Comment by maxharris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxharris | Hacker News Reader

Meh. Why develop for RIM? They don't have any market share, and they're not easier to work with than Apple (or the runner-up, Google). They're even behind #3, Palm/HP. They haven't shipped, and I don't have any idea when they will. I read the tech press pretty much every day, and I have no idea when this is supposed to be. I assume this year?

If you're working on a RIM app, I'm asking you: why? I am honestly curious.

Edit: I went to rim.com, and after three pages and six clicks (including that funny country selector thing - why do I have to do this again? I don't need to do this when I visit apple.com), I finally got to the "playbook" page. But nowhere on that page is any indication of when I'll be able to buy this thing, or any kind of online store that would let me order it. All I can see is "Get Updates" which takes me to the form on the bottom of the page where I can tell them how to send me a promotional newsletter. (This makes me glad that I bought an iPad last April. If I had to wait for RIM, the best I could do would be to print out a picture of their product, glue it to a thin book and pretend that I have an iPad.)

Edit #2: You know, Palm made a great effort at almost this same thing, actually shippped their product, and they still sank (and they're only relevant now because HP picked up the pieces) for messing up less than this. How is this going to be any different, except that this time around, there's won't be a suitor like HP to buy up what's left of RIM?

"If you're working on a RIM app, I'm asking you: why? I am honestly curious."

Mike Kirkup had promised free Playbooks to devs who got their apps submitted early on. (NB: I don't know if that still applies, that was last year.) So there's a pretty good reason, submit an app, get some free hardware.

The main reason though would be if you were a Flash developer. Playbook looks like an absolute godsend for them, because they can just take their flash app, wrap it as an archive (presumably signing it and zipping it up) and plop it straight into Playbook. I'm not aware of any other mobile platform that runs adobe stuff natively like that.

Of course, all of RIM's developers were Java guys, so you can imagine that the subset of their developer base that were also secretly Adobe fanboys was actually quite small...

Nokia and RIM both seem to be massive train-wrecks in the whole 'looking after your developers' department. Maybe the guys in Waterloo have been taking coaching from Elop or some other major Microsoft shareholder.

Adobe AIR also lets Flash developers package their Flash apps for iOS and Android.

As an off-topic, pedantic aside: the Belgian Apple site requires me to select a language every time I visit. They don't store it in a cookie or try to deduce it from the browser locale settings. Just saying your comparison with Apple here is not that relevant.

Your comment doesn't show his to be irrelevant at all. It's less clear what language someone hitting the belgian site would speak; at least Apple does the geolocation stuff automatically, which RIM doesn't. Nice try, though.

It's much easier to see what language someone would speak since a browser specifies it in every HTTP request [1]. It's not only more deterministic than guessing where someone's geographical location is based on IP ranges, it also doesn't rely on ISPs updating database records. It is magnitudes easier and more reliable to check someone's language than it is to check someone's geolocation.

Next to that, if I select it once, I would hope Apple would be at least smart enough to save my selection in a cookie, so that when I visit the site tomorrow, it doesn't require me to enter the same exact information.

It's obvious Apple is dropping the same ball on browser locale here just as RIM does, so my comment disproves his comparison with Apple.

[1] http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14...

(including that funny country selector thing - why do I have to do this again? I don't need to do this when I visit apple.com)

This is a really good point - GeoIP is almost guaranteed to be accurate enough to determine country of origin now. We should no longer have to deal with that crap.

Unless you like to use Tor or just proxy for whatever reason through a server in a different country.

Too bad for those few random people. Guess they get lumped in with the people who don't use their ISP's DNS server.

> GeoIP

No. No no no. Please don't do that. I know everybody does, but it's such a terrible idea. If you rely on geographical location to set language, you're ignoring travelers, expats, regions with multiple languages, etc.

Look at my browser's Accept-Language header. Go with that. It's almost certainly what I want. If you have a really good reason to serve me content based on my location, use GeoIP to determine that. Never ever use it for language. And make it really easy to change both.

Fair enough, Accept-Language sounds better. The idea is the same though -- don't require a region splash page first. I had assumed that the reason for the splash page was different product offerings in the country, not language, but if the real reason is language then by all means use that.

I would prefer a combination though. If I live in Italy but am browsing in English, use the Italian product page via GeoIP but the language according to the Accept-Language header.

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