Playbook - Developers It's Time To Get Started

Posted At : November 18, 2010 11:58 AM
Related Categories: Web Dev

I have just started taking a reasonable look at developing for the Blackberry Playbook. The specs certainly look pretty good. Dual-Core! So far there are only a few videos showing it in action, but those videos show a nice looking tablet. From all accounts the tablet itself will not be out until early next year. That means we have some time to develop applications for it.

Developing apps for the Playbook is currently done with Adobe AIR. Mac or PC. Anyone with actionscript knowledge can build apps pretty darn quickly. There will be native app development options in the future, but do not seem to be available currently. As a bonus developing in AIR means with little effort that same app can likely be deployed to android devices, or a native iPhone app.

Development is free, and for a limited time they have a wonderful promotion. If you develop an app and it is accepted into the market, they send you a free Playbook. Sweet right?

I tried out the sdk, went through the install process and found myself relatively unscathed. I am not a flash/flex developer so some of the tooling is a bit new to me, however their instructions are easy to follow. Once I had resolved my small issues, making a Hello World app was a snap. There are a couple small gotchas I should mention though.

1) Their SDK doesn't support Win7 64 bit. It is coming, but not out yet. There is a pretty easy workaround for it, involving downloading/installing the jdk for 32 bit, then pointing a config file to the 32 bit java install. Nothing horrible, but it will be very nice to NOT have to do that.

2) You can use the command line to compile the app, but using Flash Builder is much easier, plus you have the benefit of Flash Builder functionality. You need 4.0.1 though. Not 4.0 (easy patch to 4.0.1) and not yet 4.5. They say burrito support is coming, and I think you can update it to build from command line, but I haven't tried it.

Also, they have a webcast series which should be informative.

So, what are you waiting for?