John M. Wargo

This could be fun!

RIM announced today private beta for the Native SDK for BlackBerry Tablet OS. You can read the announcement here.

I’ve kinda gotten away from BlackBerry development, focusing more on cross platform development tools, so I’ve not really kept up with what RIM’s doing with the PlayBook. The WebWorks stuff is…interesting and Hybrid frameworks like WebWorks is where the market is going (the popularity of the PhoneGap and Titanium frameworks has helped prove that one) but there always seemed to me that there would remain the need to write native applications for any device. I couldn’t understand how RIM could be using native development tools to write applications for QNX and more than a year after they announced the device didn’t have any native tools available. I know they expected that these tools would only be needed for high performance applications such as games and specialty drivers, but sometimes you just want to kick around in the API’s directly.

By why so late?

This is something Google and Apple have definitely done right and RIM seems to completely ignore. When Apple or Google announce an OS upgrade, they release the appropriate SDK’s with the device or even sometimes earlier. RIM on the other hand, doesn’t seem to understand the need to have timely access to the newest development tools. I don’t remember whether it was BlackBerry Device Software 4.6 or 5.0, but I remember that for one of them the native development tools were still in beta almost 6 months after the release of the device running the software. Seriously? C’mon – how hard can it be? You’ve released the device, how hard can it be to release the tools you used to actually create the applications running on the devices people are holding in their hands?

At the beginning of the year, I replaced my main PC in my home office. I’d had the last one for more than 4 years and it was really time to get rid of it. When I build a new PC, I always go for the biggest and fastest and this one was really fast 4 years ago, but could no longer keep up.

For the new one, I purchased an Intel i7 quad core, dual graphics cards, 24 GB of memory and a big honking 8 TB drive array configured for RAID 5 (giving me 6 TB of available space). For my boot drive, I implemented a solid state drive, very cool but I wish it was bigger (Isn’t that always the case?). I’d previously used AMD processors, but for this one, I knew I’d be doing a lot of work in Virtual Machines so I wanted the hyper threading capabilities of the i7 processor.

It wasn’t long after I had this beast up and running that the RAID controller indicated that the third drive in the array was indicating that it was experiencing SMART errors. Soon afterwards the 4th drive failed completely. I quickly ordered a replacement drive from www.newegg.com (I LOVE those guys) and, when it arrived, replaced the failed drive in the array.

I then downloaded the drive diagnostics utility from the Samsung web site (I was using 4, 2 TB Samsung SATA drives for my array) and plugged the drive into one of the test machines in my lab. Quick tests indicated that there was an error with the drive (I already knew that). Surface test indicated that there was a problem with the drive (I still already knew that). After low level formatting the drive, I reran the tests and was informed that the drive was bad (didn’t I already know that?).

I opened the manual that came with the drive and saw that I was supposed to call an 800 number to get support. I called the number and after only getting transferred once, spoke with a tech who gave me directions to go to a web site to generate an RMA number. I would have completely avoided the phone call if they would have just given me the support URL in the manual, but apparently that’s not the way it works.

I shipped the drive off to Samsung and soon received the replacement drive. I installed the new replacement drive in the drive 3 slot in my RAID array and of course now I’m completing the same steps for the other failed drive. So far, the quick test and surface test have completed and I’m currently low level formatting the drive. Since this drive didn’t actually fail, only threw some SMART errors, I’m not sure what’s going to happen here. I’d prefer to have the drive replaced and have a good backup drive lying around to use when the next drive goes bad.

I’m disappointed that I had the drive failures, but I am glad I implemented a RAID Array (so I could easily recover from a failure). What bothers me most is that I have to pay shipping three times to get these two drives replaced under warrantee (one for shipping of the purchased replacement drive and two to send drives back to Samsung). Even though these drives are under warranty, I have to incur a cost to use the warranty. Sucks, but it’s better than the alternatives.

I got my ‘thanks but we don’t need you to speak at the BlackBerry Developer Conference’ email this week. I’m really frustrated; I’ve been silent on this for years now, but I have to say something now. Here we go, but be sure to keep in mind that the opinions provided here are mine alone and do not reflect the opinion or public statements of my employer.

