BlackBerry Upcoming WebKit Browser

17 Mar 2010

RIM has unveiled the new upcoming BlackBerry browser based on the new WebKit engine.

At the New England BlackBerry meetup, Mike Kirkup mentioned that they are doing some neat tricks with precompiling JavaScript through MDS which makes the JavaScript blazing fast. You can see it for yourself in the embedded video.

The new WebKit browser will be available in the next OS release but the upgrade will be limited on per device manner since WebKit browser is quite resource demanding.

Anyways, it's great news and good job RIM!

Firefox 3.6 Fix the Tab Order to Open at the End of the Tabs

13 Mar 2010

Just upgraded to Firefox 3.6 and I am a little annoyed by the new "feature" of tabs opening next to the tab where you open the new tab from. While this might be convenient to some people, I got used to the "old" way of handling tabs and find myself constantly wondering where this new tab is. I might give it a few more days to see whether I get used to it but in case you are annoyed by that too and want to "fix" this here is how you can disable the new “Insert Related Tab After Current” tweak in Firefox 3.6.

Type about:config in the address bar. Then, if needed click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.
In the filter box – type in: tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent
Right-click that about:config entry, and choose “Toggle”

This will convert Firefox back to opening a new tab from a web page on the far right of the tab bar, rather than right next to the tab you opened it from.

If you decide that you actually like it and want to switch back, follow these same steps and toggle the “false” back to “true”.

Successful People SHIP

10 Mar 2010

I've seen this video by Seth Godin, who is without any doubt a great thinker and visioner. This presentation by Seth, besides being very informational and interesting is quite extraordinary as well. I can not remember when I've seen a better presentation lately. Great usage of visuals and associations!

The presentation made me think about people that are successful and people who are not. And this is absolutely true - successful people ship. I've known this for all this time, but this simple 3 words "slogan" so to say never formulated in my head. Intuitively I always felt this but after this presentation it just formed.

Borrowing analogy from Math, shipping is a required condition but not satisfactory, meaning that just shipping you will not necessarily make successful, but if you DO NOT ship you will most definitely NOT be successful.

Again, very inspiring presentation that may be an eye opener for some. Enjoy!

What Makes Blackberry App a Super App - Summary of Webcast

25 Feb 2010

What makes a Blackberry appliactoin to be a super app? This is the question that Mike Kirkup - head of developer relations at RIM tried to answer today in a free webcast. There has been an obsession recently with super phones and super apps as it seems. And why phones and/or apps have to be necessarily super?

So there seem to be two definitions of super apps according to Mike Kirkup.

If you take the blackberry phone from the user and he misses this app - then it is a super app since it provides an inherent value for the end user.

Another "definition" is more technical - so what are the main components that make a BlackBerry app a super app:

Always on experience
Seamless integration with 3d party apps
Notification driven

Not sure about you, but I see here a small misconception. On one side Mike says that if the application is extremely useful up to the point where if taken away from the user he will surely miss it but on the other hand there are specific points which actually make an app to be a super app. So what if the app is very useful to many people to the extent that they will surely miss it if taken away such as for example DailyHoroscope application for BlackBerry. Because many users of DailyHoroscope application are going crazy and flood us with mails in case we experience even minimal downtime. So the application is extremely useful to its users and certainly has value for them but according to the bullet points, DailyHoroscope is not a super app.

The source of confusion I think is that Mike meant if you take away BlackBerry device from the user, then other devices that may have similar apps will not be able to fill the gap. That's what makes any BlackBerry app a super app I would guess. The push mechanism and the multitasking and deep integration is something that does not exist on iPhone and/or iPod Touch, but similar things exist on Android and WebOS and Maemo are also actively developed and progressing towards richer and richer platform.

