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.
Whining, nothing more (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Can we let RIM die, already ? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 ?