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Programming

RIM Does Not Want PlayBook Devs, Complains One Potential Developer 165

Posted by timothy from the you-don't-want-a-rim-job? dept.
fidget42 writes "It appears as if Research In Motion is trying to discourage people from developing for the PlayBook by making the process too darn complicated." This is a pretty serious rant; has anyone had a better experience with RIM's system? Sometimes the gap between developers and users (even when those users are other developers) can be more of a chasm.
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RIM Does Not Want PlayBook Devs, Complains One Potential Developer More

RIM Does Not Want PlayBook Devs, Complains One Potential Developer

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  • Cry me a river.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 26, 2011 @09:59AM (#35323444)

    Boohoo.. the guy is crying about having to fill out a couple forms and downloading a couple files. Writing his rant probably took 3 times longer than all the supposed "extra" time he had to spend on setup compared to competing platforms.

    I know first impression counts, but does 30 minutes count in the grand scheme of things when you are going to spend days, weeks or even months learning and working on something? Must be the ADHD generation..

    What happened to staying up through the night because you are so excited to learn and get something working?

    • Re:Cry me a river.. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Superken7 ( 893292 ) on Saturday February 26, 2011 @10:10AM (#35323512) Journal

      Why would someone say up the night developing for a platform that is a PITA when they can go and develop painfully for "the King" ? (be it iOS or Android, whatever)

      I would rather focus on making my app great rather than wasting time dealing with a hideous development environment.

      Moreover, the author not just complains about time. Its about money, too:
      "I do, however, notice that although it is currently free to register with App World, in the future there will be a $200 USD charge. Now just in case you’ve never looked in to competing developer programs, Apple charges $99, and Google charges $25. Considering you are by far the underdog in this game, how do you justify charging double the price of the market leader? Also, with the $99 or $25 charge, Apple and Google let you publish and unlimited number of apps on their stores. You, on the other hand, have decided that for $200, a developer should only get to publish 10 apps, and it will cost $200 for every additional 10 apps"

      • They just don't want 100,000 fart apps, or the kinds of developers who really can't do anything more than produce fart apps.

        I mean, are you just a "fart app developer"?
         

        • I tried to set myself up to do some development on the Blackberry platform, and gave up too. It seems they want to keep a short leash on the apps. Blackberry has always been about security, control and business. I would imagine that by introducing such a controlled platform, it's not fart-apps which they're worried about, but trojans, rootkits, etc.

          I don't know if the strategy will work. History has shown it will not.

          What I do know though is that $200 fee locks out all the under-18 developers out of

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Dr. Evil ( 3501 )

            Oh and it does a good job at my personal email and Google maps. Google apps is great.

          • What I do know though is that $200 fee locks out all the under-18 developers out of the market, making it a platform at best one where old people sell established ideas to young people. It clearly locks out all the interesting innovation.

            By "innovation", im assuming you mean the thousands of fart apps, hundreds of babe of the day(bikini or nude), and my personal fav "Poop locator." This barrier for entry is going to make apps pricier than on other platforms, but its going to discourage nonsense as well. The only problem i see with this is companies not wanting to port their apps

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Dr. Evil ( 3501 )

              "The only problem i see with this is companies not wanting to port their apps"

              That's a pretty big problem. Especially when apps are marketed and developed natively on other platforms first.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by GreyLurk ( 35139 )

          Sure, The $20/submission fee keeps out fart apps, but the thing is that it's not $20/app. If I submit Application A and one of my users finds a bug, I obviously need to submit an update... That UPDATE costs another $20. What if you add a feature? Another $20. So basically, the model that the Blackberry App World model encourages is for you to submit bugfixes only when they're absolutely critical, and to avoid adding new features.

        • Plus, $200 is only a very tiny amount of money to pay out for software development. The Playbook you need to buy to test the thing out on would cost much more. I'm assuming they have an emulator, but that's not sufficient for full testing. You need the real deal if you want to test your app under real world conditions. $200 is less than a day's salary for most developers. Sure it's more than the other guys charge, but it's still quite acceptable. They probably do want to prevent fart apps. I wish the

          • You assume all developers are paid developers working on a salary.

