Blackberry WebWorks SDK

Having installed Flash Builder and the Blackberry SDks, and built a simple Hello World, I decided to look at the simpler WebWorks development tools to see if Javascript development would be as easy to use. I’m more into javascript, jQuery etc nowaday, so it might just be more convenient.

The WebWorks SDK can be found at http://us.blackberry.com/developers/tablet/webworks.jsp. The Air SDK from http://www.adobe.com/products/air/sdk/ is just a zip file that you can place anywhere convenient. Version 2.5 is needed; as we speak they are testing 2.6.

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Playbook tests

Having a look at the Playbook development using Flash Builder. I had installed on Windows and ran up the VMWare simulator for the Playbook. All seemed to be fine, but then I couldn’t see the Create New Actionscript Mobile Option in the menu, so was a bit stuck. So I thought that I’d check the Mac version. Here, that menu was available, so I decided to give this a try and then ran into the problem of there being no VMWare Player version for the Mac. I decided to try the VMWare Fusion trial to see if it worked, but might try Virtual Box later as that is free. I can’t see other people with the same Windows problem, so when I get back to the office I might reinstall and try that again. (Worked after I uninstalled and installed again! – (edit) but needed to be in a fresh workspace)

Blackberry Playbook

Went to a big discussion around the Playbook today. It was put on by the Blackberry and Adobe groups and gave a feeling of a strong entrance into the field by this device. It has some good features and with the Adobe Air runtime almost built in to the operating system, it should provide Flex and Flash developers the tools to produce some applications quite quickly. There are also advantages in doing this as, if you can get an app approved in their app store before mid March, the developer will get a free device. All the big guns were there, MDs from both companies and they had the stats to show that Blackberry had the top market share in smart phone and imply that they would carry this on into tablet devices.