How’s that for a title, “Fresh” and “Berry” all over the place.  I’m finally venturing into the Micro ISV arena and building a BlackBerry application for FreshBooks.  It’s set to Beta around the end of February with a subset of the final features.

The planned features for version 1 are:

• Enter time for a specific project/task
  • Directly by entering number of hours
  • Using a timer
  • Entering time for any day
• View time for a particular day
• View clients and interact with the device to:
  • Map client addresses
  • Call clients
  • Email clients
• Add clients
• View Invoices and
  • Enter payment
  • Send payment notification

Potential future features include:

• Create invoices (this gets wonky and complicated, but would be useful)
• Send late invoice notifications
• Add alerts for invoices on the BlackBerry calendar (maybe helpful to manage late notices)
• Custom BlackBerry app for clients to view your invoices to them, with your icon on the BlackBerry ribbon.  Not sure if this is even useful, but something I’ve thought about.

To subscribe for more information signup at the FreshBerry site: http://www.freshberryapp.com, or send an email directly to info@freshberryapp.com.  I’d love to hear feature requests or anything else on your mind about this application.

[NOTE: This application has been renamed "Book Keeper" and is now available to the public at:http://www.bookkeeperapp.com]

• Configure an application with multiple entry points (if you need to have an app that has a startup/background component and a GUI accessible from a ribbon icon).
• Sign the COD file
• Handle the funky “COD file that is actually a ZIP file with other COD files in it” situation gracefully (it unzips and extracts the separate CODs so the JAD can load properly)
• Upload the JAD/COD file(s) to server environments for deployment (by default it has dev, qa and prod servers configured)
• Email a list of recipients a notification of the deployed file with a link to the JAD to download

This ANT script makes use of the bb-ant-tools library, without that it’d be quite ugly to build.  Requirements for running the tasks:

• You must have the Blackberry JDE installed and configured and if you need to sign the COD files, you’ll have to get a code signing certificate from RIM.
• Must have bb-ant-tools installed properly, see http://bb-ant-tools.sourceforge.net/docs
• To SCP files to the deployment servers, JCraft SSH lib must be in your ANT lib path.
• To send the mail notification of releases, JavaMail must be in the ANT lib path.

Instructions are in the ANT script, please follow them to set the properties you’ll need to setup for your project’s needs.  There is no license associated with this, just use it however you wish, if you wish.  I think it’d be useful for people as a starting point.  If you liked it, let me know.  If you hated it and have better ideas for it, let me know.

Download it here:
blackberry-build.xml