Developer of popular BlackBerry app shares his experience

Marcus Watkins, who wrote the PodTrapper software for the BlackBerry, has chronicled the journey that led him to develop for the RIM smartphone. PodTrapper is a BlackBerry podcast manager and, apparently, the only one around.

The article is a long, though worthwhile read if you have the time, especially when you contrast Watkins' experience with that of most iPhone developers. I have summarized a few key points from the VersatileMonkey article, below:

On the SDK:

RIM has been around for a long time now, and there are five different versions of the SDK. They range from 4.2, 4.2.1, 4.3, 4.5, to the newly released 4.7. Going for more features means fewer supported devices.

Designing the user interface:

The default widgets provided by the iPhone SDK will require a significant amount of code to simply emulate with the BlackBerry. Watkins deliberated at length before deciding to have a UI similar to the BlackBerry App World. He wrote, "I figured copying RIM wasn't really ripping them off, more like emulating the look and feel of a host OS. To actually make it happen took a LOT of work."

Network programming:

While conceding that one great aspect of the BlackBerry platform is the availability of the network communication across carriers, Watkins noted that "there are 10 different network transports available on BlackBerry: WiFi, Direct TCP, WAP, WAP2, BES/MDS, BIS, Unite, BES Serial Bypass, USB and Bluetooth," all of which are implemented as totally isolated transports.

Memory management:

The earlier BlackBerry devices have pretty limited memory. As an application that runs all the time in the background, memory leaks can be detrimental to the health of the device. Watkins wrote, "I can definitely see why Apple has been hesitant to open up background processing on the iPhone. It's really easy for bad developers to make the whole platform look bad."

Marketing is everything:

Quote: "If there's one thing I would point to as a major lesson learned from PodTrapper it's that marketing is everything...I could have created the greatest product unknown to man, but if no one knew about it how could they buy it?" Enough said.

To read the full story:
- check out this article from VersatileMonkey

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