This is a great comics I came across, very concise and true!
I especially liked the dinosaur. BlackBerry are dinosaur outdated both in the features and especially from the development perspective. I covered this before in my [intlink id="75" type="post"]Android vs. BlackBerry development post[/intlink].
Today, at the annual PDC10 conference, Microsoft is showing love for its developers and promoting its coming Windows Phone 7 by giving all the attendees a free Windows Phone 7. This follows in the steps of similar giveaways by Google at Google/IO 2009 and Goole/IO 2010, Motorola and Adobe giveaway at Adobe Max 2010. With many companies following Google's example, Google so far is by far the leading company on these giveaways.
Microsoft is expected to spend more than 400 millions on the promotion of its Windows Phone 7 . Here's hoping that registered and published developers will get a free phone or at least discounted phones since as of now, it is quite hard to get your hands on a a phone and this is obviously crucial to testing the apps in real live scenarios, on real hardware.
I needed recently to basically remove my app installation from the Windows Phone 7 emulator. I could not find how you can remove the app from the emulator, but I found a way to reset and force the Windows Phone 7 emulator to cold boot.
You can clear the windows phone emulator state, by deleting the saved state file in:
%ProgramData%\Microsoft\XDE\*.dess
You can just hit the windows key on your keyboard and paste this "%ProgramData%\Microsoft\XDE\" and you will be taken to the right location.
Delete the *.dess files. This will force the emulator to reset and run the cold boot sequence.
Too bad, it's not possible to do simulator reset right from the development tools. Here's hoping that Windows Phone Tools development team will improve that situation in the future releases.
Please share your thought in comments.
So, as you probably already know, the coming BlackBerry table will be powered by the QNX pronounced almost like Unix - "ku-nee-ks". So what is QNX?
Below are some notes from the session delivered for developers right after the tablet was introduced during the keynote speech at the DevCon2010.
Real time here basically means preemptive partitioning, which in turn means patented scheduling mechanism for dynamic resource allocation. Here we are talking about CPU as the main resource.
Self Healing - since the system is based on POSIX - message passing, only the core kernel (0.1 million lines of code in total, compared to 70+ million lines in Windows and 9+ million lines in Linux kernels) and the process manager are at the core, all the other processes, can be hot restarted. The key issue here to take home is that QNX is highly modular system unlike the much more monolithic Windows and Linux systems. The monolithic kernel only consists of the microkernel and the process manager - a small partition of all OS code which can be highly optimized and is easier to monitor for bugs. All the rest of the OS systems are "hot pluggable" modules which run in their own processes and can be restarted without taking down the whole system. This is the main point of QNX being highly resilient system and the term used by Dan Dodge the co-founder and the CEO of QNX systems - self healing.
QNX will support Adobe mobile Air and Flash for start and is fully capable of running the Java JVM which should enable the table to run any Java applications written with native BlackBerry SDK for OS 6.0 (and probably anything above level 6.0 SDK). There is also an option of a native C/C++ development for QNX. Momentics - the native developer environment - an Eclipse plugin. QNX is apparently company #3 to join the Eclipse project early on - at the Eclipse 1.0 stage and the main contributor to the C/C++ CDT project. The Momentics environment has a rich set of tooling for coding, debugging and profiling the natively written applications for the QNX.
If you are interested in the latest updates, you should head to the following resources:
In a recent blog post, Google announced that it is significantly expanding payment support both for developers and the users.
Developers in 29 countries will be able to sell their apps and users from 32 countries will be able to buy paid apps. The most recently added countries in which the Android users will be able to buy apps are: Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Israel, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Sweden, and Taiwan.
Addition to support of paid application distribution is expanded to the developers in the following countries: Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland and Taiwan.
Android is closing the paid application gap with the iPhone quite fast, while BlackBerry still lags behind.
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:
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...