The blackberry pause

I have to confess it : I made a small pause in my Android development.
During one month, I developped for the Blackberry Playbook, and it was a rather pleasant experience !

Actually, it started when I read this blog entry from James Becwar.
Blackberry offered a free Blackberry Playbook ( their incoming tablet ) if you developped a application for it.
This was a very tempting offer, so I decided to jump into this challenge !

The challenge :

Actually, the challenge was that I read this blog entry on the 26th of February, and you had to submit your application before the 15th of March...
I only had about 15 days to learn a new language, a new platform, a new submission process, and to develop my application.
All that, while still having to manage my real job, my kids, my wife, my friends...

On top of this, a friend proposed me at the very same time to play a 'Neptune's Pride' play. "Neptune's pride" is a nice strategy online game, that played over 2 to 3 weeks. The things is when the game starts, you only have 4 units, so everyday it takes about 10 minutes to play. But the game quickly becomes more challenging, and more time consuming. Way too much for me ! But I couldn't make myself reasonable, and give up. So I played until the end ( I even won the match :) ! ).

Developping for the Blackberry Playbook :

So I decided to start to develop for the Playbook.
There are two ways one can develop for the playbook :
- Using Adobe Air
- Using Html5

I decided to go the Html5 way : it is free ( I could use an evaluation version for Adobe Air, but I prefer to learn something that  I will use as much as I want ), and I feel like learning Html5 can always be a good thing, for my work, for my android development, for some personal Web develpment, etc...

The tools to develop for the Playbook :

The playbook comes with an SDK, and an emulator that really is a virtual Machine running under VmWare.

Considering the short time I had to develop my application, I decided to stay as far away as possible from the device specific issues, so I decided to choose an application as simple as possible, and that I could develop as much as possible with Chrome.
So I didn't wanted to write files, to use the camera, to use the GPS, or anything like that.
I just wanted to develop in Chrome, and check every day that my development was still working in the emulator.

So the application I chose to develop that a simple sliding puzzle ( also called the 15 puzzle ). Nothing really exciting, but something I really could finish in such a small amount of time.

Developping in Html5

So I started developping in Html5, with Chrome.

Html5 is some Html, css, and javascript.
In my, case, I just took a canvas ( ie a part of the Html page ), and entirely control it in Javascript, from the event response to the display.
So I didn't use the Css at all, I merely used the Html part to create the canvas. So quite all of my development were in javascript.

And to be honest, I was really impressed by this way of developping.
The 'iteration Cycle' - ie the time it takes to make a change in your code, and to check its effects in your application - is really low : you modify your javascript code, and just press F5 in your chrome browser, and voila ! It's done...
It's much better than developping for Android, where the installation phase on the emulator or the real device, and even the compilation phase, for a big application, takes some time.

Chrome contains a full debugger, so tracing a bug is quite easy, and you can even hot change the code !
It also contains some profiling tools, and some tools to monitor the memory usage.
Actually, I was impressed by all the stuff that were in chrome. I only had used it as a (fast) browser, and now I found it was also a valuable develoment environment !!

Obviously, everything is not that easy in the Html5 development world :

Javascript is a strange language:
* not really object ( there is no real inheritance ),
* Actually even creating an object is an strange thing : you create it as a special function !
* sometimes Javascript is not strict enough : if you forget to define a variable as a new one, local to your function ( with the 'var' keyword ), it will use whatever var with the same name it can find in the namespace ( like a global one, or worth, one coming from a caller function ), creating some strange bugs...
* the counterpart of all this strangeness is that javascript is a very flexible langage, so can do crazy things like modifying some methods of an instance of an object at runtime. ( at least for a C++ developper, this is a very crazy thing )
* Chrome optimizes the javascript code, so sometimes, it's hard to debug : the code won't stop at some lines that are actually really executed !
* Chrome is a real development environment, but I still prefer my Visual Studio environment !!!


Developping for the Playbook added some specificities :
* For some reasons, I wanted to use more html5 feature than just using my canvas, and failed. Something as simple as calling specific javascript code with clicking a link didn't work. I didn't investigate, and just put everything in my canvas !
* A lot of features just didn't work, in the real device or in the emulator ( and I don't feel like releasing something without any test ) : sound, videos, orientation support, ...
* The event for managing the touchscreen are a little different from the events for managing the mouse. Nothing really big, but enough to bring me some bugs...


Conclusion :

All in all I was really happy with these development. Actually I manage to create my application in 15 days. At this time, the limit had been postponed to the 31th of March, so I ended up developping another application ( to be honest, I was a little ashamed to only deliver such a simple application as a sliding puzzle ), so I created a coloring game for child, in the next 15 days.

I enjoyed doing these two developments, and could finished them by the deadline.

Some time ago, with some friends from work, we made a kind of context where we were to create a little game prototype during our launch pause. So we only had 1 hour and half to create this prototype.
Actually, I like the idea of developping something as fast as possible.

I would like to do it again, all by myself : to give me the constraint to create a little game in 15 days ( or at least a good prototype ). I always found that some good things were coming from this challenges.

As for the result application, they are some applications I still can be proud of. 

Actually, my older kid likes the sliding game, and both my kids like the coloring game. This is, in my opinion, a really good sign !!!

Now, as this is essentially a Android blog, let's talk a little about more robotic things.

Now that I have two Html5 applications, I will try to port them to Android, and check how easy it it.

Actually, I would like to check if developping directly in Html5 is a viable option for Android, but I really have some big hopes in this area !!

Here are the applications :

The coloring game :

 The sliding puzzle :

And here are the link to the application for the Blacberry owners that are lost on this Android development blog :

The coloring game

The sliding puzzle