So what makes specifically BlackBerry platform a super app enabler platform accodring to RIM? The first and the point which was put most of the emphasis was the “multi-threaded OS with background apps”. Other enablers mentioned were:

Contextual integration with apps
Rich event based notification model that integrates deeply in the system
Efficient push services
Integrated LBS and Mapping

Mike argued that the possibility of deep native integration allows easier “native” application integration in a cohesive manner into the system. The main point seems to be that since the applications do not have to invent everything from scratch by using built in components/services etc, the applications can deliver unified user experience which lowers the learning curve for the applications and eliminates most of the confusion in mastering a new app.

Starting from OS 5.0 RIM introduced (or better say exposed to 3d party developers) much richer built in components such as autocomplete, file picker, map field, browserfield, media player components (JSR 135 or MMAPI)

The power of push. Mike mentioned that RIM invented the push and were running it in production for more than 10 years and they know exactly what they are doing. (hear that Apple? haha... ). The push limitation for BIS is 8KB while for BES it is much higher and is specified by BES administrator but is hard limited (by I think 1MB in the older BES versions with much higher limit value in BES 5.0 - I think around 10Mb)

Overall it was an interesting webcast and Mike did a great job talking about all the things that are great about BlackBerry platform. I personally was a little disappointed since I expected much more technical session.

Q/A Session:

Q&A session was quite interesting. Mike zipped through more than 200 questions in less than 40 minutes with great and to the point answers. Thank you Mike! I documented the most interesting Q&As to my taste and the ones that are most likely to be interesting to other developers.

When advertising will be available?
For BB alliance the beta will be opening very soon. For the rest of the publishers - the time line promised by Mike was approximately 2 month

Time for application approval?
Depends on the type of the application submitted. In general it is about 10 days but they are supposedly getting at about 48 hours time

Is the PUSH service free for all the developers?
It is free for almost all the alliance partners but they are working on releasing it to all the developers

All those super apps running in the background will make the devices slow - what about more resources for the devices?
Mike said that they will continue to innovate in the device area but the overall answer was extremely vague

More tutorials and code?
There is a lot of tutorials and code currently available online but it is hard to find it. Current knowledge base will be restructured and reorganized and mostly replaced by developer resources which is some new knowledge base.

Book for developers from RIM?
Working on that with authors and the community RIM is unlikely to release the book of its own.

Developers competition for super apps? Is it something that is coming?
RIM is planning to run super app development challenge in 4 regions very soon and pick up the best super apps and showcase them in BBDevCon in the end of September

When 5.0 JDE will be out of Beta?
5.0 JDE will be out of beta soon and will finally NOT require simulator restart to push the new build to the simulator (YEY!!! Great news, hopefully Eclipse will mirror that as well)

UI tools for GUI building
Working on UI tool which will be drag and drop tool that will generate Java code for you (That would be a blessing, although knowing how RIM executes development tools projects, the tool might very likely be quite unusable for anything more serious than placing a label field with "Hello World")

Paid applications worldwide timeline?
Worldwide is particularly difficult since RIM is supporting more than 150 countries. Support will be rolled out increasingly

Is JDE going to be phased out in favor of Eclipe?
Not right now. When RIM will feel that Eclipse has matured enough it will happen, but in general Eclipse is destined to replace the JDE

Are other development platforms going to be supported except Windows?
Mac is in the pipeline and support is likely to appear until the end of the year

App World is not as advertised as Apple's App Store
Rim will start being much more aggressive about promoting App World in the future but this is highly dependent on RIMS relations with carriers since RIM is tightly integrated with carriers and they rub each other's shoulder. (well, of course...)

Payments through carriers as opposed to payment through PayPal
App World 2.0 will have options to pay with either credit card, PayPal or through the carrier

Is Verizon's store going to compete with App World?
Not really as RIM is not competing with any of the 3d party stores like Handango, GetJar etc...

Are subscription based payments going to be supported in App World 2.0?
It is not clear exactly what it is going to be, but some sort of subscription payment will be available

What is the best cross framework to use for developing for BB? PhoneGap
PhoneGap is great but the apps built with those cross platform frameworks will not be super apps! This is not possible since those frameworks are targeting the lowest common denominator.

Suggested books?
There are 2 good books John Wargo which is more like a reference manual. Anthony Rizk is more smooth read book and is less like reference.

