RIM Does Not Want PlayBook Devs, Complains One Potential Developer 165
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.
Cry me a river.. (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Update (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
I disagree about the $200 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I disagree about the $200 (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple don't even need you to fax anything nowadays. Everything can be filled in on iTunes Connect. RIM's process is ridiculous by comparison.
Requiring VMWare? Installing an ISO from an installer, THEN requiring you to install that in the VM? What the hell? Android's SDK, which is about one download more complicated than Apple's (in other words, not very complicated) gets you a simulator/emulator right there in the IDE. Why couldn't RIM look at a working setup like that for inspiration?