John M. Wargo

I attended the the BlackBerry Web Development webinar today and it was interesting. they went through a good concise overview of web development then dug into the new web development tools. I'm always surprised though that the internal developers from RIM NEVER do live demos. Whenever they want to show how any of the technology works, they'd always fire up a recorded demo and play it. What's the fun in that? When I demonstrated the tools, I always did it live. 

Anyway, when the session wrapped up, there were a whole bunch of questions people sent in. Some were kinda lame (sorry) but some were really good. Mike Kirkup hopped on for the Q&A session and jumped in on some of the more political questions.

What I heard was:

• While RIM won't say it, they're going to support Flash. What I want to know is when the Mono implementation comes? I'd be happy to work on that project!
• Mike finally received 'approval' to share some of the deployment numbers with the world. Things like what's the distribution of BES across supported messaging platforms (Sorry Domino folks, you're at about 15% and going down) plus what's the distribution of devices deployed in the market. So many developers have to guess which devices to target for their first applications - soon we'll know. Mike said the numbers would be in his presentation at the conference then posted to the blog soon after. Nothing like having permission to release something then holding on to it for two months so you have something big to put into your presentation at a conference.
• Lots of big announcements coming at the developer conference in November.