BlackBerry Developer conference is starting tomorrow. I have arrived to San Francisco at noon today and just had a relaxing day browsing the sity, visiting the beautiful Chinatown and the Coit Tower from where you can see pretty much the whole city. It's my second time in San Francisco, first time being here about 1.5 years ago for the Google I/O 2009 (so sorry had to miss it this year...). San Francisco is an interesting city and I like it, but it is a little dirty for my snobby Bostonian taste.

Anyhow, this is not about the city. BBDevCon 2010 is tomorrow and I am expecting it to be a turnkey for me, it was a long time of [intlink id="75" type="post"]love and hate relation[/intlink] between me and BlackBerry. The platform is not evolving (yeah yeah, BB OS 6 - whatever... this is so 3 years ago) and in the super fast paced space as mobile, standing still is actually equals to moving back as everyone is innovating with the speed of light.

I will be looking for cues as to whether RIM will be able to at least [intlink id="285" type="post"]maintain its current user base[/intlink] and improve his ways in treating smaller indie developers.

There have been rummors about BB Tablet - BlackPad, to be announced during the BB DevCon 2010. I am personally very skeptical about it, but we will see. Also - it is almost clear to everyone that RIM will announce it's advertising API availability to the public - not great news though. They have the worst performing advertising so far, and this is one of the major points for me personally, if there is no promising (I am not even wishing for bright) future on the horizon, BlackBerry will be the last platform to receive any attention on my list.

Apparently today Facebook was down for 2 hours and for some even more... I did not pick up long time on this since I do not use Facebook, but just accidentally I wanted something and I tried to load it and boom I got:

Not sure whether this is a localized event I went to twitter to see if others had this problem and man I was in for some good laughs. Here's the collection of funniest tweets during the time that the Facebook was down:

Ant check out the Twitter trends. How "DNS Failure" sounds to you as a trend - huh?

UPDATE: Apparently it wasn't just my "original" idea to collect funny tweets, many other websites did so as well, what is interesting that there are about 20-30 different tweets overall which just keep repeating from site to site. Are we short of funny twitter-ers? People obviously do care. Maybe they are just afraid Facebook coming after them in revenge? (just kidding of course, or am I?). Let me know what you think in comments.

For the last several month I've been thinking about the future of developing for BlackBerry and whether it even makes sense to bet on the BlackBerry OS. The learning curve for BlackBerry development is very steep, which makes it a huge hurdle for the newcomers to the platform, but works for the advantage of the companies and developers who already took the plunge and were swimming the quirky waters of BlackBerry OS for some time.

So basically what I am saying is that for existing BlackBerry developers is it a very sweet spot to be in if BlackBerry OS is to there to stay. With less than 10 thousand apps on the app world compared to more than 150 thousand on Android and more than 250 thousand on iPhone, there is a good chance your app will get noticed and get traction; especially if your app is somewhat polished since many of the apps on BlackBerry at the moment look absolutely horrible.  But the if I mentioned earlier about BlackBerry staying in the game, at least long enough for developers to rip any benefits in indeed one big if.

Is RIM in trouble? Yes, I think it certainly is.

My contemplations began a long ago and I keep finding more and more reinforcements to this as time goes by, or maybe just more and more people are starting to realize it now as the revenues of RIM are plummeting and the market share is shrinking instead of growing with the overall growth of the smartphone market share. It surely does not look good anyway you look at it.

The upcoming BlackBerry developer conference seem to be struggling to find audience as well, as I have been getting tons of emails with more and more steep discounted registration fees, to the extent when it seems they will soon start actually paying people to attend.

A recent find to the collection was this article on business insider about how noone gives a damn about BlackBerry OS:

• No one who buys BlackBerry products actually cares about the BlackBerry OS.

• RIM's greatest assets are its email service (on BlackBerry phones and back-end server setup), BlackBerry Messenger, and the BlackBerry brand. These could all be moved over to Android, and none of them relies on the BlackBerry OS.

