A Geek Diary

I got up at 05:00 yesterday to get on a train and attend BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour in London with two of my teenaged overlords colleagues from C2 Development.  The event was held at the Vinopolis – a stone’s throw from London Bridge station.

The keynotes were very interesting, and (as a BlackBerry newbie) I was surprised and enthused to find out about the number of different development routes which can be used to create apps for the PlayBook and for BlackBerry10.  WebWorks, the new Cascades UI stuff, Java BlackBerry runtime, Java Android runtime, C/C++ Native SDK – the possibilities are limitless and there are really no barriers for any vaguely competent programmer from any background to get in there and start developing.

RIM have also announced that anyone who has an app ready for BlackBerry10 launch and has that app make at least $1000 in its first year of release – will have that made up to $10,000 by RIM!  If that isn’t motivation – I don’t know what is!  Big smiles all round on that one.

After that was lunch, which included after a short break – a series of “lightning pitches”.  These were 3-minute slots in which one could pitch an app for BlackBerry 10 to the rest of the 500 developers and RIM staff in attendance.  After a quick discussion with my overlords colleagues, we pulled a few notes together and I went up – alone – to pitch our real-time project management system.  We got some great visibility out of it, and a lot of really positive feedback and interest from the other attendees. It’s clearly a project we’re going to have to take on beyond planning!  While we were obviously nervous, we felt that it went well and I’m grateful to RIM for the opportunity to give that idea some air-space in that kind of environment.

We then nipped out for a McDonalds and came back for the Native track talks.  Marmalade produced a great presentation for their software which helps developers to create cross-platform apps and particularly games, and looks like a really useful bit of kit.  The full licence is $500 per seat – however, they also spoke about an “indie” platform-specific licence which is a bit cheaper.  Once their website is back up – I’m going to check it out and might well go for it!  While I’ve been more of a web person than a native person – I’m really excited about the range of options on this front – and the QML/Qt stuff along with the new Cascades UI looks really useful and will make for some quite sexy-looking apps.

At the close of the conference, they declared the winner of the lightning pitches – and we hadn’t won the “PlayBook, $500, and 30 minutes with an evangelist of your choice” which was a bit of a shame as we’d got our hopes up after all the killer feedback – but we were still really glad that we did it.

At the end of the event, I had to get in a long queue of people with “Q”s on our badges, provide photo ID, and sign a two-page form which forbids me from all sorts in order to get “seeded” with a BlackBery 10 Dev Alpha device.  It’s worth it.  It’s a beautiful thing – PlayBook-esque in design, phone shaped and sized, amazing display, feels robust as hell, 16Gb onboard memory.  Frankly – I’m impressed and I’m looking forward to taking advantage of all of the available tools and support to develop loads of great apps for it!  In fact I’ve been so impressed – I started today!

We met loads of interesting people and fellow developers, got lots of great ideas, smashing feedback on our existing ideas, and came away feeling inspired.  We’re really excited about the possibilities for BlackBerry10, and it marks the start of what will be a epic summer of work!