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0 pointsprotomyth5y ago0 comments

There developer story was way too confusing. Adobe Air just wasn't a good idea. Blackberry had been Java, and I wonder what made that a pain. The Runtime for Android was a good idea, but they really needed to pick something.

QNX is doing fine in cars, shame it never really got a chance. The 2 screen Doom and rebooting drivers over the network showed some amazing stuff.

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mightyscouse5y ago

It wasn't so much that it was Java (albeit ME without generics) it was more you didn't get an awful lot out the box.

You had to hand roll all your UI with drawing routines that scaled across various devices and handle all the touch/tracker button events yourself.

Networking was a minefield. Depending on your connection (bis/bes/tcp/WiFi) you'd have to pass various undocumented params. Think we had a modified version of some networking code a RIM employee has given us, God knows how you'd have figured it out as an indie dev.

The support and open source ecosystem wasn't really there at the time either. Just a couple of devs who were super prolific and knowledgeable on the dev forums (thanks Peter Strange, if you're about HN)

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