• RIM's mobile app platform is garbage compared to Apple's or even Google's. An Android BlackBerry would be able to take advantage of the fast-growing Android app platform, and RIM wouldn't have to waste any money nurturing it.

• RIM still has good relationships with most carriers. So an Android-based BlackBerry could receive top billing from carriers, versus rival Android devices from Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and others.

• If RIM joined the Android camp, it would be a HUGE boost for Android, and a big problem for Apple, which would lose even more platform share to Android. Developers might seriously have to start thinking about Android first, and Apple's iOS second. (There are still some major problems with Android's app market, but those can be worked out.)

• For illustration, if RIM were an Android vendor in Q2, Android would have had 35% of the world's smartphone market, per IDC, versus Apple's 14%. Instead, RIM had 18% -- down from last year -- and Android had 17% -- up huge from last year.

• Doesn't a BlackBerry Droid sound sexy to you?

The article may come as a joke to some, but if you think about it and you know [intlink id="75" type="post"]realities of development on different platforms[/intlink], this actually starts to make a lot of sense.

I've come across this somewhere. There was no credit, so I can not give the credit here, if you know the origin, please let me know and I will make sure to give proper credit.

And the BlackBerry would go - yeah you can do anything if you have strong enough head that it won't crack from all the banging out of frustration...

It is simple to load a BlackBerry application packaged as cod file to your device using JavaLoader.exe. With JavaLoader, you do not have to install the desktop manager if you just want to have an ability to quickly load applications to your blackberry

1. Connect your BlackBerry to your computer through USB
2. Open command prompt and navigate to the location of JavaLoader.exe
3. Run JavaLoader.exe -u=USB load path_to_your_cod_file command and you should be all set

It is easier if you have the JavaLoader and the COD files in the same dir because then the command is simply

JavaLoader.exe -u=USB load path_to_your_cod_file

UPDATE: The JavaLoader command will not work if you don't have the BlackBerry desktop manager installed. You will get an error that the port can not be open.

It seems that GPU computing is becoming more and more ubiquitous. Tools are becoming better and better, the applications are becoming wider and wider and the hardware is becoming faster and faster too.

CPU are steadily gaining in productivity. It's a steadily rising curve. Is it good news though? Depends how you look at it. It's good that the speeds and efficiency are improving, but apparently CPUs  are improving much slower than GPUs. GPUs computational power for suitable problems (like number crunching) was apriory much higher to start with, but what's really important is that GPUs are moving much faster i.e. the curve of the speedup is much sharper than that of CPUs.

For about $500 you can get the Nvidia GTX 480 right now with 400+ cores and super fast memory. GPUs in general also require much less space and power and thus are in general much more efficient for heavy number crunching computations than CPUs. Of course GPUs are quite limited in their capabilities and are really suitable for specific tasks, but there are more and more areas where people are starting to employ the power of highly parallel GPU computing with lightweight threads.

There is another caveat with GPU - it's the slow bus connection. The bus is too slow for the speeds of GPU and there is nothing you can do about it at the moment. One thing that can be done since GPU has so much computing power in parallel, is to compress the data that is passed between the GPU and the rest of the system. 1 to 10 ratio is the standard compression ratio of text, so you can increase the throughput of the bus by a factor of 10 using compression. Of course there is still some overhead and you should make an experiment and see whether this is beneficial in your setup.

Overall though, it seems pretty exciting area at the moment and the true technoratis should definitely pay attention to that area.

It's been long advocated by software developer luminaries that you have to "eat your own dog food" which means you have to use the software you are producing as extensively as possible to realize the shortcomings and things that are broken. This is the "I am not a fish" category as explained by Seth in the series of the following 3 videos. Extremely valuable series for anyone dealing with user experience.