I’ve attended every BlackBerry Developer Conference. One as an employee of Research In Motion, another as an employee of BoxTone and two as an employee of AT&T. As you may or may not know, after I left Research In Motion, I wrote one of the first books dedicated to BlackBerry development (I usually say mine was the first, Anthony Rizk’s Beginning BlackBerry Development technically made it onto paper a week before mine, but my book, BlackBerry Development Fundamentals was available online on Safari Books Online months before that).

When I was at Research In Motion, I couldn’t present at the conference because I didn’t work in the ISV Alliances team nor did I work on any of the internal BlackBerry development teams. I worked for one of the carrier business units (AT&T of course) and even though I was considered expert enough to work with customers on BlackBerry development stuff, I wasn’t good enough to speak at the conference.

The next year, I submitted a couple of session topics but was declined. The following year, folks at Research In Motion actually encouraged me to submit session abstracts, but turned me down anyway. By then, there were two books on BlackBerry development on the market and I’d written one of them (the author of the third book doesn’t even attend the conference). You’d think I would be qualified to speak at the BlackBerry developer conference, but nope – declined. I didn’t submit any topics last year, but I just knew it was an exercise in futility. This year, just like Charlie Brown trying to kick a football being held by Lucy van Pelt, I thought I’d try yet again – declined.

The issue for me is that Research In Motion is just too close to some of these topics to present them with any type of real impact. Watching Tariq Tahir year after year present on Push and completely omit important details plus get interrupted time and time again with questions because his presentation wasn’t structured well - was painful. Watching Adam Stanley and Tim Neil present on Widgets (WebWorks) at last year’s conference and get peppered with questions over and over again because they just weren’t explaining the details clearly was painful as well.  Developer types at Research In Motion do know their topics, but many are too close to the topics (and therefore omit important, assumed details) and don’t really have the organization and presentation skills needed to impart the information well.

Developer Conference sessions should be stuffed full of details, examples and background information. It should be structured in a way optimized for people that don’t know anything about the topic. Research In Motion developers assume too much when they present topics, they assume you know a whole bunch of background information, rather than build their sessions with no assumptions and therefore making a bigger impact on less knowledgeable learners.

Let me give you an example. When I was working on the book, one of the chapters dealt with issues with the browser related to problems that occur since JavaScript was turned off by default in the BlackBerry browser. One of the Research In Motion reviewers, made a note indicating that it could easily be turned on programmatically but provided no additional information. I searched everywhere on the Internet looking for any reference to how this could be done and found nothing. Finally after begging for the solution, Research In Motion gave me a quick sentence on how to do it.  I worked away at it, with no additional support from Research In Motion and finally figured it out. It’s documented on this site here and as far as I can tell, for a very long time (possibly still) it’s the only reference on the Internet that explains how to do it. The reviewer from RIM just assumed I’d understand the comment, even though the information being referenced was NOT explained or documented ANYWHERE.

I’ve always wanted to present on BlackBerry Push capabilities. For the longest time, it wasn’t documented very well anywhere within Research In Motion’s documentation, and I felt that I knew more about the topic than most people outside of RIM . I wrote more than 100 pages on push in BlackBerry Development Fundamentals and I think I know it pretty well. If you’re a developer and you want to learn it, there’s on-device API’s that help you leverage it, but for creating server processes that leverage push, the only examples available from RIM help only if you’re using Java on the back-end. If you take a look at Research In Motion’s last documentation on RIM Push available here you’ll find that the sample application illustrating PAP shown beginning on page 90 will NEVER WORK since the code pasted in there illustrates an example of RIM Push, not PAP. I told Research In Motion about the error years ago, but the documentation was not updated – it’s been wrong for years now.  If you want to learn how to do BlackBerry Push by hand, you’ll have to buy my book since Research In Motion’s documentation is wrong and has been wrong for years.

Having worked with the technical team responsible for the BlackBerry Developer Conference, while at Research In Motion and later while helping me with the book, those people really don’t know me very well. I was part of the carrier team, rather than being a ‘true’ developer type, so I never felt that they accepted me as a peer.

