So firstly we’ll run you through the new features:

Likes now affect search rankings

Well for us this is the most important change, certainly an SEO change which will have an effect upon many websites. Those with popular content such as blogs are more likely to be shown above competitors, irrespective of their optimisation for search engines.

Facebook pages integration

If your search result doesn’t have any likes from your friends but does have a Facebook page, its recent Facebook status updates may appear in your search results.

Highlights content liked by your friends

If your search result is an online blog, all articles which your friends have liked will be displayed below the result. You will be shown the article thumbnail and title. We listen our friends far more than a search engine, as they are real people that we trust. This feature is certainly an interesting one Bing..

Bing’s new toolbar

We found this quite a surprising feature. Bing’s new toolbar will allow you to like any online content, irrespective of whether it has a Facebook like button.

More advanced people search

Bing’s previous Facebook people search allowed you to search a friends name and they would appear in your results. This has been improved by allowing you to search for information related to your friends. For example if you search for something including ‘Lancaster’, Bing will show you which of your friends actually live there so you can ask them. We think this is a great usability feature Bing, well done!

Sharing options

According to Bing, 90% of us consult our friends and family on many decisions, known as the ‘Friend effect’. So to make this process faster, Bing has brought us more sharing options, allowing you to post things to your wall with ease.

You can read more about these features over on Bing’s blog

Our opinion

We like the way Bing is going with it’s personalised search results. This is possibly the way search results should be with the amount of personal details we list online. Whether we like it or not (no pun intended!) Facebook is becoming a large part of our online lifestyle’s. We’re certainly interested to see if these changes will convert some any of Google’s fans. We believe that the success is dependant on how Bing markets these changes. For us though… we wont be switching.

Let us know what you think!

Being a Blackberry owner I sometimes feel like I’m being ignored by mobile app developers, with the iPhone and Android stealing all the limelight. However, Dropbox announced a limited beta yesterday (first 500 users, later extended to 1,000) and I managed to quickly nab myself a download. A small download and a quick install later and I had it running in practically no time. I was presented with a nice splash screen and prompted to enter my Dropbox account details, after doing so I was fully setup and ready to start using the app.

First Impressions

On the home screen you’re instantly presented with all the files and folder within the root directory of your Dropbox folder. The first thing I noticed is that the interface is really sleek. Like, really sleek. It has a very “iPhone” look and feel, with big icons and well spaced lines for each item; not something you normally see on a Blackberry. Each folder type has it’s own instantly identifiable icon, and each file has a nice icon similar to what I’d expect to see on my desktop computer, and not on a phone.  When you go to open a folder a spinning loading indicator pops up as it loads the directory. On one occasion, for whatever unknown reason, the indicator kept spinning but it didn’t seem to be loading anything (I assume a bad internet connection) but, and this is something I’ve never seen done on any Blackberry app (native or otherwise), I was able to backup out of the loading process. No hanging, no delay, just the ability to instantly cancel loading. Straight away this is a big thumbs up in my book.

Good Points

Here are some interface touches and other features that I really liked:

• The photo viewer works well, and allows you to slide through a photo folder and download each file on the fly
• Ability to upload photos directly from the camera or from files already on the phone
• The .doc and .txt viewers work well (though I have a minor bad point about the .txt viewer that I’ll come to later)
• The downloader dialog is nice and shows file progress

Bad Points

I want to qualify these bad points first by saying that this is a Beta app, it’s free and as far as apps go for Blackberry, this has one of the smoothest User Experiences I’ve ever had. But, nevertheless, here’s what I noticed:

• It will not download files that it can’t open, and there’s no way to make it.
• It doesn’t like PDF files either, it will download these but when it tries to open them it gives an error. Though this could well be a problem with the Blackberry itself, which has other problems with PDF files.
• On 3 tests of the search functionality, I searched for files I knew existed, but once got an error, once got no results and only once got the correct results. It took around 40 seconds to find the files (For reference, I have about 2GB worth of files in my Dropbox)

EDIT (11/08/2010): I updated to OS v5.0.0.656 and was unable to recreate these errors when searching. I can’t say whether the update fixed the problem or not as I only experienced it the first time I used it.

• The .txt viewer acts strangely. Only about 3/4 of the screen real estate is used, and no scrollbar is shown, but regardless of that it is still usable and I can see it becoming very useful.
• Where are the files going? I didn’t set a download location, and there isn’t any functionality to set it, so I have no idea where the files I download save to.

In Summary

This is a great app from Dropbox, and my negative points really are a lot of nitpicking. This is definitely one of the best apps I’ve seen for Blackberry (alot of apps have a reputation for being buggy and poorly maintained) and I’m astounded it works so well on it’s first Beta release. Hopefully Blackberry will start to get more love from app developers one day, but I think more of the phones features need to be made available for developers to play with first. I’m sure I’ll get great value from this app, so many thanks to the Dropbox team!

You may have to wait a bit before you can get your hands on this app if you missed the Beta, but in the meantime, give Dropbox a try if you haven’t already.

Or you could use my referral link and net us both 250MB of extra space for free!

It would be very easy for me to rabble on about all of FreeAgent’s features. If you’re after an in-depth feature walkthrough, then this review makes for good reading. Here are a couple of our favourite bits along with three improvements which probably aren’t listed in other reviews.

Some stuff we liked:

1. One recent addition to the FreeAgent skill set is the ability to add notes to not only a client’s account, but also to each individual project. For us, I can keep track of all correspondence with a client by using this feature, adding even more value to this accounting miracle!
2. The overview page is a great summery of how your business is performing. It gives some brief details regarding finance, latest invoices and quotations and bank account details. There is even flexibility over customising the overview, including drag and dropping widgets into place.

Improvements:

1. However despite these benefits, we have also thought of a few improvements. Firstly email alerts would be very handy, informing selected users whenever an invoice is overdue or we’re 30 days off a tax bill.
2. Refunds on fully paid invoices aren’t currently supported in FreeAgent, which has never posed a problem for me since we’ve been using it (fortunately!), however I guess that it will become a problem at some point in the future.
3. Finally the largest improvement for me would be able to split an invoice in two, a deposit and a final invoice. An even further improvement on this would be to split an invoice into phases, allowing more flexibility over payment.

Why not give it a try yourself, and don’t forget to let us know what you think. Click this referral link for a free 30 day trial and a 10% discount!