            For large portions of the iApp ecosystem, this is not true. RIM has basically told the hobbyist developer to go away with that up-front fee.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by TheLink ( 130905 )
        I'm wondering why he even bothered to post such a long rant about it.

        Does he care that much about RIM's success? Was he forced to write RIM stuff?

        If I wasn't forced into using RIM and was looking at the options, I'd look at RIM's much higher entrance barrier, go "fuck it", and develop for a different platform. Not my problem - RIM's problem.
        • Maybe he inherently likes RIM because they provide jobs in his neighbourhood, and contribute a significant amount to Canada's GDP. But he has criticisms about their future plans. One of those tech does not equal US stories. Maybe he hopes they take their thumb out of their ass and provide an alternative to Android. Or IOS, obviously.

      • Why would someone say up the night developing for a platform that is a PITA when they can go and develop painfully for "the King" ? (be it iOS or Android, whatever)

        I would rather focus on making my app great rather than wasting time dealing with a hideous development environment.

        Moreover, the author not just complains about time. Its about money, too: "I do, however, notice that although it is currently free to register with App World, in the future there will be a $200 USD charge. Now just in case you’ve never looked in to competing developer programs, Apple charges $99, and Google charges $25. Considering you are by far the underdog in this game, how do you justify charging double the price of the market leader? Also, with the $99 or $25 charge, Apple and Google let you publish and unlimited number of apps on their stores. You, on the other hand, have decided that for $200, a developer should only get to publish 10 apps, and it will cost $200 for every additional 10 apps"

        Actually I haven't read anything that says they'd resume charging or not - only that they reserve the right to. SInce they're currently in the process of giving away free PlayBooks to developers who submit PlayBook apps, I rather doubt they'll be shooting themselves in the foot that way in the near future, if at all. One thing is certain - if you have a vendor account and you get it for free, they're not going to make you pay for it retroactively. In the worst case (if they do decide to shoot themselves in

    • Having delved into writing software for the Blackberry, I would have to say that my experiences were much the same as his...

      Heres what I had to say on the subject:

      I have, for the past two days, been trying to get a working Blackberry Developer environment setup so I can do some Blackberry development - and you know what? Its been the worst possible nightmare I have yet experienced in software development.

      The suggested environment is a mix of the Open Source IDE Eclipse and the Blackberry JDK plugin c

  • My Favourite part (Score:4, Funny)

    by Superken7 ( 893292 ) on Saturday February 26, 2011 @10:01AM (#35323454) Journal

    "First up, I have to put the simulator into development mode, which makes total sense because of those times when you don’t want to use the simulator for development."

    I really hope RIM doesn't consider that dev environment to be anywhere near final. Or wait. Maybe they just want to encourage devs to write Android apps and use them on the Playbook?
    Yeah, given how messed up the process is, and how critical it is for a platform starting at 0 native apps to start ramping up available 3rd party apps, I am going to assume they just don't wanna have you write playbook apps, they just want you to write Android apps! (assuming they are really compatible)

    • although it is currently free to register with App World, in the future there will be a $200 USD charge. ... You, on the other hand, have decided that for $200, a developer should only get to publish 10 apps, and it will cost $200 for every additional 10 apps. ... After getting all my personal information in, and being thoroughly disgusted with your ignorant pricing scheme, I’m now ready to start the actual process of developing.

      Their pricing scheme is not ignorant, but certainly arrogant. On one hand

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by GreyLurk ( 35139 )

        One has to sympathize with RIM's internal software engineers if that is the same tool they have to work with to develop their own apps. This is not an indication that RIM wants to turn developers away, but an indication that their software development process is not very efficient. The complicated process is not only a turn-off for external developers, but also their internal ones. The question is, is this the best process they could come up with, or is it that good ideas or designs in the company have problem becoming realized?

