My experiences as a Junior Blackberry developer.

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6 Replies - 1958 Views - Last Post: 18 October 2010 - 07:21 PM

#1 Sergio Tapia  Icon User is offline

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My experiences as a Junior Blackberry developer.

Posted 11 September 2010 - 02:56 PM

I've been working at my new job for a month now and we've been working the last weeks on a Blackberry application we're going to present in October to potential customers.

I have to say without a shadow of doubt that this is probably the worst time I've had programming, ever.

Some of the things I hate about working with Blackberry:

1. The JDE IDE is horrible and looks like a program taken from 1982.

2. Creating a UI is just a horrible and very cumborsome experience because you have to create all your UI using Java code, run that code, wait for your IDE (JDE or Eclipse) to package it and send it to the simulator and then the phone has to load the package. At work we've only been working for two weeks on this application but I can honestly say that I must waste around 40 minutes a day just waiting for the Simulator to load the code. Compare this to the Windows Phone 7 way of declaring UI with XAML code and seeing changes in one swoop.

3. Debugging is very hard to set up. You have to find some obscure page on the blackberry website to find a somewhat easy-to-follow tutorial just to setup the debugger.

4. Layout is horribly backwards and is terrible to predict where your elements will be. "Field.FIELD_RIGHT" sometimes doesn't float elements to the right of their container. HorizontalFieldManagers act much more different than a VerticalFieldManager. You'd expect them to behave the same (except in orientation of course) but they only share a few things in common.

All in all I have to say I really despise working with Blackberry. I find their tools outdated, their work process much too inefficient and their website very hard to navigate.

I just wish our company would have decided to work on the iPhone or Windows Phone 7 instead. :(

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#2 Alex6788  Icon User is offline

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Re: My experiences as a Junior Blackberry developer.

Posted 11 September 2010 - 06:51 PM

Ahhh sounds like a nightmare. I'd want the pay to be good to be that nerve racking.
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#3 earlgrey  Icon User is offline

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Re: My experiences as a Junior Blackberry developer.

Posted 28 September 2010 - 03:39 PM

I would hope other Blackberry employees don't use this site and see your post :P
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#4 Sergio Tapia  Icon User is offline

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Re: My experiences as a Junior Blackberry developer.

Posted 29 September 2010 - 08:24 AM

Two weeks have passed since my initial post and I still hate this platform with all my heart. I wish it burns to the ground and dies a slow painful death.
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#5 keakTheGEEK  Icon User is offline

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Re: My experiences as a Junior Blackberry developer.

Posted 29 September 2010 - 10:37 AM

I don't really know much about mobile development, but I thought you could also develop for Blackberry using Visual Studio. Is this not the case?
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#6 Guest_Todd*


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Re: My experiences as a Junior Blackberry developer.

Posted 18 October 2010 - 05:04 PM

What are you complaining about? Instead of whining why don't you do some research and try to improve your working IDE

You can always use Eclipse Blackberry plug in for development and utilize the rich Eclipse IDE environment. Also you would not have to wait "40 minutes a day" waiting on the simulator.

Also you complain about the UI and lack of an ability to to be able to align your fields properly. Are you familiar with custom field managers? You can easily get one if you search for it and it would allow you to center your fields properly. Eclipse also allows you to have a debugger and the one with JDE is not bad at all. Are you sure your work provides you decent work machines?

See I am a hiring manager at my company and would never ever hire someone like you as instead of improving your own personal development environment, you just complain and try to defame an entire platform. Sure nothing is your fault. It must be the compiler Gods that are making it hard for you to develop.

There is nothing wrong with blackberry an application development platform. You are just bad at what you do.
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#7 jini01  Icon User is offline

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Re: My experiences as a Junior Blackberry developer.

Posted 18 October 2010 - 07:21 PM

You can get some good blackberry tutorials at: Blackberry Development

Also JDE is bad so try Eclipse plugin as the post above mentions. Sorry about your experience so far.
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