Tuesday, February 7, 2012

The Playbook Games

It's been over 75 hours since I registered to be a Blackberry App Vendor and I still don't have an account. Hrmm.

I'm still trying to get the app working like it should (and does on Android). But there are some new problems:

Want to work on some code and test it when you don't have an internet connection? Forget about it. The blackberry signing process fails if you are not connected to the internet. And you will likely have to restart your IDE. Guess I won't work on the plane tonight.

What about google ads? For some reason (and maybe it's just me) they won't show up, but a blank spot is reserved on the screen for the view. Works fine, though, in the google tablet simulator (Android 3.1) and on handsets. Actually works much better- no flickering, weird display problems, etc.

I tried to run a video player app (it's been downloaded thousands of times and runs well on many platforms. I know since I wrote it). It complains that there is no Internet connection, while it successfully loads youtube's website. But videos won't play, so I can't port that app or add video to the one I was trying to port.

How about adb connectivity? I have not seen it at all. This means no logs. Here is some adb output:

C:\Users\erich>adb logcat
adb server is out of date. killing...
* daemon started successfully *
- waiting for device -
error: protocol fault (no status)
* daemon not running. starting it now on port 5037 *
* daemon started successfully *
- waiting for device -
error: protocol fault (no status)

C:\Users\erich>adb connect 192.168.170.130:5555
adb server is out of date. killing...
* daemon started successfully *
** daemon still not runningerror: cannot connect to daemon

C:\Users\erich>adb devices
adb server is out of date. killing...
* daemon started successfully *
List of devices attached


C:\Users\erich>

and so on. I tried lots of things and many searches and found nothing. I even searched the Blackberry Android Micro-site as they call it for 'adb' and got this:

Your search - adb - did not match any documents.
So how do you develop and troubleshoot an app? The process is this:
  1. write your app for Android (the first-class citizen)
  2. if the app is successful, port to Blackberry and hope it works (an after-thought)
  3. if it doesn't work, don't waste your time trying to get it running right. The tools are insufficient.

It reminds me of trying to run Java on a Windows PocketPC over 10 years ago.



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