John M. Wargo

I don’t know if you heard about it or not, but a RIM executive published an open letter to his bosses: Mike L and Jim B of RIM. It’s an interesting read and it had to be said. It’s really sad, but RIM has been slow in its response to market changes and it’s likely that they won’t be able to recover.

Their development tools are sub-par and it takes a ridiculous amount of time to release them. Where Apple and Android pre-release their development tools or at least ship them on the same day the device is announced, RIM does prolonged betas and in one case delivered the SDK out of beta only after a device that used the particular SDK had been in market for almost 6 months. Ridiculous.

I was trying to get my demo machine ready for a presentation at The View Developer Conference last week and had upgraded one of my BlackBerry Java projects that I was going to show at the conference. When I loaded the project, Eclipse gave me all sorts of errors that I just couldn’t resolve. I quickly called a former colleague at RIM and he informed me that he never imports old projects into Eclipse; he created a new project every time and copied his code over into the project.  Ugh! Is that world class development? No ! Is it at least acceptable? No way!

Is Apple’s Platform better? No, absolutely not. I wrote about this a few weeks ago, but developing for the iPhone is much, much harder than it is for any other mobile platform I’ve worked with (I’ve worked with a lot). In a previous article on this site, I referred to a post by an Australian developer who confirmed my conclusion.

RIM gets hammered because its technology is so old, but the iOS tools are even older. BlackBerry development’s primary language is Java which was released in 1995. NextStep, the stuff that Objective-C (and all iOS development) is based on was released in 1989. iOS has no Garbage collection capabilities, the developer has to manage the lifecycle of all objects – there’s not another popular smartphone platform in market that has that same limitation. In Objective-C, all references to variables are through pointers – that’s so 1980’s (or so Pascal), the development world is way past that approach. Compared to every other modern development language, Objective-C code has so many quirks that it’s essentially unreadable (to me anyway – and I’ve been a professional developer for almost 30 years).

If you’re a new developer, Objective-C might make sense, but it you’ve been working with many different development technologies, you’ll find it almost incomprehensible. There’s no reason it has to be so hard, but it is.
RIM’s problem is that it’s old. RIM has done a very good job of forcing their internal development teams to continue to support older devices as new ones (with new capabilities) are released. That’s a good thing, backwards compatibility is very important. Unfortunately that does make it harder on developers – there’s no getting away from it and it’s the kind of thing that Windows developers, Linux developers and many other platform developers live with on a day to day basis.

iOS is new, Apple is going to have the same problem in the future. They’ve already started releasing newer devices with higher screen resolutions, so developers now have to deal with two iPhone screen resolutions plus the iPad. As displays get better or form factors change, it won’t be long before Apple developers start complaining about all of the different devices they have to code (or create graphics) for. When apple starts adding additional interfaces (neural and who know what else) the same problem will occur. It’s the way software development works and it has nothing to do with Apple or RIM. For Apple, forcing users off older OS helps eliminate some of those problems. Since users are essentially forced to upgrade as soon as a new version of iOS is released, developers don’t actually have to support older OS’s for that long. Unfortunately, RIM works with enterprises and that’s just not acceptable for most companies.

I said a long time ago that RIM should abandon their older devices and release a new, more modern way of building mobile applications. They’ve done that now with their acquisition of QNX, but I agree with the market that this transition has taken too long. Working for a carrier, I understand the pressures RIM and other device manufacturers face, but it is taking them way, way too long to get things done. They announced the PlayBook when they weren’t ready, they released when they were not ready, those aren’t smart things to do. Releasing the PlayBook without native email support is incomprehensible.

I truly do not know whether it’s too late for RIM or not. I feel for them and hurt a little inside when I see their repeated stumbles. There’s a whole bunch of smart people there, so there’s a chance they’ll pull it out, but it will take very drastic measures and a lot of pain. Unfortunately, by the time they figure it out, it may be too late. 

Remember: The comments presented herein are my personal opinions and in no way represent AT&T (my employer). I am not speaking as a representative of AT&T.

Apparently Seesmic has announced that they’re dropping support for BlackBerry users. You can read the announcement here: http://blog.seesmic.com/important-update-for-blackberry-users.html. Seesmic makes social media tools for mobile devices and, back when their solution was in beta, it was a highly anticipated product.

