I’ve resisted too much comment about this, feeling that my specialty is really mobile development, rather than IT infrastructure and BlackBerry security, but the latest ‘suggestion’ from the government of India has pushed the whole BlackBerry security story from a sort of badly-managed PR problem for RIM into an absurd Orwellian/Gibsonian alternate reality. The problem that UAE and Saudi Arabia (and now India) have had with BlackBerry email is that it’s too secure. Understandable, these [...]

Another op-ed piece (don’t worry, I’ll get to more concrete stuff again soon). I’ll start with a confession – I’ve been using an iPhone instead of a BlackBerry for the past little while, because my company has been focused on developing some iPhone products. The iPhone is a phenomenal device, and certainly has to have RIM worried, but having used both devices now, there are definitely a lot of things that the BlackBerry does way [...]

The BlackBerry Developer Conference (Nov 9-12 in San Francisco) contained a lot of new announcements – among the bigger ones (Payment Services, Advertising Services, etc) one of the most exciting – from my point of view – may have been overlooked a bit. A new version of the BlackBery JDE Plug-In for Eclipse – v1.1 – as of this writing in Beta. Being a huge fan of Eclipse for BlackBerry development – despite numerous problems [...]

I just started coding in J2ME just under a year ago, when I wanted to build a GPS Golf application.  After learning the wrong way to do it, I found a GPS class that I have changed a bit to suit my needs.  The following is a simple GPS class that will run on its own thread in the background, and you can use the get methods to get any of the GPS data that [...]

I’ve convinced someone else to write a post about GPS for Thinking BlackBerry! Justin is a BlackBerry developer (among other platforms) and has created a couple of great BlackBerry applications, including BBGPSGolf, a great free golf application for BlackBerry that uses the device’s GPS to show a map and give you information about golf courses (distances to the green, etc) on your device while you’re on the course. Anyway, he graciously offered to share some [...]

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, but it sounds too much like making excuses. Well, in a way it is. Faithful readers may have noticed how the frequency of my posts has dropped off rather sharply in the last few months. There are two reasons for this. First, I’ve started a company called Zeebu Mobile doing – what else? – BlackBerry application development, specifically in educational and early childhood applications. We [...]

Playing with some animation for a new BlackBerry product (see next post) and wondering about performance of double/float/Fixed32 arithmetic I came across this post on Blurry Words, which is exactly what I was looking for. Basically performance depends on the type of arithmetical operation you’re doing (though double is always slowest, usually by a wide margin). For addition and subtraction, Fixed32 is faster, for multiplication and division float wins out. Some sample results: BlackBerry Bold [...]

It’s been way too long since I wrote a post – interesting aside for bloggers: don’t get out of the rhythm, it’s incredibly hard to start back up again once it’s no longer part of your daily routine. Anyway, I’ve been busy (more on that later) but due to demand am now committed to start posting again, and it was a recent comment on an earlier post that gave me the idea for this one: [...]

I’ve gotten several good ideas for posts from the readers of this blog, so I’ve decided (based on a user comment) to put a sticky post up solely for the purpose of soliciting new post ideas. So here it is: What would you like to see me write about? Any area of BlackBerry development is fair game. Leave comments below and I’ll pick the ones that are most in demand or that I think would [...]

A while ago, I wrote a post about setting up the JDE Eclipse Plugin, which extolled the virtues of the JDE Plugin for Eclipse. As I said then, I’d been using Eclipse for BlackBerry development for years (using custom Ant scripts, etc) but the official RIM Plugin for Eclipse was relatively new. I’ve now used the plugin for a few more months, and, while I still believe it’s the best way to develop BlackBerry applications, [...]