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by sergiotapia·14y ago·view on hn ↗
In my short 5 year career as a software developer, my absolute lowest point was working with Blackberry creating applications.

This was around July 2010-ish.

The development environment: Sucked. Eclipse with some rubbish plugins that didn't work all the time.

Each change in the UI, I had to compile, publish to my BB device (which took about 20 minutes each time) and see how it ran there because the simulator was nowhere near to the actual representation on the phone.

Using Java to make BB apps wasn't so bad, I mean, I was only used to C# at that point, and the transition wasn't that painful. It was the god damn awful developer tools.

I wouldn't go back to making Blackberry apps ever again; I value my happiness much more these days and I can afford to pick and choose my jobs.

I wonder if they have made things easier this iteration. It's been 2 years since I've seen things in the ecosystem after all.

My absolute favorite platform to make Mobile apps is Windows Phone 7 (I hear 8 is pretty much the same). You just can match the developer tools for it. It's so simple.

1 comments
You were targeting the Java devices (probably BB5, BB6?) Unlike those devices, the BB10 devices (like the Playbook) are based upon the QNX OS and so the overall development experience is significantly better. But don't just take my word for it, click any of the BB10 links that talk about the development experience for a more in depth discussion.
I watched a friend write an app for the playbook, and he kept firing up a virtual machine to do something. Why would the dev environment need a virtual machine running every time you need to run a test?
Because you need to test it in the actual runtime environment, not your machine? That's how mobile development works.