter and Flickr feeds. Existing Viigo users will have to download the CrackBerry Version and then manually add the CrackBerry Feeds (we will look at adding feeds a bit later.) If you’re new, you’ve picked a great time to board the Viigo train. With the server upgrade last month, feed updates have become amazingly fast. Besides that, you’ll be sporting Viigo with CrackBerry.com’s branding.
Your main Viigo Screen
In my opinion, Viigo – CB is the fastest way to keep up to date with the site, while on the go. Blogs are easily accessed and you have a quick overview of the forums. Reading the forums is easy, but to respond you will still have to use wap.crackberry.com OR the CrackBerry.com BlackBerry Home screen shortcut. You’ll have access to other default RSS Feeds too, like the latest Celebrity Scandal or getting your MobileCrunch on.
Feed Me!
Let’s take a look at the main page. Wow, there are a lot of different feeds to dive into. To the left of each Feed, the icon should have a red star or splat on top of it. This means that there are entries that you haven’t read yet, similar to the star on your BlackBerry Messages Icon. When you open a channel and view its articles, unread content will also have this red star. When you open an article you are given the “abridged version”. One click of either the trackball or the BlackBerry button pops up a slew of options. A few include; reading the full article or visiting the article at its web source. If you find the article interesting enough to share, you can send it off via email directly from Viigo. Maybe once you finish reading this Review/101, you will have the urge to immediately share it with the world.
Viigo also utilizes some of BlackBerry’s features to navigate through your Channels. If you have opened a channel/article, you can use N (next) or B (previous) to skip through channels/articles and T to head to the top. These nifty little shortcuts come in very handy if you are a speed reader.
If you find you are receiving too few or too many articles you are able to increase/decrease, not only the total article limit (from 50 to 1000), but also the Articles per Channel limit (20 to NO LIMIT). Though no limit and 1000 tend to contradict themselves, Viigo will begin to devour the oldest articles, keeping your news as fresh as today’s salmon right off the boat. Depending on how often you want to keep in touch, Viigo gives the option to change the Auto-Update intervals, choose from 30 minutes, 1,2,4,6,8,12-hours or 1 day. Or you can turn off auto-update entirely.
Article Options
But Ryan, how will I keep in the loop?
Glad you asked. To manually update a specific or even all channels, simply select “update channel” or “update all channels” from the main menu. I delete articles I have read and you can too! See your BlackBerry’s delete button? Press it. Poof! Articleus Disappearius!
Now it’s time to tweak it up a bit. Remember when I mentioned you can add channels? No? (Glares with a long handled ruler in his hand) Well pay attention! Adding or removing channels are a simple process.
Add a Channel
You have a few options to add. First, you can add a channel from Viigo’s selections. If you are using the original version of Viigo and wanted to get the latest on CB;
From the main screen select Add Channel > Viigo’s Partners > CrackBerry> choose forums, blogs, store or all 3. See below for an example:
Is there a specific thread of the forums you want to follow? Follow this link http://feeds.feedburner.com/BlackberryForumsAtCrackberrycom
If you know the URL of the channel you want to subscribe to, there is a field (shown below) you can fill out.
Remove a Channel
To remove a channel, highlight the correct channel, open the options menu and select “Remove Channel”. Make Viigo pertinent to you.
Step 1. Select “Add Channel”
Step 2a. enter your own RSS feed URL
OR select from those listed in Viigo
Step 3. Search for a specific category
Step 4. Choose your new feed
Step 5. Enjoy
Aggregators
An Aggregator, according to Wikipedia, “is client software or a Web application which aggregates syndicated web content such as news headlines, blogs, podcasts, and vlogs in a single location for easy viewing.“
Viigo now works with Google Reader, My Yahoo and Bloglines. Yes friends, you can now sync your above accounts with Viigo and have the ability to delete an article in the Aggregators, and in Viigo as well. The only feature that doesn’t work is the read/unread (red star) notifier. There’s always room to grow.
Choose your Aggregator
Besides those, you also can access Craigslist.org (to check on who’s selling what BlackBerry, if I know you) or even have the ability to Track A Package using simpletracking.com, or check on Traffic Alerts in the US and the UK. These are only a fragment of the feeds they offer in default, so just imagine what Viigo is capable of for you if you personalize it!
Since Kevin’s at CTIA Wireless 2008. Why don’t we use Viigo to keep an eye on him?
Viigo – CrackBerry Edition now comes preloaded with CrackBerry.com's Twitter and Flickr Feeds. Very convenient since Kevin is using both while he’s at CTIA. For all of you existing users, you can add these channels just as you would with the CB Blogs and Forums. AddChannel> Viigo Recommends> Partner Picks> CrackBerry.com. You’re now ready to stalk - I mean - follow Kevin’s exploits.
I hope Kevin looks for Viigo at Rim’s booth at CTIA. For quite some time, there have been rumors about the secret “Project Tango”. I pulled this from Viigo’s site;
“A preview of Viigo’s new platform, code-named “Project Tango”, will also be on display at RIM’s booth (#425) at CTIA. Project Tango represents a quantum leap forward in creating a unified mobile platform from which users can access a wide range of content and services with unparalleled speed and simplicity.”
Bring back the gold Kevin! I’m not talking about your Vegas winnings but that would be great too.
Going Big Brother on Kevin
Conclusion
If there is one application you have, have, have to download this year, Viigo – CrackBerry.com Edition would be the winner by a longshot. Not only would you have lightning access to all of your daily feeds, but you can view them like a CrackBerry Abuser should. I have no complaints with Viigo, yet they continue to improve upon utter perfection. The best part is that Viigo is free, yes, FREE!! The funny thing is once this Blog is posted, most of you will probably read it on Viigo….
Download Viigo – CrackBerry Edition from either link:
http://viigo.com/partners/crackberry.html >>
http://getviigo.com/crackberry >>