        Honestly, the dev tools for the Flash/AIR platform are pretty solid, but the RIM SDKs are pretty horribly architected. It's loosely based on the Adobe Flex APIs, but it ignores all of the conventions set up in the Flex APIs, and isn't even internally consistent with itself. Half of the reason for using a Flash-based API is to have the built in smooth transitions (Fade, slide, etc..), but for whatever reason, the QNX components don't work with the built in transitions. You can build an app without QNX com

      • Speaking of chicken and egg problem when playing catch-up - just yesterday, Microsoft announced that the limit of 5 submissions of free aps per $99/yr developer subscription is now raised to 100. Which is to say that before you can make money on developers, you must first have developers...

  • "Update: It should be noted that I was using the WebWorks SDK and not the AIR SDK. A commenter on HN mentioned that if you’re using Adobe Builder, it will eventually get you to a Build and Run button, but that they experienced similar problems as well"

    Eventually sounds somewhat amiguous.... IMHO, if the setup takes 20min more than on other platforms I don't think thats a big deal, as long as its simple enough during development.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      ahh, amiguous, that feeling you have when somebody says something to you on the street or at the store and you try to remember if youre friends or not.

    • Re:Update (Score:4, Insightful)

      by mangino ( 1588 ) on Saturday February 26, 2011 @10:13AM (#35323546) Homepage

      It's not 20 minutes more, it's an hour of installation. At first, the mac instructions had you download the windows version of VMWare Fusion. To even be able to try out the sdk costs $80 on a mac. Note that you can get started developing for iOS at no cost with a single download.

      As a developer, little time sinks can make a big difference. For example, building and running my app on the iPad simulator takes about 5 seconds. It's easy to test iterations and small tweaks to the UI. On Android with the honeycomb emulator, it takes more than a minute (assuming the emulator is running, it takes about 3 minutes for the emulator to start on a dual quad core box with 16G of ram) I never found out on the Playbook, since I don't want to spend money buying an emulator for a currently vapor product.

      (accidentally posted as AC the first time)

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Bogtha ( 906264 )

        Note that you can get started developing for iOS at no cost with a single download.

        I don't think that's an entirely fair comparison... in order to get started developing for the Playbook, you need VMWare, in order to get started developing for iOS, you need a Mac. The latter is quite a bit more expensive.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by swalve ( 1980968 )
        If you do it right, you don't have to continually test. That's the sign of a hacker, not a programmer. Don't get me wrong, that's how I learned too. But then you graduate beyond ADHD "programming" and buy yourself a notepad. Run the test, write down all the issues, fix all of them, test again. Gets you down to maybe 5 iterations, instead of 1000.

        • If you do it right, you don't have to continually test. That's the sign of a hacker, not a programmer. Don't get me wrong, that's how I learned too. But then you graduate beyond ADHD "programming" and buy yourself a notepad. Run the test, write down all the issues, fix all of them, test again. Gets you down to maybe 5 iterations, instead of 1000.

          From my experience of building seamless UIs, you can never be done in 5 iterations. Finalizing and polishing some UI element placement can easily take 10-20 runs.

          Functionality? - often takes minutes to code and yes 3-5 runs. Making the functionality accessible in an intuitive fashion? - days, sometimes weeks.

          And it doesn't even matter what type of UI it is - touchscreen, WebUI or CLI - in my experience accessibility and intuitiveness always take much much more time to get right than the core function

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mangino ( 1588 )

          If you don't continuously test, you're not doing it right. Maybe I'm biased because I practice TDD.

          Let's say you're right and that it takes me 5 iterations to test and get the result right. Now I have at least 6 different resolutions to test on for android, and at least 3 different skins for the device maker. That's about 18 different devices I need to test. Each one requires launching a new emulator. If I need to make a change for any emulator (for example, the red button on Motoblur doesn't look right or

  • ", right? RIM? Bueller?" What does that mean and why does he repeat it so often? I don't understand what the problem is, he is expecting a spoon to come flying towards his mouth.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by dOxxx ( 8571 )

      ", right? RIM? Bueller?"
      What does that mean and why does he repeat it so often?

      Ferris Bueller's Day Off: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091042/ [imdb.com]

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Pop69 ( 700500 )
      How old are you ?

