With over 15,000 beta testers logging in to both the private and public beta versions of Viigo every day, we’ve been able to gain a great deal of insight into where the app is working well, and where it isn’t. We’ve also been able to generate a number of amazing ideas for new features, many of which we’ve put into the development queue.

It was clear that a number of you were being affected by the following important issues: hourglassing, intermittent connectivity, channels not being updated, and battery drainage. As a result, we focused this beta largely on improving the core of the app, at the expense of tackling larger features such as Audio.
Despite this focus, we have some exciting new features to announce. But before we let you know what these are, we’d like to ask you to keep this quiet until the public unveiling of the BETA on Friday.

Here’s what’s new in beta 3…

Enhancements (available today)
• New: Flights and Travel (search for flights, build itineraries and check the status of flights)
• New: Enhanced Sports selector … allowing you to subscribe to multiple sports at one time
• New: Better organization of the sports service … multiple feeds per sport (e.g. scores, standings) are now grouped by folder
• New : NCAA Football Scores
• New: Kijiji Classifieds Search
• Enhanced: Politics Coverage (Upcoming Canadian and US elections)
Enhancements (coming in the next few days, with no need to upgrade again)
• New: Currency Exchange Rates
• New: Enhanced sport coverage (blogs, news, spreads, standings) for many sports
• New: Stock Portfolios by industry sector (keep track of the top industries in each sector)
• New: Read the Classics on Viigo (brought to you by the DailyLit)
• New: Premiership scores and standings
• New: Movie Showtimes And more
Other enhancements:

You can now customize the Viigo Home Screen – Add or remove services from the home screen (like CFL, Elections, Entertainment etc.). To add or remove a service from the home screen, simply highlight it then click the BlackBerry menu button, then select ‘Add Service’ or ‘Remove Service’.

Improved memory usage and reduced ‘Hourglassing’ –This release incorporates a number of improvements to reduce both the dreaded ‘hourglass’ and memory utilization on your device. We’ve made some great headway here, but we are working on much more.

Improved connectivity - We’ve improved the way in which Viigo communicates with our servers, addressing the following connectivity issues: ‘Update All’ fails to update, intermittent ‘Update Failures’, and the login message prompt, ‘Your account has been transferred to another device’.

Watch for a blog post on Friday describing these features in more detail.

Items not fixed in this release

Loss of Custom RSS Titles and Saved Articles When Upgrading¬¬ – Custom titles and Saved Articles are not preserved after installing the new beta version of Viigo (even if you login using your Viigo ID). This is still a known issue, and we’re looking into a long term solution here. This release does not yet incorporate a fix, but expect to see one shortly. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Audio – With the tradeoff of improving the battery life, device memory, and server connectivity, this release doesn’t incorporate any updates to Audio for the private beta testers. We’ve temporarily removed it from the app so that we can focus on making it better.

To download your copy of beta 3, head here for the public beta Get Viigo or,

Here for BlackBerry Forums branded version:

OTA: Get Viigo
Desktop: Get Viigo

Thank you,

Team Viigo

This could get interesting. I have already downloaded the update, replaced the custom feeds that were deleted by the upgrade. Now to see if this is one any better... as soon as I try to hide some of the bloat-ware applets that I will never use.

It has NCAA football. Thats important.

"... But before we let you know what these are, we’d like to ask you to keep this quiet until the public unveiling of the BETA on Friday. ..." Oops!

Maybe I've just gotten used to FreeRange, but this version feels extremely slow. There are many times the program lags behind my input.

Yeah, but it's still a PITA. How do you get scores for JUST MY TEAM? It looks like you have to scroll through the whole list of 100+ games just to find your score? What a freaking waste of time / effort(?) / bandwidth. Did they put ANY thought into the design of this? If I only care about 5 games, why not give me a way to select those games - if I decide I want to scroll through the whole NCAA schedule, I can still do that, but keep it out of my way.

I've set up Yahoo alerts for the sports and scores that are important to me and I get an email / text message with the score updates ... it's quick and I don't have to mess with a slow bloated app that kind of gives me something close to what I want sometimes.

This version DOES seem slower... great improvement

The nearly 800k file size took me by surprise as well.

Yeah. It would be nice if we can sort by Top 25 and conference.

Has anybody been able to find the schedules and the other Sports enhancements that are referenced in the email?
I dl'd the update and they aren't there, despite it being said that they ware avail. today????

