OK, so I'm biased-- I write mobile games. But this gives me the unique perspective of having played every game on Verizon. And I think they are all enjoyable and worth their extremely low price.
For less than the price of a single console game I can fill my phone with a dozen games that I can play anywhere and enjoy for 30 seconds or a few minutes at a time and feel done and happy instead of getting sucked into a tweaked out console mega-universe.
Yep yep yep, writing the unit test first has made a major difference in my coding life. It's awesome, I consistently cover ground two or three times faster than before I started doing this, AND there are less bugs.
I really like BREW, it's a fun platform to develop for.
Unfortunately, I think its current karma excludes hobbyist developers. The C++/C/Assembly vibe is wonderful and efficient, but it also gives you too much control over the phone for us to reasonably expect the device manufacturers and the carriers to open this up completely. This isn't J2ME where a JVM sticks your code in a sandbox and isolates it from the rest of the phone. You can screw the phone up, maybe even do bad things.
So there are few hoops to jump through if you want to see your application running in your hand. You need a business. That business needs a $400 Verisign certificate (to sign your applications with). You have to register with Qualcomm. You have to mail your phone to them to get reflashed. You need a $1500 compiler.
This is very reasonable process for a business that plans to write software for phones. But not hobbyists. Maybe it's better to think of BREW as a very open and relatively cheap game console platform, rather than a completely free and uncontrolled platform like PalmOS.
I talked to the Qualcomm folks about this at the BREW developers conference in June. They said they have GCC working and would post the details to their developer site. I haven't seen this yet, so I guess they ran into trouble or this is a low priority.
Some folks on the BREW developer discussion board have tried to figure out for themselves how to get GCC to work. According to them, GCC will not work because it does not compile position independent code that uses the ARM procedure call standard (ie: it doesn't implement the -mapcs-reentrant command line option).
Harvey Mudd College had a student project last year to get GCC working for BREW. Unfortunately they never posted their results to the web.
I second picking a dry spot. I think that's the most important thing.
I sailed for a while, from San Diego and on through the South Pacific, up through Australia and Indonesia and on to Singapore. Even with daily use while at sea, the laptop held up surprisingly well. I was reasonably careful to wipe off my hands before touching it, and would try not to drip water on it if I was wet. I almost never took it off of the table (and some place dangerously wet, like the cockpit). But I wasn't much more careful than that. The touchpad wouldn't work if my hands were the least bit wet or salty.
Remember to bring some kind of rubber pad for it to sit on-- without it, mine would slide around on the table and hit the wall with every roll.
I think the most important thing is to do everything you can to ensure a dry navigation table. Your friends should make sure their navigation table (or where-ever their electronic stuff is) will stay dry, rather than spending a disproportionate amount of time and money on a waterproof laptop setup. Radios and other weird sailboat electronics are much harder to find in rural places than laptops, and it's much sadder when they break. Also, unless your insane, a laptop is really just a fun luxury, email and entertainment and maybe navigation. The Sims was a nice escape during a long gale off Borneo, and Photoshop kept the whole crew entertained through the calms in the Coral Sea. A ham radio, the power distribution panel for your lights and GPS and autopilot, those are much more important. Focus on keeping those things dry and happy.
Pay attention to the simple things that you can do to keep it dry-- locktite shut the port hole and seal the dorade vent above the nav table. Make sure a splash that comes in from the companionway won't hit anything important. Be really anal about it. Move the radios and other things as high up as possible. It makes a huge difference in your lifestyle, so that you just don't have to worry about water as much and can enjoy the bouncier weather and the squalls and gales more, instead of running around trying to reef or take down the spinnaker AND close the hatches and cap the special dorade and close the companionway. You want set it up so life is very easy and foolproof, so you don't have to worry and race home if you are ashore and it starts to rain.
That said, about half the people I knew in the South Pacific had some kind of water and electronics story. On some boats, it's just not possible to have a foolproof, totally dry area. Some friends of mine on a Westsail 32 were knocked down, water poured in through the companionway and onto the leeward chart table. Other friends had water come in through a (previously very dry) dorade vent in a gale. It wrecked their ham radio, so they lost radio contact and other sailors worried about them until they showed up in Suwarrow. My story is much less dramatic-- someone was cleaning the decks at anchor and forgot to close a window, ruining the laptop, battery monitor, and a dozen of the switches on the power panel. I almost lost the second laptop during the same gale off Suwarrow, a large wave came in from astern and down the companionway, but luckily I was standing in front of the laptop and was able to shield it.
Sometimes you are lucky and one of the home remedies works-- that water displacing electronics cleaner stuff worked for me a few times on simple electronics, and my friends on the Westsail put their laptop in the oven, on low heat, to dry it out (it worked).
Oh, and watch out for the inverter/power supply interface. One of my laptops power supplies absolutely hated the inverter, it would get really hot and the batteries never really charged.
On a side not, have fun. Cruising is the most fun thing in the world. Leave now, don't spend another month as a landlubber. Now that I am back, I miss it horribly and day dream a lot of going out again.
During a year and a half sailling trip, about a quarter of my CD's died from the mystery clear spots. The home burned blue ones seem especially susceptible, none of them survived. It may be a coincidence, but no spots formed on CD's with solid color labels, only on ones that are mostly shiney and have a few words on them. Until now I thought it was the metal rusting, from handling the CD's with wet and salty hands.
Does anyone know a way to prevent this? Wipe the CD's down with "antibacterial" soap or Hibiclense or 409 every once in a while? It sucked to lose a lot of good music, especially since we weren't near civilization and there was no chance of replacing it.