[amazon-product]0321647424[/amazon-product]

[amazon-product]1430230150[/amazon-product]

[amazon-product]1430272252[/amazon-product]

What is the OS version to use as the lowest common denominator for development of super apps?
4.6

Can I create a super app with SDK prior to 4.6
Yes you certainly can - many of the capabilities are available in the prior versions of the platforms

What is the process of migrating a simple app into a super app?
Think about how your simple app can take advantage of all the mentioned components that comprise a super app. Start thinking about your application and you will most likely realize that there are many ways to improve

Monitoring f uninstall of your own app - will it possible?
This is something that should be available in the next version of the next version.

Are free apps going to be able to use payments for donations?
Certainly - using in app payments is possible for that

Is advertising network be available worldwide?
Yes at the launch the advertising service will be available worldwide and then local advertising agencies will be added locally

What are you doing for developer training especially in Asia and Africa?
RIM will run BlackBerry developer days around the world. Follow our development blog for more details and updates.

Knowledge base is broken, I can not find any information there
The KB will be phased out and replaced with BB resource center

When normal developers will be able to use BIS?
This is something that RIM will be doing soon

Samples of a super apps?
Poynt app that was highlighted through MWC definitely have several characteristics of a super app

Are there any security risks with all this deep integration of the apps into the system
There is a

Where do I start with blackberry super apps development and information
http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/started/super_apps.jsp

Any battery drain issues with the application always on interfacing with different system components?
RIM will release a simulator that will be able to simulate battery drain of the applications

Word Wrapped Preformatted Text in DokuWiki

12 Feb 2010

TL;DR

I had a code plugin for DokuWiki but it is not supported and thus available anymore

I am using DokuWiki quite extensively lately to keep documentation of various things. Using wiki is quite useful in general and some people opt for using local wiki such as WikiPad but for my needs, I opted for online wiki since I often times need to access it from various places. Maybe in the future I will post why I chose DokuWiki and some of my (objective) thoughts about comparison to other wikis and some of my likes and hates about DokuWiki (although there are much more “likes” than “hates” :) ). This post would be short and not about it

Several times I just wanted to put a plain (pre formatted) text into the wiki for whatever reasons but I ran into a problem that DokuWiki isn’t really ready to support this. One option is to use <code></code> but then the lines are not word wrapped and for text it looks just weird. So at those various occasions I tried to search for a solution with little success until I just took xterm plugin and modified it slightly (mostly the style CSS file) which took me about 5 minutes to do (and took me about 30 minutes to write this post, and the corresponding DokuWiki Plugin page and test the browsers) and now we have a wpre plugin for DokuWiki for word wrapped preformatted text which seem to work on all recent major browsers. You can dowload it from NOT AVAILABLE ANYMORE (the page on DokuWiki references this file)

Supported browsers:

(I just tested whatever I had installed on my machine and all are pretty recent. I suspect many much older versions should be supported as well)

FireFox 3.5.7
Safari 4.0.4 for Windows
Opera 10.10
Internet Explorer 8.0
Chrome 4.0

Google Buzz a Step Forward to Google Wave?

10 Feb 2010

Today many people that will open their gmail will be faced with the dialog about Google buzz. This is a new service from Google that in a sense makes your gmail inbox into twitter like account. But it is more than twitter like account. It includes conversations and embeddings from other sites like Picasa, Flickr, Youtube etc...

The interesting question marks that raised in my head are:

Is Google trying to compete with huge success of Twitter? (They are not trying to compete per se, they want the realtime information that's available on Twitter and is not (yet???) available to Google.
Is this a step forward to Google Wave?

Maybe it's actually both 1 and 2 and something else that we can not yet see in the big picture :)

Google Buzz is also available on Mobile:

And here's the announcement of Google Buzz on the official Google blog

Some Web Server Administration Tips on CentOS and cPanel (But Not Only)

26 Jan 2010

This is more of a personal notes for myself but I am sure others will find it useful.