      Does your Mum know that you're using her computer ?
      • I'm in my mid-twenties. And you seem to be implying that I'm young becuase I don't know every crappy reference to crappy popular culture stuff, right? Pops? Buller?

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Seriously if you're in the US, Canada or UK this is one of the most popular movies of all time. They have literally played it hundreds of thousands of times on television for over 20 years, to call it crappy is appalling, it's one of the greats. Highly recommended.
          Other greats you probably missed: Willow, Masters of the Universe, Adventures in Babysitting, Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal.

          • Well, seeing as I never watched much TV, I guess it's amazing that I've seen the movie like twice. I think maybe one reference to the movie is fine, but after the second one it's too much. I only got the reference because so many other things reference it. I honestly don't really think it's funny the way the writer uses it in this case

    • It's from Ferris Bueller's Day Off [youtube.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by scrib ( 1277042 )

      Don't feel bad... I GET the reference and it left me wondering what his problem was. It distracted from his message and the reference doesn't actually make sense in the context of the article.

      It made me want to exclaim "there's no crying in RIM development!" (An equally out of place A League of Their Own reference.)

    • This seems to be one of those anglocentric popular culture references - where most of the rest of the world knows, or cares, very little about.
      But since most native anglophones seldom speak fluently any other language, it's not easy for them to figure out what is or isn't relevant outside of their countries.
      As in "Foreign language education: if ‘scandalous’ in the 20th century, what will it be in the 21st century?" by Eeon E. Panetta [stanford.edu].

    • I don't understand what the problem is, he is expecting a spoon to come flying towards his mouth.

      If the spoon does just that on iOS, Android, webOS, WP7 etc, then his expectation is not unreasonable.

    • It's a movie reference. It would be funny if:
      1) He used it in the correct context. (Reading a list of names.)
      2) He used it only once. (The second time, the joke is dead.)

      But don't worry, the article is written in about the most insipid way imaginable. I was actually interested in reading about Playbook development, as I'd been thinking about trying my own hand about it, but I couldn't read more than a few paragraphs-- I think I got to the second "RIM? Bueller?" or a little past it.

      Please: I know it's just a

  • I disagree about the $200 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by larry bagina ( 561269 ) on Saturday February 26, 2011 @10:24AM (#35323608) Journal
    $200 vs $100 isn't a big deal, particularly if this thing is targeted towards businesses. And it's $0 today. Perhaps the biggest problem with the iTunes App Store (and Google Marketplace) is the spam apps -- shit that takes little or no time to build and has no value. RSS feed apps, wallpapers of images from other games, copy/paste a wikipedia article, "howto: guides for other games, etc. Putting a price on it should eliminate some of that shit.
    • Exactly. $200 is a low price to enter an already defined market of enterprise customers who have real money to spend. And enterprise customers who have real security requirements which Android hasn't even begun to address.

    • Agreed. $200, $100, whatever. Some fee is fine. (Mind you, they must be careful - for devs in other countries those can be large amounts).

      What is much more important is the rules of the App Store. Does the App Store have simple, written rules?

      I remember the story of the dev who had an app for both iPhone and Android and in his listings he mentioned that he had won an award for best Android app. He got rejected by Apple for even mentioning Android. On a practical level that is easy to fix, but it makes

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bogtha ( 906264 )

      I think the idea that they are aiming towards businesses is quite relevant. iOS took off in a big way as a platform precisely because anybody could develop for it. Some of the biggest successes on the App Store are from lone developers or just a couple of people collaborating. You might very well get rid of the shit by raising the bar... but unfortunately you'll be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Lehk228 ( 705449 )
        anybody could develop for it.*

        as long as the final product is approved by St. Jobs

      • but unfortunately you'll be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

        Nintendo manages to print money [google.com] despite its stated policy [warioworld.com] of "throwing the baby out with the bathwater".

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gaspyy ( 514539 )

        That was Android's Marketplace philosophy. $25 (on-time I think) developer fee and that's it. Self-signed (aka worthless) certificates. No review process. The result is that the store is full of shitty (and sometimes malicious) apps.

  • Whining, nothing more (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gaspyy ( 514539 ) on Saturday February 26, 2011 @10:27AM (#35323620)

    Random whining programmer thinks process X is too complicated for him.

