Appforge for BlackBerry
I have followed AppForge from it’s early days. It’s a powerful platform development tool that relies on a runtime to be installed on the device. Development is in Visual Studio .NET. Target platforms include the Pocket PC, Microsoft Smartphone, Palm OS and Symbian.
This month, Appforge have added support for BlackBerry (J2ME). This is a surprise as instead I was expecting Support for Symbian 9.1. It seems Appforge have concentrated their efforts in a different direction.
In the early Appforge days when everything was done in VB, I found Appforge suitable for Symbian UIQ and Series 60 development because developing for these platforms in C++ wasn’t particularly developer-friendly. I was involved with a client last year who was seriously interested in using Appforge but came to me for C++ development as the amount he had been quoted, per client runtime, was far too high for distribution of thousands of units. As for consumer applications, the lack of consumer applications written in Appforge is testament to the unsuitability of the licensing schemes for this kind of development. Currently it’s more of an enterprise development tool.
I can’t help but think there’s a lost opportunity here, not necessarily for Appforge but for Symbian, UIQ and Nokia. The Symbian OS would really benefit from an easy-to-use development environment with a free runtime, preferably included in ROM. Python goes part way there but doesn’t include UIQ, isn’t in ROM (too many people are having problems when installing the wrong runtime) and still isn’t ‘easy development’ for many people.
Incidentally, the BlackBerry implementation has a poor feature list, mainly due to limitations of what’s possible under J2ME. I suspect the Symbian 9.1 port is/was/will be a much more challenging piece of work for Appforge.