I guess I’m not that surprised they’re dropping support for BlackBerry, since BlackBerry and many other device manufacturers have made social media such an integral part of their on-device experience. RIM’s support for Facebook, Twitter and so on – very much in your face on BlackBerry Device Software 6 would seem to make it hard for other developers to make compelling aps for the platform.

It’s funny though, when you look at Seesmic’s web site how very lame the BlackBerry version of their premier application looks against the others (although the iPhone version seems even lamer – that must be the wrong screen shot).

Figure 1

What surprised me, and other people too (from reading reader comments on the Seesmic site), was this comment:

“Effective June 30th, Seesmic will discontinue support for Blackberry in order to focus development efforts on our most popular mobile platforms: Android, iOS and Windows Phone 7.”

Too bad they didn’t know how to spell BlackBerry – they must not have been much of a partner to miss how RIM spell’s the product’s name.  Everyone gets iOS right, but doesn’t even try to get BlackBerry right. Sigh!

Anyways, back to my surprise. What surprised me was their comment that they’re abandoning BlackBerry to focus on their most popular platforms which seem to include Windows Phone.  Windows Phone? More popular than BlackBerry?  Are they serious? I can see iPhone and Android, but Windows Phone? More popular than BlackBerry?  Ugh.

I like Windows Phone. I’ve enjoyed using the Windows Phone devices and I’m even reading a book on Windows Phone development. But if Seesmic is seeing that Windows Phone is more popular than BlackBerry then the folks in Waterloo (RIM) really do have an issue.

What’s happening at RIM and the public outcry targeting the company saddens me.  I really, truly can’t wait to see what they come up with as a strategy for getting out of this very visible slump they’re in.

A while back I got really interested in content management systems (CMS). When I discovered Joomla!, I quickly created this site and hundreds of articles later it’s still going strong. A few years ago, Wired Magazine (I think it was Wired) did an article about an open source CMS called Concrete5 (www.concrete5.org) and it looked…interesting. I installed a copy of it, but never really got the hang of it. I didn’t have a site I wanted to build at the time, so I didn’t really have a reason to use it and that probably affected my experience with the product. Ultimately though, I think I really didn’t understand what it was. I was used to Joomla! and Drupal and expected Concrete5 to be like those other CMS’s. It’s not really, where normal CMS’s are database & template driven systems for displaying content, Concrete5 is more of a web site builder that uses a database in the back-end to store the content. It’s for building sites with pages rather than creating articles, links and other things that are rendered by the CMS templates.

I decided a few weeks ago to build the John Wargo Books site (www.johnwargobooks.com) and thought doing the site using Concrete5 would be fun. I quickly registered the domain, downloaded the files and got started. Knowing now that I was working with a site builder, it was really easy to populate the home page with the content I wanted (shown in Figure 1).

Figure 1

Once I had that done, all I had to do was add a navigational component (shown in orange on the right side of Figure 1) then create the additional ‘pages’ I needed for my site.

The cool thing about this tool is that your site building is all done in the browser. When you access the home page, you can easily login (the default Concrete5 template includes a login link in the footer, the template I’m using now does not) and directly manipulate the site using buttons that appear at the top of the page (as shown in Figure 2).

Figure 2

To edit a page, you navigate to the page then click the ‘Edit page’ button. To add a new page to the site, you simply click the ‘Add Page’ button and start typing your content. The system allows you to define a hierarchy for your pages then the navigational component automatically reflects your changes. There’s plug-ins such as the ‘Share’ button and the site search shown in Figure 1. Behind the scenes there’s a Dashboard view (shown in Figure 3) that allows you to configure the site as a whole.

Figure 3

In all, it’s a pretty easy system to setup and use.

I’m getting ready to start writing my next (third) book. As I mentioned before, I’ve been having conversations with my publisher about what I’m going to do next and I think we’ve decided on the topic. I’m waiting on a contract from my publisher then I’ll get started.

In the mean time, I decided to register a domain and open up a site where I can list information about my different books. Additionally, there’s another John Wargo writing books so I have to have a way to distinguish my books from his. I brought the site up this weekend, it’s called John Wargo Books and it can be found at www.johnwargobooks.com. Check it out when you get a chance and be sure to tell your friends!