Monday, November 9, 2009

Breaking news almost live from BlackBerry Developer Conference Keynote

Breaking news! Only 7 hours late!
  • OpenGL ES and 5.0 widgets were impressive, but most impressive of all...
  • They showed a jaw-dropping demo of reloading an application in the simulator without restarting the simulator and waiting for ages for the bloody thing to start up! Good morning freedom!
  • Another demo from RIM research dungeons: a too-good-to-be-true demo of a completely Java-based simulator, and they teased all of us poor souls with a screenshot of it running on Mac OS X. Now, of course, my gut feeling is it's not going to be available for at least half a year — but at least they are moving in the right direction.
  • New Eclipse 1.1 plugin looks spiffy. I just might start running Eclipse in parallel with my beloved IntelliJ Idea, an IDE of unparalleled beauty and power. Still better than running JDE on VmWare in parallel with IntelliJ Idea on OSX. And now for some delusionary dreaming: now that Idea is open-source, how about a full-scaled BlackBerry™ plugin for Idea? Pretty please?
  • First glance at visual editor for GUI in Eclipse plugin: I'm looking forward to how badly it's going to screw up when faced with manual edits to its generated code and slightly-more-complex-than-trivial layouts.
  • Flash, Webkit: right direction, but meh for now: mention it when you actually have something to show.
  • Payment system and ads: huge in impact, but of course in no way innovative. Still a welcome addition.
  • Triangulation-based location failover: nice, but again, RIM is catching up here.
  • Overall: lots of nice incremental changes, right attitude towards developers. But I should've gotten more than 3 hours of sleep before that keynote.
Obligatory sarcastic remark:
  • Java 1.5 language support: nowhere in sight.

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