taab needs your help

Posted on September 11, 2012 by mparadise

taab is an excellent platform for electronic payment that’s been developed in response to the Mint Chip Challenge – and it needs your help to win the popular vote.

There’s a video on the challenge page, and plenty of details on the taab web site  so I won’t repeat all of that too – but suffice it to say that taab is cross-platform framework that allows merchants to integrate payment solutions into their custom apps and processing systems.  The reason I’m posting here is that – unlike nearly all of the competing entrants – taab supports legacy BB and BB10 (in addition to Android w/ iOS and WP8 support on the way), and I’d like to see developers that support the BB platforms receive support from its community of users.

Please register and show your support for this excellent solution by voting – it’ll only take you a minute (you can use Facebook or register directly) and it will help an active BlackBerry developer to continue developing solutions for BlackBerry – both old and new. I can also say that I’ve received no emails or marketing that were not directly related to this voting.

Votes recur daily, and there are just two days left.  So please – register, vote, and stop back in on Wednesday to vote again.

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The Future of BBSSH

Posted on May 25, 2012 by mparadise

That title sounds ominous, but it’s not as bad as it sounds.

I am the sole developer for BBSSH (except for about two weeks in early ’11, when one person helped me).   I have a full time job and a family, both of which take precedence over BBSSH development and support.   This leaves me little time for BBSSH, and I need to choose where I spend that time carefully.

RIM has made clear that the future of BlackBerry is in its new BB10 operating system – so clear that they’ve not given legacy Java apps any path to make the transition from OS7 and earlier up to BB10.  I do think that this is a good, necessary break from the past for RIM, but it does mean that any continued work on legacy BBSSH has little in the way of returns.

Therefore: after BBSSH’s 2.1 release and subsequent updates to incorporate additional language translations, legacy BBSSH for BB OS 7.1 and earlier will be maintained only for critical bug fixes and security updates.  This does mean that certain planned features – such as SCP, line drawing mode, and others – will likely not be implemented on the legacy version of BBSSH, unless someone from BBSSH’s wide community of users would like to contribute.

During that time, I’ll be hard at working rewriting BBSSH for the new BB10 platform – so that it’s available upon release of BB10 devices, and for the PlayBook after it receives its BB10 upgrade.

 

 

 

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News and Updates – May 2012

Posted on May 25, 2012 by mparadise

Things have been quiet for a while as I’ve been getting settled into my new job and dealing with life’s oddities.  However, I’ll soon be pushing to get BBSSH 2.1 out of beta and into final release state – as well as into app world. There are a couple of bugs (mostly around screen refreshing) that need to be resolved first, and I need to re-implement support for larger RSA key sizes.

After that, I’ve received a couple of translations (Russian and French) from community members – I hope to include these shortly after 2.1 is released.

Stay tuned for a post later today – I’ll be detailing plans for BBSSH’s future on legacy BlackBerry and on the new BB10 platform.

 

 

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BBSSH on FaceBook

Posted on November 16, 2011 by mparadise

BBSSH finally has a FaceBook page.   I’ll get a button on the web site this week, but in the mean time — if you’re a fan, stop by and “like” it, or whatever you crazy kids do with FaceBook pages these days…

 

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Forum software – suggestions?

Posted on October 25, 2011 by mparadise

Can anyone suggest forum software that has good handling for spam, bogus tags, etc? bbpress isn’t really doing it (a lot of things slipping through, the management interface for deleting users/posts leaves a lot to be desired, and I have no way to delete invalid tags…)

I last used phpbb several years ago, and it was a spam magnet. Has that improved under 3.0? . SMF was a similar experience, but again that was 3-4 years back.

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Another crazy few weeks…

Posted on October 12, 2011 by mparadise

I’ve been in process of finding a new job (more on that in a week or so on my personal blog @ http://marcparadise.com), so BBSSH support and PB development have taken a temporary back seat.

A few of you have used ‘send feedback’ to send in an issue report since late September; please know that I’ve not forgotten you – but catching up may take a little time, because I’m also pushing to get BBSSH 2.1 finalized and in App World.   For the most part, there is only one of me – so if you have some J2ME and/or BB development experience and want to help out, please let me know!

This is especially important now, because I see a fair number of new OS 7 users every day (based on anonymous usage stats) and I know that unless they visit this site to see the news about using BBSSH 2.1 for OS7… they’re downloading the current ‘official’ 2.0 release and finding that it’s not working for them.

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BBSSH for OS7 Update (Pre-Beta)

Posted on August 17, 2011 by mparadise

An issue has been discovered under OS7 in attempting to show the Symbols screen while in Direct Input mode.  This will cause BBSSH to hang, and you will not be able to use BBSSH until you reboot the device.   This was due to the specific menu item that BB OS uses to universally provide the “Show Symbols” menu having changed internally.

