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

blog.jamiemurai.com

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

#41

Post by zzzmarcus »

kgutteridge wrote: post #39
jammur wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ha. Clicked the link and came to a full page error:

Our apologies:

It looks like you are using an unsupported Operating System. BlackBerry App World was designed to support the following:

Windows

Although you can browse BlackBerry App World with your current browser, some features may not be functional.

To their credit they did let me continue.

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

#43

Post by gcheong »

mortenjorck wrote: post #23
kin wrote: post #15

Yeah, the $200 was a major blocker for me. As a student, I just want to make silly free game apps. $200 for $0 income? Well that's certainly not appealing. On the other side, don't they not take any cut of your income from their app store?

Can anyone verify that, that RIM doesn't take a cut of sales?

From the blackberry app world vendor agreement:

"5.1 Application Revenue Fee

Vendor shall pay to RIM thirty percent (30%) of Application Revenue..."

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

#44

Post by jammur »

jarek wrote: post #17
btipling wrote: 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.

That same thought occurred to me when I was writing it. The conclusion I came to was that if RIM is going to offer an SDK for Mac (or any platform for that matter), they need to do it in an integrated way, just like their competitors. I have no problem with NOT offering an SDK for a specific OS, but if you make the decision to do it, don't do it half assed.

I think it's less important how "good" an SDK is unto itself, and more important how good it is relative to it's competition. In this case you have to compare the Playbook SDK to Apple's and Google's because when developers are making decision about which platform to work with, they're going to be choosing between them.

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

#45

Post by fleitz »

jarek wrote: post #17
btipling wrote: 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.

Why not just say Mac is unsupported? A friend of mine's company spent months developing a BlackBerry app, when he got me to do their iPhone app it took half the time and worked 100s of times better. Why? Because their developers were busy writing code trying to figure out what kind of connection the device had so they could open a TCP/IP connection, seriously the network interfaces aren't abstracted away from the developer.

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

#46

Post by jonknee »

kin wrote: post #15

Yeah, the $200 was a major blocker for me. As a student, I just want to make silly free game apps. $200 for $0 income? Well that's certainly not appealing. On the other side, don't they not take any cut of your income from their app store?

It's currently waived, so don't let it block you...

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

#47

Post by kgutteridge »

zzzmarcus wrote: post #41
kgutteridge wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ha. Clicked the link and came to a full page error: Our apologies: It looks like you are using an unsupported Operating System. BlackBerry App World was designed to support the following: Windows Although you can browse BlackBerry App World with your current browser, some features may not be functional. To their credit they did let me continue.

This ones even more amusing on the actual Blackberry App World

http://failblog.org/2011/02/04/epic-fail-photos-blackberry-a...

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

#49

Post by lallysingh »

btipling wrote: 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.

Honestly as an ex-indie PalmOS developer, I'm having trouble being sympathetic. I don't do blackberry myself, and don't have any particular affection for RIM, but this is just a little much.

As I understand, RIM's gonna do all the fulfillment & billing for you in the app store? This is the SDK for an unreleased product? On a new, unreleased OS? On a different architecture than your dev machine? Yeah, it may require some paperwork, and the SDK & dev docs might not be where all their developers' attention currently is.

Actually, the 10 app limit impressed me. I don't want my apps as #13 in middle of 25 variations of the same app from another developer. $20 a product just isn't expensive.

Also, why do you have to use VMWare fusion if it's an ISO? Couldn't you use any of its competitors if it's not in a proprietary file format?

Finally, as for all the 'cryptic commands'... write a shell script. ( http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ )

If you want a button, write an applescript app that shows a button & runs the shell script. ( http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.21/21.04/IntroTo... )

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

#50

Post by jammur »

leon_ wrote: 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 definitely heard the horror stories of the early days of iPhone development. I don't think I exaggerated though. I pretty much stuck to the facts of what happened, with some sarcasm sprinkled on of course :)

It's important to remember though that RIM isn't competing for developers with the Apple of 3 years ago. They're competing with the Apple (and Google) of today. As a developer who's time and sanity is valuable, I'm going to have a hard time justifying the added frustration, when there are other options that are much simpler, and have much more profitable markets to sell apps to.

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