    For me it was a non-issue. It took me exactly 2 hours to port my game (http://itunes.apple.com/app/sparkchess/id398133128) from iPad/Android to Playbook and test it, including installing the simulator. The signing process was a little more complex but really nothing fancy. If anything, on the whole I found the process faster and easier than publishing on iOS.

    It took about one week for the app to be approved and it's now in AppWorld.

    • in any case the $200 per 10 apps is a rip off, even if they'd streamline the process.

    • Granted, the letter might be a little over the top, but he makes a lot of valid points. RIM's developer website is notoriously terrible, the organization sucks, it typically takes forever to find what you're looking for, and like the guy said, you have to enter your personal info over and over anytime you visit the site. RIM's infrastructure is plagued with issues, their signing servers go down routinely and AppWorld has constant hiccups. If they want to seriously complete with Android and iOS marketplac
    • Do those 2 hours include the entire time spent configuring the environment for the first time and the time it took you to get notarized papers and send them to RIM?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by gaspyy ( 514539 )

        Do those 2 hours include the entire time spent configuring the environment for the first time and the time it took you to get notarized papers and send them to RIM?

        Yes, the 2 hours included installing the SDK and reading through the documentation as well as installing the simulator. They have step-by-step tutorials for this.

        As a company, I didn't have to get a notarized paper, I only had to provide a scanned company registration, just like with Apple. Approval time was 2 days I think.

        Getting the app signed

        • As a company, I didn't have to get a notarized paper, I only had to provide a scanned company registration, just like with Apple. Approval time was 2 days I think.

          As a company, I think you stand in a very different platform than the writer of the article. As an individual, it does seem a bit hostile to go through such a process. It did cross my mind that his point may be mute as a company, but also, as a company, a lot of programmers would still develop for the platform because they were told to do so (for the exception of one man companies that the IRS considers illegal [nytimes.com], you will have to hire a janitor or something to work around the 1 employee rule and not face any

  • RIM is not long for this world.

  • What? RIM is being obtuse with developers? (Score:3)

    by Chas ( 5144 ) on Saturday February 26, 2011 @11:02AM (#35323824) Homepage Journal

    NO WAY MAN!

    This is status quo for them.

    Let's just say I'm NOT enamored of the platform and let it go at that.

    Then again, my experience with several third-party BB app developers has been less than stellar as well. But it'd really help if RIM's infrastructure wasn't such a shoddy hodge-podge to begin with.

    • "What? RIM is being obtuse with developers? NO WAY MAN!"

      I came here to say this. RIM's "support" of third-party developers (and system administrators, etc.) has always been the worst, which is why there are virtually no decent third-party (or even first-party) applications for their platform.

      I had a good laugh when they announced "AppWorld", because I knew there was no way they were going to offer something as mobile-developer-friendly as Apple, Google, or even Microsoft. It's the same level of spin on a cr

  • Come on! It's still beta! (Score:3)

    by quetwo ( 1203948 ) on Saturday February 26, 2011 @11:03AM (#35323826) Homepage

    This is still all beta software he is dealing with. The platform is still not complete, and RIM is still tweaking the process for creating applications for their new, still unreleased tablet. This is why it's called bleeding-edge -- it's because it's not polished and you may bleed a bit working with it. That is also why those who take the pains and actually publish to the AppWorld first are the ones who are most rewarded. If your app is the first on the market, you will be most visible on opening day, and since it is still free -- you really are only loosing time.

    On another note -- there are plenty of walk-throughs available when working with this beta software, from both RIM and Adobe. RIM has also been offering nearly weekly developer web-casts on how to work with it too. Sure, it's not as polished as the iOS development platform (you know, with it being Apple only, certificate issues, profile issues and publishing issues aside), but it does work.

    • This is still all beta software he is dealing with.

      You could say that about all of RIM's software. I can virtually guarantee that the experience will not improve significantly between now and the "release". Or ever, most likely.

