4 ms·

definitely taking a look at this book - spent a short part of my career as a blackberry OS developer - worst dev experience of my life, so I'm glad they're dyin

by avh02 5y ago

definitely taking a look at this book - spent a short part of my career as a blackberry OS developer - worst dev experience of my life, so I'm glad they're dying a slow and excruciating death for it.

vnorilo 5y ago
Maybe BB saved you from Symbian though?
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  MeeGo ended up being not too bad, it used Qt. https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/1356777281188937728 https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/13567772811889377...
  - Mikeb85 5y ago
    It was probably the best phone OS at that point in time. It was just a little too late for Nokia and they disastrously threw their lot in with Microsoft.
  - joecool1029 5y ago
    It's funny that BB10 was in many ways similar to MeeGo, it also used Qt/QML and had a similar UI. I went to BB10 after wanting the next closest thing to the Nokia N9 I had before.
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      BB10 was QNX-based, otherwise I wonder if RIM and Nokia could've pulled their efforts along with other big guys (Samsung and Intel who went on to do Tizen) to set up a compatibility layer between their respective platforms to allow an app ecosystem to flourish.
  - vnorilo 5y ago
    MeeGo was nothing like Symbian. It was a Qt/Linux stack and quite sweet in many ways. N9 was the only phone I ever owned that got me excited.
- enjo 5y ago
  I spent 6 years slogging through Symbian work. The whole "C++ but not quite" approach was infuriating, and the system level API's weren't much better. It was very difficult to work with. The original iOS SDK felt like a revelation in comparison.
ndesaulniers 5y ago
Why do you say that? (Worst dev experience)
- avh02 5y ago
  It was a few things all tied in together: 1) their "device simulators" could not be relied upon 2) certain devices running certain versions of their OSs would have APIs function or not (i.e: a library call may work in one OS version and not in another, but only on one type of device) 3) every time you wanted to run any code on a device, it needed to be signed by blackberry's signing servers - which were often down or slow (waits of 40-60 seconds were common). (it no longer exists, but we had http://isthesigningserverdown.com http://isthesigningserverdown.com to help us know) 4) sometimes the devices just restarted, either when you tried to load something or sometimes when you made certain API calls. Blackberry devices took MINUTES to start. 5) logging infrastructure was basically non-existent... logs went to a hidden log page, (ctrl+lglg to access it and view/scroll on the bb device) - we wrote our own network logger lib to basically `tee` to the builtin logger and back to our desktop consoles. the first 3 points combined meant you often had to iterate on real hardware, waiting 40-60 seconds to deploy each time, only to have it explode in your face by restarting and then frustrating you by not being able to figure out what was going on. I'm sure i've forgotten much more.

by avh02 5y ago

definitely taking a look at this book - spent a short part of my career as a blackberry OS developer - worst dev experience of my life, so I'm glad they're dying a slow and excruciating death for it.

vnorilo 5y ago

Maybe BB saved you from Symbian though?

Apocryphon 5y ago
MeeGo ended up being not too bad, it used Qt. https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/1356777281188937728 https://twitter.com/stroughtonsmith/status/13567772811889377...
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  It was probably the best phone OS at that point in time. It was just a little too late for Nokia and they disastrously threw their lot in with Microsoft.
- joecool1029 5y ago
  It's funny that BB10 was in many ways similar to MeeGo, it also used Qt/QML and had a similar UI. I went to BB10 after wanting the next closest thing to the Nokia N9 I had before.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    BB10 was QNX-based, otherwise I wonder if RIM and Nokia could've pulled their efforts along with other big guys (Samsung and Intel who went on to do Tizen) to set up a compatibility layer between their respective platforms to allow an app ecosystem to flourish.
- vnorilo 5y ago
  MeeGo was nothing like Symbian. It was a Qt/Linux stack and quite sweet in many ways. N9 was the only phone I ever owned that got me excited.
enjo 5y ago
I spent 6 years slogging through Symbian work. The whole "C++ but not quite" approach was infuriating, and the system level API's weren't much better. It was very difficult to work with. The original iOS SDK felt like a revelation in comparison.

ndesaulniers 5y ago

Why do you say that? (Worst dev experience)

avh02 5y ago
It was a few things all tied in together: 1) their "device simulators" could not be relied upon 2) certain devices running certain versions of their OSs would have APIs function or not (i.e: a library call may work in one OS version and not in another, but only on one type of device) 3) every time you wanted to run any code on a device, it needed to be signed by blackberry's signing servers - which were often down or slow (waits of 40-60 seconds were common). (it no longer exists, but we had http://isthesigningserverdown.com http://isthesigningserverdown.com to help us know) 4) sometimes the devices just restarted, either when you tried to load something or sometimes when you made certain API calls. Blackberry devices took MINUTES to start. 5) logging infrastructure was basically non-existent... logs went to a hidden log page, (ctrl+lglg to access it and view/scroll on the bb device) - we wrote our own network logger lib to basically `tee` to the builtin logger and back to our desktop consoles. the first 3 points combined meant you often had to iterate on real hardware, waiting 40-60 seconds to deploy each time, only to have it explode in your face by restarting and then frustrating you by not being able to figure out what was going on. I'm sure i've forgotten much more.