Slashdot Mirror
RIM Does Not Want PlayBook Devs, Complains One Potential Developer
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.
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?
"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)
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.
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)
Mike Mangino
mmangino@acm.org
How old are you ?
Does your Mum know that you're using her computer ?
$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.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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.
Their pricing scheme is not ignorant, but certainly arrogant. On one hand, RIM knows that popularity is a chicken and egg problem. If they don't have apps, they won't have users, and if there are no users, there will be no apps. They want some apps to show up at the beginning to seed users, but later on they want more apps to be paid. I don't know if the pricing scheme will achieve what they want. According to Distimo last year, Blackberry had a paid/free app ratio on par with Apple iOS, but has the most expensive average paid app price.
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?
I once had a signature.
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.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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.
I did BlackBerry development for years, and RIM was always difficult to deal with. Simple stuff like having to fill out the same web form every time I wanted to download something, even though I was logged in. Android and iOS have better tools, better support, better experience for the developer.
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 ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
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 the rest of his rant, if he just used Flash Builder instead of compiling from the command line he would have quite easily been able to deploy an app to the simulator without any problems. You can get a free license for it from Adobe as well. It's a reasonably ok workflow, and if you've used eclipse before you will have a good grasp of what to do.
Honestly my biggest complaint is how incomplete the simulator seems to be at this point, there is still loads of the API that does not work in the simulator, and last update I got they completely broke sound :(
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.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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.
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 functionality itself.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.