Apache:

/usr/local/apache/logs/error_log

All exceptions caught by httpd, along with standard error output form CGI applications are logged here. The first place you should look when httpd crashes, or you incur errors when accessing a website.

/usr/local/apache/logs/suexec_log

Contains auditing information reported by suexec each time a CGI applicaiton is executed. If you receive an internal server error, with no relevant information being reported to the Apache error_log, check here for potential suexec policy violations.

Domain specific access logs are located here:

/usr/local/apache/domlogs/

PHP

To find out which php.ini is used for PHP configuration (to save you frustration of editing a non active php.ini) find it with the following simple command:
php -i | grep php.ini

where -i switch is used to give you PHP information (obviously). To see other useful switches run

php -h

to locate where php is use:

which php

(but you already knew this - right ? :) )

*** Some of these tips are applicable not only to CentOS and cPanel configuration.

Problems Running BlackBerry Simulator (Fledge) on Windows 7 64 Bit

22 Jan 2010

As I already wrote, [intlink id="75" type="post"]BlackBerry development is not a lot of fun[/intlink]. Not only you basically can not develop in Linux and OS X (although there are some workarounds, it makes the process even more painful than it already is). But you will also have problems with 64 bit operating systems. RIM is in a position that they do not officially support 64 bit systems.

The main problem with 64 bit Windows 7 for me was that I can not close the simulator (or actually the "fledge" application that runs the simulators). There are 2 possible solutions to this problem:

Kill the task through task manager
The simulator should close if you are in debug mode and you disconnect the debug session

There is also another inconvenience which is caused by your cautiously guarding Windows system. It will warn you every time that (Oh my!) fledge will change something on your computer. You know - the standard User Control Account message. To avoid that message always popping up, you will have to adjust your setting in User Control Account panel. Hit "Windows" then just type UCA, you will get it. Adjust it to the minimum and you'r good to go.

The Humans Are Dead - Flight of the Conchord

06 Jan 2010

I just could NOT not to post it. I am trying to do a rationality in multi agent systems research nowadays. This speaks to me and these guys rock!

I hope the robots remember those us that helped make them what they are and keep us around to do all those jobs that they don't want to do. Christopher Amato

BlackBerry Development With Eclipse Plugin – Fixing Corrupted *.jdp File

13 Aug 2009

It's not a secret that Eclipse plugin is very buggy and although it has improved a lot over the time, [intlink id="75" type="post"]the blackberry plugin still has a lot of issues and quirks[/intlink]. One of the problems that have been bugging me a lot was that sometimes the *.jdp file gets corrupted. This is the file where BB plugin for Eclipse saves most of the meta data for the project, including the files that are included in the project and consequently need to be compiled. So, many times I had problems with SVN meta data files corrupting this project, or sometimes perfectly legitimate *.java files that get stuck in the *.jdp file, but do not exist anymore. The result of the *.jdp file being corrupted is that your application does no longer get compiled and redeployed when you run it. And the worst part, Eclipse would not explicitly let you know about this. It would silently fail and not re-deploy the app. So unless this is the first time you run the application, or the changes you made are not visually obvious, you would not know about this. But this is completely separate issue. One of the many issues with BB Eclipse plugin already covered. Each time I have been struggling (sometimes for significant amount of times). Couple times I was able to manually delete files from the *.jdp file (although this is not recommended by RIM) and this solved the problem, but mostly I had to recreate the whole project from scratch, which if your project is large and, which is more important has dependencies on libraries, may become painful if you need to do this every few days.

So the easiest way I found so far to solve this problem is:

Delete the *.jdp file (you can just rename it to *.jdp.OLD)
Delete the project from Eclipse (right click the project and choose delete). DO NOT however check the checkbox "delete the contents of the project from disk"
Create a new project and point it to the same place.

Since all the Eclipse project related files remain untouched, you should get your project exactly at the same state it was before it got corrupted, minus the corrupted part. Why - because when you re-create the project Eclipse plugin should re-create the *.jdp file.

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