The thing is that I’ve been a professional software developer for almost 30 years. Even though I’ve not been an in the trenches Java developer like the developers at RIM, I still know an awful lot about software development and a whole lot about all aspects of BlackBerry development. I’ve created several commercial software products (by my hand) including two award winning ones. I’m a regular speaker at developer conferences (Lotusphere, The View Domino Developer Conference, MWLUG). I was a certified Novell Netware Instructor (CNI), Lotus Certified Notes Instructor (CLNI) and a United States Soccer Federation (USSF) State Referee Instructor (only about 5% of USSF instructors achieve this status) so I have more than 20 years of experience teaching technical topics to both adults and children. I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Physics with a certificate in Computer Physics. If you look at posts on this site, you should see that the articles are chock full of details and are very well structured. None of the details needed to understand a topic are omitted from my books, articles and conference sessions. I can discuss and teach the deepest possible technical topics to learners at any level; if you’ve seen me present at conferences, you’ll hopefully agree.

I give up – if you hear me talking about submitting a speaker abstract for next year’s BlackBerry Developer Conference, please talk me out of it. I’ve moved away from BlackBerry development, instead selling cross platform development tools for AT&T and working on a book on PhoneGap. Perhaps after I’ve published a book on PhoneGap and more articles on this site about cross platform development topics that the PhoneGap community will accept me and let me speak at their conferences. I bet it will be easier to work with that team as an outsider than it is to work with my former colleagues at RIM. I only want to help, to help make the BlackBerry Developer Conference a better experience for attendees. I think I have the knowledge, experience and presenting skills needed to make a big impact, unfortunately I’m not able to make RIM understand that.

For the record, RIM has been helpful in supporting the book. They did a complete technical review of the book and scheduled book signings at the last two conferences. Even giving me a media pass to one of the conferences when I'd lost my job at BoxTone and wanted to attend. Sales are winding down though, as BlackBerry development is no longer as important as it was in thos cross platform world.

For a long time now, I’ve been running a series on mobile applications, highlighting where developers build an application for a mobile device without really paying attention to the mobile device or the needs of the mobile user.  In this article, I’m going to shift gears and talk about something related to mobile, but not directly to mobile applications. I’ve written about this company many times before, let’s take a look…

I received the following email this morning from Research In Motion. I’d signed up for updates, so they would notify me when new software was available for my device.  I thought it was a good idea to keep my BlackBerry device up to date and it was great to receive the notification.

Figure 1

What struck me as odd was not that the image they’d included in the email didn’t load, but instead that they included a note at the top of the message saying:

“For best results, please view this message from your desktop computer.”

Seriously? An email from Research In Motion with a suggestion that the email would look better on a desktop computer than on a BlackBerry? That makes absolutely no sense. I have a BlackBerry. They know with a pretty high level of certainty that I have a BlackBerry (since I signed up for BlackBerry software update notifications, didn’t I?). This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

What they did was format the message so it had a nice layout when opened in the desktop email client. It was designed to center the message’s content in the center of the available space in the email client. Big deal, what’s the point? I don’t need emails content such as this centered in the email. It’s a simple message letting me know that there’s a software update for my BlackBerry device, does it really matter what it looks like?  All they did was make it so the message was larger than it needed to be (all of that HTML content used to make the message formatter better on the screen), took longer to download than necessary and costs the receiving company (my employer) additional cost (over text-only messages) to store and forward the message to me.

Here’s what the message looked like on my BlackBerry:

Figure 2

Yes, I have my fonts cranked up (I’m old), so it’s bigger that it would be on your device.  The image at the top of the message doesn’t appear on my BlackBerry device either, so I’m not sure what’s going on there.

What I needed was a simple, text-based email from Research In Motion letting me know there was new software available for my BlackBerry device. I needed to know it was available, how to load it and what is different in the new version (what’s new, what’s been fixed).  I didn’t get that. What were they thinking?

We need to get back to simple. Use HTML formatted email where it matters – not in simple emails like this. If you know the reader is likely to be reading the email on a smartphone, format the message so it looks OK in both the desktop and smartphone email clients. A message to a BlackBerry user with information about his or her BlackBerry device should be formatted expecting that the message will be opened on a BlackBerry. It makes no sense to do anything else.