Normally I wouldn’t post about an update for a single issue, but this one is critical enough to merit it.  You can grab the fixed version at the unstable download location for BBSSH OS7:

http://dev.bbssh.org/bbssh/unstable/7.0.0/BBSSH.jad

All the usual disclaimers apply: this release is considered a development build, and may contain additional issues not yet discovered.

Thanks to those of you who reported this one to me.

 

 

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BBSSH for OS 7 (pre-beta)

Posted on August 14, 2011 by mparadise

Current versions of BBSSH do not properly run under the just-released OS7. There is an ‘unstable’ build currently available that corrects this.  Note that I have not tested other functionality – in particular we may see problems with available keys in key binding.  Once I full test the version I’ll move it to regular beta, but in the interim you can grab it here:

http://dev.bbssh.org/bbssh/unstable/7.0.0/BBSSH.jad

You should be able to get back all of your settings from your old device using “restore” in desktop manager.  If you are doing a selective restore (something I’d always recommend when switching devices…) then you’ll find that all of the BBSSH settings to restore are prefixed with the name “BBSSH”.

If you do find any new issues under OS7 please report them to me using the “Send feedback” menu item.

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Getting the Most from BBSSH: GNU Screen

Posted on June 24, 2011 by mparadise

Many long-time SSH users already know this, but I receive a number of emails from people who haven’t heard of the awesome utility that is GNU Screen.  Screen has several benefits for frequent (and even infrequent) SSHers.

  1. Persistent logins: after setting up a Screen session, you can reconnect to it at any time.  In practical terms this means that even when your crappy 3G coverage *cough AT&T cough* flakes out and you lose connection to your server, you don’t lose your work.  You can reconnect and pick up right where you left off.  To do this, just type this at the shell prompt:screen -RDaA
  2. Multiple shells within a single connection.  Screen lets you create a virtually unlimited number of active sessions within one connection and switch between them.  BBSSH shortcuts make this easy to manage.
  3. Scrollback buffer: while BBSSH’s scrollback support is improving with every release, using screen for scrolling doesn’t use extra memory on your device — so you can keep a scrollback buffer that is much larger. (Mine is 5000 lines).   And those multiple sessions I mentioned above? Each one has its own scrollback buffer under screen.  One thing to note is that BBSSH’s vertical scrollback buffer is of much less use if you are using screen – it’s pretty much either/or.
  4. BBSSH’s copy support is fairly rudimentary (though I hope to change this soon).  While screen’s copy/paste won’t let you share with your BB device, it will let you easily copy and paste between mul
  5. For those of you looking forward to getting a new high-res BB OS7 devices (or who like the small font sizes BBSSH has available) screen allows you to split the window showing 2 or more sessions concurrently.
  6. IRC fan? Run screen and irssi together, and you have IRC from your BlackBerry device – except unlike most of the IRC clients available on BlackBerry, irssi is a powerful client that runs on your remote system and not your BB — so the connection remains stable.

Stay tuned and I’ll be posting some BBSSH macros and shortcut bindings I use with screen (and irssi) that make it sit up, beg and roll over with a single keystroke/touchscreen tap.

One important note: disable “visual bell” on screen in order to avoid a terminal bug in BBSSH.   To do this, type: CTRL+A CTRL+G . You only need to do this once.   (For folks with hardware keyboards using default bindings, that would be: SYM,A,SYM,G)

For now, here are some useful links:

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June Update

Posted on June 8, 2011 by mparadise

Well, it’s been a while since I updated here (blame the PlayBook and a mild case of family) but BBSSH is still alive and kicking.   The 2.1 beta is coming along well if a bit behind my planned release schedule, and as usual the early adopters have been providing some great feedback. Some fun new features are included along with a few critical bug fixes  - go ahead and try it out, as long as you’re not relying on the legacy fonts (there is a rendering bug introduced which should be fixed soon).

Now on to the question everyone has been asking me: when will we see BBSSH on the PlayBook? A few months ago the answer was not clear – with no details of the native SDK capabilities, and no desire to write a complete SSH stack in actionscript … the outlook was grim.

However, bits and pieces of information have been dribbling out of RIM and Adobe – enough that I can finally commit to actually starting the project. It’s too soon yet for a definite timeline, but I’m hoping to have an alpha quality release out the door this summer.  The actual release is highly dependent on when RIM releases the actual NDK beta.

Stay tuned for more details – I’m exploring a couple of different options for implementing this and will bounce these ideas off of you all in the very near future.

One thing I would like to hear some feedback on is this: BBSSH development is a one-man operation.   This means that when I start to focus on a PB release for it, BB development will be put on hold (excepting critical bugs and security fixes).  The three big features outstanding are utf8 support, sftp, and port forwarding.  So the question is … is it worth delaying one or more of these in order to have a PlayBook ssh client available?

 

 

 

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