  • Can we let RIM die, already ? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by billcopc ( 196330 ) <vrillco@yahoo.com> on Saturday February 26, 2011 @11:19AM (#35323918) Homepage

    I'm going to be a dick, as usual, and ask why people still bother with RIM in 2011.

    I'm in the frustrating position of having to develop (admittedly simple) apps for iOS, Android, BB and WinPhone7. After experimenting with all four platforms, I found iOS by far the most "pleasant" to work with, as both user and developer. Now this was the first time I ever worked with a Mac, and I was pleasantly surprised by XCode and its tight integration with the SDK. The whole drag&drop thing between interfaces and code was a bit of a mindfuck, but it does make sense once you learn it. More importantly, almost everything you learn for the iPhone carries over to the iPad, and the workflow is identical.

    Android was a not-too-distant second, their Eclipse toolkit is decent, if slightly disjointed, but app performance and usability is greatly dependent on the actual phone hardware, and it seems 99% of them are utter garbage except for that coveted Samsung Galaxy.

    BB's interface makes me want to throw puppies in a wood chipper, and the JDE is a throwback to the 90's, lacking many creature comforts found in modern IDEs. Code signing is a pain in the ass, and even though the JDE said I had no "restricted items" in my code, it still refused to run on a real phone. And that emulator ? Fuck sake, do I really need to "boot" the emulator every single time ? Slowest dev cycle ever! I'm just grateful they used the WebKit browser like the other two, so once I got my hybrid app to compile and run, I was pretty much done, though I dread the day the client hires me to build the 2.0 version. The actual phones seem to be plagued with stability issues, freezing or losing network connectivity for no apparent reason, and I regularly encountered an issue where it simply refused to sync, requiring a reboot of the phone, and killing of the host-side tasks that were stuck in limbo. Just messy all around.

    And finally we have Windows Phone 7. Development was actually decent, maybe because I was already familiar with Visual Studio, maybe because they significantly improved things since WinMobile 6. Now the browser, on the other hand, is a steamer. Apparently it's "based on" IE7, well to my untrained eye it's based on Netscape 3.0, because the damn thing can't compute HTML5, nor CSS, nor half of jQuery. It's ass. I don't care for the phone's UI, though it seems sleek and more streamlined than all the others.

    So to me, it seems the Blackberry is sorely outclassed. They were early to the game, but failed to keep up with the times. So I reiterate my question: why in hell are people still buying and supporting this dinosaur of a platform, and the near-sighted company behind it ?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by opportunityisnowhere ( 1877452 )
      Users stick with the platform because it works, it still does what it was designed to do extremely well and that's what most enterprise users are looking for. That's users though, RIM is losing developer support left and right. I attended a local dev group meeting and I was the only mobile dev that still supported RIM in the bunch.

  • As someone currently developing an app for the Playbook I can tell you that article is mostly b/s.

    It's hard to defend the RIM setup, because it's a bit absurd, but it's not nearly as bad as this guy is making it out to be.

    Let's take a couple things off the table right away:
    > pricing - well yeah i guess that sucks for but now it's free so don't worry about it
    > AIR SDK installer - well he can't put this on RIM because this is an Adobe package. honestly is installing an SDK hard for any developer?

    As for

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gaspyy ( 514539 )

      I agree with you, and just to make it clearer, I DID compile from commandline and it was very straightforward. As mentioned elsewhere, my app was ported from iOS and Android to Playbook in a couple of hours and within a week it was signed and approved in the AppWorld.

    • ou can get a free license for it from Adobe as well

      Whoah, you can? How? (I went w/ HTML5 b/c I didn't realize this...)

  • Got one word for this guy: WUSS! (Score:3)

    by SmallFurryCreature ( 593017 ) on Saturday February 26, 2011 @11:35AM (#35324048) Journal

    Until you had to pull drivers from install CD's from outofdate versions on a korean site in chinese, to even get a input device working you payed thousands of dollars for the hardware, you ain't got a right to talk.

    Oh come on, who here hasn't experienced FAR FAR worse in the past? Fill in a form three times? Ah, you poor baby. Ever had to fax your passport to some backwater place like the US back when all faxes didn't work with each other? Then find out you been trying their BBS because you got an old number? How about having to download 100mb of data on a stand alone PC with a 28.8 modem with only floppies available and no option to install any software for a fix that needs to go life NOW!

