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Comment by jarek | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the requirement to get VMware Fusion Mac-specific? Might as well complain about not being able to write iOS applications on Windows.

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Why not just say Mac is unsupported? A friend of mine's company spent months developing a BlackBerry app, when he got me to do their iPhone app it took half the time and worked 100s of times better. Why? Because their developers were busy writing code trying to figure out what kind of connection the device had so they could open a TCP/IP connection, seriously the network interfaces aren't abstracted away from the developer.

This. The way networking is done on BB devices is positively archaic unless you pay RIM $2K for BIS access. ;deviceside=fuck you RIM.

This is a fair point, but its a fair point that completely misses the point. If RIM wants to attract the huge numbers of developers that are flocking to iOS (and, presumably, doing all of their dev work in OS X), they should be doing everything possible to make the switch from iOS development to Playbook development as smooth as possible. And there is no way to do that without addressing the question of Playbook development on OS X.

Maybe they want to attract the huger-still number of developers who aren't flocking to iOS. It's obvious they won't get the rock star developers, but there's a lot more non-rock stars. How is the experience on Windows?

The question is: do they want to compete with Apple for developers? Given Apple's huge success, I can't see how the answer to that question could be anything but "yes".

If RIM's strategy doesn't have some component that involves trying to woo iOS developers to their platform, I predict they will fail.

At the risk of sounding xkcd-esque, what is your definition of "fail"? I agree that RIM attempting to duplicate Apple's consumer-focused strategy is unlikely to yield Apple-like results in terms of market share and immediate profit, but let's remember that that's not where RIM started out. There's always a lot of money to be made in B2B, which just happens not to be the competition's strong point.

Finally, the whole smartphone area is ten years old, consumer-focused part of it less than five years old: less than mature, and way less than settled. In another ten years, this all might have turned out to be a silly bubble as Moore's law erases any effective differences between smartphones. Will Apple "fail" when its percentage profit per device and market share falls to current Macbook values?

That same thought occurred to me when I was writing it. The conclusion I came to was that if RIM is going to offer an SDK for Mac (or any platform for that matter), they need to do it in an integrated way, just like their competitors. I have no problem with NOT offering an SDK for a specific OS, but if you make the decision to do it, don't do it half assed.

I think it's less important how "good" an SDK is unto itself, and more important how good it is relative to it's competition. In this case you have to compare the Playbook SDK to Apple's and Google's because when developers are making decision about which platform to work with, they're going to be choosing between them.

Judging by the fact that the dev kit shipped with an ISO for running the simulator, I suspect you would need some kind of VM package in Windows as well. However Windows has the free VMWare Player.

The choice of VMWare over VirtualBox is worth complaining about then.

Until RIM makes its own desktop operating system I don't think it's comparable at all. And, once again, iOS is the market leader. They get to be different. RIM doesn't.

Except iPhone OS was also different back when Symbian was the market leader and Blackberry was the #2. People complained then. It still rose.

False dichotomy. Everyone knew that RIM and Nokia weren't even playing the same game. This is clear from the fact that neither had App Stores. You'll also remember that when the iPhone was introduced there was only web development, meaning iPhones had no special restrictions.

Native applications and the App Store were introduced in iPhone 3G / iPhone OS 2.0, when iPhone was still far from being the bestseller it is now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IPhone_sales_per_quarter_s...

What about using the free VirtualBox, like Palm and Android dev kits do?

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