If you have "can't locate tools.jar" error when trying to run "ant", you've come to the right place. The fix is apparently very easy, you have to properly set up the "JAVA_HOME" environment variable to Java JDK. The tools.jar is found in the bin folder of the JDK but you only need to point the JAVA_HOME to your JAVA SDK installation and you should be all set!

Easy, right? Go get them!

If you've been experiencing horrendous performance of Eclipse on OS X, or maybe you even did not know that Eclipse actually can run very fast, you'd be surprised to learn that apparently it is very easy to make Eclipse run 4-5 times faster  on OS X with proper settings to your eclipse.ini file.

First I will give you a bit of  background. If you want the gist of it or how to make it fly - just go the end of the post.  So a few days ago, PSU fried on my main desktop development machine. It is a newer Quad Core i5 2.6 machine with 4GB 1066Mhz memory and a standard 7200 RPM drive. Since the machine is dead and I am waiting for a replacement power supply, I had to move to my new and shiny MacBook Pro, which I have recently purchased and which is from the latest batch of the updated MacBooks and is quite powerful. It is also i5 (only dual core though) with the same 4GB of 1066Mhz memory and 5400 HD.

So, yeah, I would say that the systems are pretty close right. Nevertheless, working with Eclipse on OS X felt horrendously slow! I had already noticed this nuance in the past and I thought that the Eclipse is just not meant to fly on Mac-s (oh well...), especially when there are so many different distributions for OS X, it signals that the project is in a shifting phase basically (it is shifting from Carbon to Cocoa) and that you should expect all kinds of problems.

I bet many people not having experience with Eclipse on other platforms would think this is normal. It's Java, so it is supposed to be slow and they just go and hate it and sing how X-Code is great. The thing is, they probably never experienced the full potential of Eclipse - a pity. Hopefully this post can change your mind and help you experience the wonderful world of Eclipse (ok, I am being a little dramatic here). Ok, let's dive into that.

Since I am pretty heavy user of Eclipse [intlink id="75" type="post"]developing both for Android and BlackBerry[/intlink] the slowness of Eclipse quickly grew on me and I started looking for ways to try and do something about it.

In the past while experiencing slowness with Eclipse on Windows, I played with the memory allocation within it to increase the memory cap and this usually helped a bit. Being desperate, I decided to try that and off I went to try that. But, that was not so easy. I wandered a bit around the eclipse folder looking for the location of the eclipse.ini but it was nowhere to be found. So I tried searching for it - nop, no luck there as well.

Apparently eclipse.ini is packaged inside the eclipse app so what you need to do is to get inside the eclipse.app package

after that edit eclipse.ini which you will find in Contents->MacOS folder and increase the memory limits for the following directives:

-Xms***m
-Xmx***m

replace the *** with whatever memory you think should work for you as a rule of the thumb, just try to double it at first.

While this is good, this is NOT what will actually make your Eclipse fly. The most important part here is the:

-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5

now, you have to switch that to 1.6 and make it

-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.6

Now THAT will make your Eclipse really shine! Just make sure you actually HAVE the JDK 1.6 installed. You can validate this by running "java -version" in the terminal. If you got 10.6 - Snow Leopard though, you are most likely covered.

If you already had that in the eclipse.ini file - well, unfortunately this already has been optimized for you and the only thing you can try from there that we know of is to play with the memmory limits.

If you know any other tips and tricks, please let me know in the comments!

I've got the Motorola Droid from Google through their device seeding program a while ago. Which is nice although Nexus One would be much better since then I would have been actually using as my phone. The Droid has to be tied to Verizon and I am a T-Mobile lad all the way.

Anyways, I've tried a few times to get adb debugging talk to my Droid on my Win7 64 bit and I could not get it to work for a long long time. I tried to search around for the solution, but none of the drivers that I've found worked until today I started the search again and found the Win7 64 bit Droid drivers from Motorola here which worked perfectly fine!

Don't forget to go to "Settings->Applications->Development" and enable "USB Debugging"