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You win, RIM (An open letter to RIM's developer relations)

blog.jamiemurai.com

31–40 of 114 posts

Re: You win, RIM (An open letter to RIM's developer relations)

#31
post #14

The post is factually inaccurate. - $200 per registration fee is waived for now. In fact its been waived for over a year now. - 10 app limit is not enforced either.

The post doesn't claim that the fee isn't waived, or that the limit is enforced, it just claims that there is a fee, and there is a limit. Whether they are enforced in the future is of course still possible.

Re: You win, RIM (An open letter to RIM's developer relations)

#32
post #17
post #9

The complaints are: $200 price to develop with 10 app limit. Multiple registration forms. Requiring multiple downloads. Requiring to purchase vmware fusion. Installer that just copies an iso. Having to password protect the simulator. Bad documentation on how to load an app on the simulator. The comparative ease with which you can do these things with android and ios.

Isn't the requirement to get VMware Fusion Mac-specific? Might as well complain about not being able to write iOS applications on Windows.

Until RIM makes its own desktop operating system I don't think it's comparable at all. And, once again, iOS is the market leader. They get to be different. RIM doesn't.

Re: You win, RIM (An open letter to RIM's developer relations)

#33
post #26

"Knowing what a pleasure it is to use Apple and Google’s tools," I haven't used the iOS SDK, but the Android SDK is far from "a pleasure to use". The 3.0 emulator is so unusably slow that it makes it practically impossible for me to adapt my app to the new tablet UI without going insane in the process.

Well, apart from the Honeycomb issues, it is a pleasure to use. If you don't have your phone plugged in and hit Run or Debug, it installs it to the emulator and runs it. If you do have your phone plugged in, it goes there. It's one button for either phone or emulator.

As a side note, I assume it will be this easy with 3.0 as well, so the slow emulator may not be a problem if you have a tablet plugged in. Even with the current emulator, I prefer to just use my phone; it's faster and gives me a better idea of how it really looks and runs.

Re: You win, RIM (An open letter to RIM's developer relations)

#34
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the requirement to get VMware Fusion Mac-specific? Might as well complain about not being able to write iOS applications on Windows.

Judging by the fact that the dev kit shipped with an ISO for running the simulator, I suspect you would need some kind of VM package in Windows as well. However Windows has the free VMWare Player.

The choice of VMWare over VirtualBox is worth complaining about then.

Re: You win, RIM (An open letter to RIM's developer relations)

#35
post #22

Hmm, I expected something ... well ... something really bad. But it looks like the guy has just a very thin skin. I'm an iPhone developer who signed up with the program as soon as it became available and I can tell you: Becoming an iPhone developer was a major PITA. It started with the registration (Apple let you wait for weeks after you purchased the membership), then with taxes formalities (as a non us-citizen I ha…

I know it's unfair, but as an overseas developer you should probably expect a bit more pain when working with such a US-centric company (correct or not).

Re: You win, RIM (An open letter to RIM's developer relations)

#36
post #22

Hmm, I expected something ... well ... something really bad. But it looks like the guy has just a very thin skin. I'm an iPhone developer who signed up with the program as soon as it became available and I can tell you: Becoming an iPhone developer was a major PITA. It started with the registration (Apple let you wait for weeks after you purchased the membership), then with taxes formalities (as a non us-citizen I ha…

I've also been an iPhone Dev right from the start and I didn't find it that difficult. Sure, the provisioning stuff took some hours, and uploading an app to an actual device was as simply as clicking 'build & run'. Publishing an app was a tad more difficult, what with the distribution profile and whatnot, but the developer in question didn't even get that far with RIM.

Re: You win, RIM (An open letter to RIM's developer relations)

#37

One thing I am surprised to not see in this list is that, as an individual, you are required to have your form faxed back after been signed by a notary. AFAIK, this is not practice of Google or Apple either.

If you're a business, you do have to fax in your business documents before your app will go live in the App Store (and it takes a couple of weeks to process), but it's most likely going to take you at least a couple of weeks to develop your app and get it approved so it's not so bad. And you don't need to get it notarized.

Re: You win, RIM (An open letter to RIM's developer relations)

#38
The fundamental problem is that their devices works the same way as their developer model. It's unintuitive, clunky and overpriced. The only thing RIM has left is BBM. It's not worth developing for.

I got the legal bullshit from Apple too. Seriously, it had to be notarized, I had to send Apple docs that had some kind of embossed type seal (I'm surprised they didn't require it in wax) like I was delivering a proclaimation from the King in the 12th century.

Re: You win, RIM (An open letter to RIM's developer relations)

#39
post #11
post #9

The complaints are: $200 price to develop with 10 app limit. Multiple registration forms. Requiring multiple downloads. Requiring to purchase vmware fusion. Installer that just copies an iso. Having to password protect the simulator. Bad documentation on how to load an app on the simulator. The comparative ease with which you can do these things with android and ios.

Now I feel like an idiot for spending an hour and half writing it, lol.

You did well to pull out early if you found this part of the process painful, unfortunately end to end it feels like death by a thousand paper cuts. Theres nothing glaring wrong through out but lots of annoyances which really add up, when compared to iOS or Android development

We recently developed this so speaking from some experience http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/content/28561

The bb version took far far longer than the equivalent iOS, simply because of other nonsense such as the pain in the signing process (isthesigningserverdown.com the fact it exists tells you all you need to know). Random exceptions being thrown that have no useful meaning and of course the joy of RAPC throwing errors such as "CreateProcess error=87, Parameter is incorrect" which we eventually found was due to the classpath being too long for RAPC to handle

However once complete the application it is something we are very proud of!

Re: You win, RIM (An open letter to RIM's developer relations)

#40
post #22

Hmm, I expected something ... well ... something really bad. But it looks like the guy has just a very thin skin. I'm an iPhone developer who signed up with the program as soon as it became available and I can tell you: Becoming an iPhone developer was a major PITA. It started with the registration (Apple let you wait for weeks after you purchased the membership), then with taxes formalities (as a non us-citizen I ha…

C'mon. Did it really take you _days_ to get the provisioning profile stuff working?

Yeah, I mean the process is a little complicated, but it works perfectly if you just follow the instructions step by step (and you don't need to do any of that to run your app in the simulator).

I think it took me about an hour the first time, and it takes maybe 10 minutes to generate the certificates and profile after you do it a few times.

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