Not yet. but the note does say:

Enhancements (coming in the next few days, with no need to upgrade again)

• New: Enhanced sport coverage (blogs, news, spreads, standings) for many sports

• New: Premiership scores and standings

Shouldn't the standings at least be here today? According to this:

Enhancements (available today)
• New: Flights and Travel (search for flights, build itineraries and check the status of flights)
• New: Enhanced Sports selector … allowing you to subscribe to multiple sports at one time
• New: Better organization of the sports service … multiple feeds per sport (e.g. scores, standings) are now grouped by folder


Also, The dates are still off by 1 day... It would be nice if they would add something into the options that let you choose your own local timezone too...

And despite all of the shortcomings of this latest release, it does appear that they have addressed the serious memory leaks... I have been running this off and on all day with over 50 feeds and I haven't seen any memory issues - I have seen only a minor fluctuation in available memory +/- about 25K. No more daily battery pulls!

But, yeah, there are still some serious shortcomings...

Wirelessly posted (Verizon 8830)

I notice my device temporarily freezes when I try to close the program.

Is it just me... I can't believe that they haven't integrated the basic blackberry -- space - to scroll a page down and - shift space - to scroll up. That's so anoying!!

That plus size of program plus incredibly slow RSS loading = delete & use FreeRange (again)

For y'all who have it running:

- Have they line-wrapped the article titles yet? (serious UI deal killer)
- Is the NHL on the sports section yet?
- Are Podcasts active yet?

Thx!

1. NO, but I don't see this as a 'deal killer'. You can read enough of the article title to know whether or not you want to read the article IMHO.

2. NO, but what's hockey anyway

3. NO, but with the BB Media Sync, I don't need podcasts here.

Thanks. We'll have to agree to disagree on #1 (), as it depends on the feed. Some of them it's totally fine, but others it's very unusable. For instance, my local newspaper here in SF has a RSS feed and the titles are not "finished" in time, I always have to click into the article to actually read the full headline to see if I even want to read the article. They post ~30 articles a day, this gets really old really fast (the clicking in).

Regarding #3, some of us really love OTA podcasts; they download on your device on their own and ready to go, no PC (and the associated manual time) needed. There are tons of daily podcasts like language learning where it's great to just run out the door for the bus, knowing the lesson you want to listen to is already on your phone.

I guess I can see all of your points, and for the record, I am not a viigo apologist.

The podcasts w/o a PC is a good idea. I had not considered the "get 'em on the go" concept... and I think that would be helpful.

Regarding the sports modules in general, they leave a LOT to be desired... especially in college sports where there are hundreds of games on any given day. Finding scores is a nightmare... notwithstanding the fact that they STILL can't find a programmer that can read a calendar - the dates are still off by one day.

I see that the NCAA "football" is spelled wrong and does not indicate the quarters during a game. NOT GOOD!!!!!

You can't beat top notch quality control.

But the date thing really irks me. At one point the date was hosed in the weather app, now it's in the sports app...

Interesting point on the quarters... I see that Toledo is leading Eastern Michigan 14-7 with 14:34 to go in one of the four quarters... shees.

I have yet to see this date problem, do you think it's a time zone thing.

nice update - does the flight itinerary section save your flights even after re-install? I imagine the info is saved on the viigo server....

The funny thing is that the date problem does not manifest on MLB, but on "NCAA Footbal" it's there... as it is on the weather app.

I'm in Phoenix, so it is 'earlier' than it is in NJ... still freaky...

I don't know but the lookup process is painfully difficult and slow. I can search the flight number on Google w/ my 'Berry is just a few seconds... or I can spend about 5-6 minutes futzing around with the viigo kludge and still have to wait on the results.

Could it be the time in the home team's time zone?

I doubt it's that simple... basically, there are NO games for TODAY. They are all yesterday.

I just loaded the crackberry version to see if it has less issues.

Let us know of it's any better (but I doubt that it will be).

I found it interesting that I got a viigo bulletin announcing the co-branded versions of viigo beta 3 for 'all of our partners'. They'd rather spend the effort doing multiple co-branded versions of a still buggy piece of software than address the bugs.

No difference. Still locks up on close. NOT GOOD!!!!!

I really like Viigo.... probably my most used app... but the bugs are driving me towards deleting the app. It is ridiculous to announce features and then not have them included in the release.

Viigo has slipped badly.

Wirelessly posted (Verizon 8830)

Dmiller,
We are on the same page. Heck the NFL APP doesn't show the quarters either.

That's the #1 reason I haven't used Viigo in a while.

Can someone from Viigo comment on this? How many people need to sound off to get basic spacebar scrolling in this app?