    How about going into a server room to find the case padlocked by some past sys admin and NOBODY noticed in years, got to love quality hardware. BTW, sparks from an angle grinder do not go well with a dusty environment and electronics... OOPS!

    RIM released a BETA that isn't all that convenient and stable... OH NO! Then don't develop for it, don't develop for one of the biggest platform that thanks to PING at least in europe is selling like hotcakes. The kids don't have iPhones, they got RIM and are typing away like mad on those keyboards.

    As for limitting the amount of apps, maybe the just don't want their marketplace absolutely flooded with crap. Really, Android market gives me the warm fuzzy feeling of the days of finding software on tucows, but without that sense of high quality and service...

    Basically, get of my lawn you whipper snapper. In my day we had to crawl uphill both ways throught ten meter snow and blazing heat to get a floppy that would work once if only it had been the right size for a piece of software that refused to run with any other software on our DOS machines, and we LIKED IT! Made us what we are today.

    Bitter.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      don't develop for one of the biggest platform that thanks to PING at least in europe is selling like hotcakes. The kids don't have iPhones, they got RIM and are typing away like mad on those keyboards.

      Really? I'm in Europe and haven't noticed any of this.
      The only RIM products I see people using here are crusty business types on their equally crusty BBs, and that's the image people around here have of RIM, they're something from the past.
      And kids love them?
      All I heard from friends and work co

      • Do you travel by public transport? Read up on PING. Rim's are very distinctive with their qwerty keypad that isn't a slideout. But it might depend on income, PING is cheap and I the kids I see are not the type who can afford an iPhone. This is in Holland by the way.

  • Sometimes the gap between developers and users (even when those users are other developers) can be more of a chasm.

    You're talking about Git right?

  • I've made an app using the Adobe Flex Builder Burrito Blackberry sdk and thought it was great. Better than iOS even. Essentially, his argument boils down to saying "they made me use VMWare for a virtual machine and I'm an idiot who can't differentiate the free VMWare Player that I'm given a download link to on the blackberry site from VMWare Workstation, which I'd need to use a trial version of."

    I will gladly have to click three separate download links (oh no!) in order to get a more exact desktop emulatio

    • Um, you did read the part where he said he was using a Mac and that VMWare Player doesn't exist for OSX?

      I guess you skipped over that part. VMWare Fusion is the only OSX product VMWare currently puts out, and it is not free.

      It doesn't look like he tried to import the image into VirtualBox which IS free. That might have been a viable option, but as I haven't tried I can't say for certain.

  • But it turned out shitty.

    What?

  • In the early 2000s, my firm was trying to work with RIM to develop apps for the Blackberry platform. RIM set the bar very high on accepting partners and our take was that the really didn't want (or felt they needed) external apps developers. This accounts for the paltry set of apps available on the BB in the pre-iPhone days. And those that were available were expensive. They have ambitious plans but I think their corporate arrogance will ultimately lead them to failure. If they haven't arrived already.

  • So... (Score:2)

    by Tridus ( 79566 )

    It's *almost* as bad as trying to develop iOS apps as a Windows user?

  • QNX is not something many people have experience with and choosing that seemed odd, it's bound to make developing for this device a bit harder.

  • I am a developer for the BlackBerry platform; and am also developing a PlayBook app. (There's little reason NOT to - get a free PlayBook out of the deal, AND the app will be compat w/ ipad and android w/ minimal mods, b/c it's HTML5/webkit based). The author does raise many valid points, but I think some clarification is needed on a couple of them. SO here goes...

    I do, however, notice that although it is currently free to register with App World, in the future there will be a $200 USD charge

    First, if you register for free you'll never have to pay $200 to register again. ONce you're an app world vendor, you're an app world vendor -

    • I should also add that those nasty "long commands" that you have to type can be fairly easily tossed into a batch file /script -- you could even make that into a shortcut on your desktop, so you never have to see that icky shell window!

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