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OK, so I'm biased-- I write mobile games. But this gives me the unique perspective of having played every game on Verizon. And I think they are all enjoyable and worth their extremely low price.
For less than the price of a single console game I can fill my phone with a dozen games that I can play anywhere and enjoy for 30 seconds or a few minutes at a time and feel done and happy instead of getting sucked into a tweaked out console mega-universe.
Yep yep yep, writing the unit test first has made a major difference in my coding life. It's awesome, I consistently cover ground two or three times faster than before I started doing this, AND there are less bugs.
I really like BREW, it's a fun platform to develop for.
Unfortunately, I think its current karma excludes hobbyist developers. The C++/C/Assembly vibe is wonderful and efficient, but it also gives you too much control over the phone for us to reasonably expect the device manufacturers and the carriers to open this up completely. This isn't J2ME where a JVM sticks your code in a sandbox and isolates it from the rest of the phone. You can screw the phone up, maybe even do bad things.
So there are few hoops to jump through if you want to see your application running in your hand. You need a business. That business needs a $400 Verisign certificate (to sign your applications with). You have to register with Qualcomm. You have to mail your phone to them to get reflashed. You need a $1500 compiler.
This is very reasonable process for a business that plans to write software for phones. But not hobbyists. Maybe it's better to think of BREW as a very open and relatively cheap game console platform, rather than a completely free and uncontrolled platform like PalmOS.
I talked to the Qualcomm folks about this at the BREW developers conference in June. They said they have GCC working and would post the details to their developer site. I haven't seen this yet, so I guess they ran into trouble or this is a low priority.
Some folks on the BREW developer discussion board have tried to figure out for themselves how to get GCC to work. According to them, GCC will not work because it does not compile position independent code that uses the ARM procedure call standard (ie: it doesn't implement the -mapcs-reentrant command line option).
Harvey Mudd College had a student project last year to get GCC working for BREW. Unfortunately they never posted their results to the web.
I second picking a dry spot. I think that's the most important thing.
I sailed for a while, from San Diego and on through the South Pacific, up through Australia and Indonesia and on to Singapore. Even with daily use while at sea, the laptop held up surprisingly well. I was reasonably careful to wipe off my hands before touching it, and would try not to drip water on it if I was wet. I almost never took it off of the table (and some place dangerously wet, like the cockpit). But I wasn't much more careful than that. The touchpad wouldn't work if my hands were the least bit wet or salty.
Remember to bring some kind of rubber pad for it to sit on-- without it, mine would slide around on the table and hit the wall with every roll.
I think the most important thing is to do everything you can to ensure a dry navigation table. Your friends should make sure their navigation table (or where-ever their electronic stuff is) will stay dry, rather than spending a disproportionate amount of time and money on a waterproof laptop setup. Radios and other weird sailboat electronics are much harder to find in rural places than laptops, and it's much sadder when they break. Also, unless your insane, a laptop is really just a fun luxury, email and entertainment and maybe navigation. The Sims was a nice escape during a long gale off Borneo, and Photoshop kept the whole crew entertained through the calms in the Coral Sea. A ham radio, the power distribution panel for your lights and GPS and autopilot, those are much more important. Focus on keeping those things dry and happy.
Pay attention to the simple things that you can do to keep it dry-- locktite shut the port hole and seal the dorade vent above the nav table. Make sure a splash that comes in from the companionway won't hit anything important. Be really anal about it. Move the radios and other things as high up as possible. It makes a huge difference in your lifestyle, so that you just don't have to worry about water as much and can enjoy the bouncier weather and the squalls and gales more, instead of running around trying to reef or take down the spinnaker AND close the hatches and cap the special dorade and close the companionway. You want set it up so life is very easy and foolproof, so you don't have to worry and race home if you are ashore and it starts to rain.
That said, about half the people I knew in the South Pacific had some kind of water and electronics story. On some boats, it's just not possible to have a foolproof, totally dry area. Some friends of mine on a Westsail 32 were knocked down, water poured in through the companionway and onto the leeward chart table. Other friends had water come in through a (previously very dry) dorade vent in a gale. It wrecked their ham radio, so they lost radio contact and other sailors worried about them until they showed up in Suwarrow. My story is much less dramatic-- someone was cleaning the decks at anchor and forgot to close a window, ruining the laptop, battery monitor, and a dozen of the switches on the power panel. I almost lost the second laptop during the same gale off Suwarrow, a large wave came in from astern and down the companionway, but luckily I was standing in front of the laptop and was able to shield it.
Sometimes you are lucky and one of the home remedies works-- that water displacing electronics cleaner stuff worked for me a few times on simple electronics, and my friends on the Westsail put their laptop in the oven, on low heat, to dry it out (it worked).
Oh, and watch out for the inverter/power supply interface. One of my laptops power supplies absolutely hated the inverter, it would get really hot and the batteries never really charged.
On a side not, have fun. Cruising is the most fun thing in the world. Leave now, don't spend another month as a landlubber. Now that I am back, I miss it horribly and day dream a lot of going out again.
During a year and a half sailling trip, about a quarter of my CD's died from the mystery clear spots. The home burned blue ones seem especially susceptible, none of them survived. It may be a coincidence, but no spots formed on CD's with solid color labels, only on ones that are mostly shiney and have a few words on them. Until now I thought it was the metal rusting, from handling the CD's with wet and salty hands. Does anyone know a way to prevent this? Wipe the CD's down with "antibacterial" soap or Hibiclense or 409 every once in a while? It sucked to lose a lot of good music, especially since we weren't near civilization and there was no chance of replacing it.