The story of this application, Start Me Up, comes from my research of another application. I’m in Las Vegas this week doing work for one of our sister sites, so I haven’t had much time to put together tips posts. Instead, as you’ve seen, we’ve mainly covered app-related stuff. But for Friday I thought I’d can the sales pitch and present a free application. That’s when I found an excellent one, iCaller Location. Well, it was excellent in theory. It’s basically a reverse caller ID. When someone calls it lets you know what the location of the area code and exchange in question. While that’s nice, it would be much nicer if it could locate the origin of the call, since plenty of calls originate outside of their local area. But it’s a free app, so who cares? Plenty of people care, apparently, judging by the user comments. While a few contain nothing but needless complaining about a free app, there was one in particular that struck me.
The reviewer wrote, “I think this would be very useful if it started automatically after you power off or reset but it [doesn't]. i always forget to turn it on so it never gets used.” That’s a fair point. This is an app that I can easily see someone neglecting to turn on, thus rendering it useless. It might be free, but it’s also eating memory so I’m sure the user will want to get at least some use out of it. But then, further browsing free apps, I came across one that provides the perfect solution.
Start Me Up creates a list of applications that you want to run upon startup. It’s as simple as that. If you frequently use certain apps, especially apps that run in the background, and want them to launch every time you restart your BlackBerry, then you should definitely check out this one. It’s free, too, and has survived 60 reviews in the Store with a four-star rating. Considering the number of frivolous complaints I see, that’s quite the accomplishment.
You can get Start Me Up from the BBGeeks Store for free. If you happen to like the idea of a reverse caller ID lookup, you can also get iCaller Location for free. They seem like perfect complements.
