dev

RIM makes a tablet play

SAN FRANCISCO--RIM put the rest of the world on notice that it's not just a boring, yet eminently reliable, buttoned-up smartphone maker anymore.

As was widely rumored, RIM did unveil its first non-smartphone device today at the opening keynote event at its DevCon developer conference here. The company is calling it the PlayBook.

The PlayBook is aimed at people who do more work than play--RIM's calling it "the first professional tablet"--but the company is certainly not ignoring the world outside of the office. In fact, even though RIM is playing very heavily to its reliable, … Read more

RIM woos developers with new ad platform

San Francisco--RIM gave developers yet another reason to stick with BlackBerry when it announced its own advertising platform at the BlackBerry Developer's Conference on Monday. Similar to iAds, the BlackBerry Advertising Service will allow developers to integrate advertising into their applications. RIM will act as mediator and will work with five different ad networks at launch (JumpTap, Amovee, Lat49, Millenial Media, Mojiva) with more ad networks to follow in the coming months.

The ads can be as simple or as rich as developers want, and they can insert the ads with just three lines of code, according to RIM. … Read more

RIM launches WebWorks App platform for developers

San Francisco--RIM developers can now build applications based on BlackBerry WebWorks, a new open-source Web-based development platform. These apps can be written entirely in HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, and developers can then use the BlackBerry Web App Packager to wrap the apps in a Javascript wrapper, making it easier for them to integrate the app with BlackBerry services. The Web apps can be built on the device and delivered through the App World like other native BlackBerry apps.

RIM says that this new platform combines the richness of Java with the speed of Web development. The BlackBerry open Web platform … Read more

RIM introduces BlackBerry PlayBook tablet (live blog)

Editor's note: We used Cover It Live for this event, so if you missed the live blog, you can still replay it in the embedded component below. Replaying the event will give you all the live updates along with commentary from our readers and CNET editors Donald Bell, Jessica Dolcourt, Nicole Lee, and Josh Lowensohn. For those of you who just want the updates, we've included them in regular text here. To get the key points from today's announcement, you can check out our summary of what got announced, in our story here. We've also embedded a short video clip of the PlayBook's introduction.

SAN FRANCISCO--A developer conference can be kind of a snooze for non-programmer folks, but Research In Motion had some rather interesting news to reveal today. After a smattering of reports of an impending BlackBerry tablet hit this spring and summer, RIM took the opportunity during its keynote address at RIM DevCon to show off the BlackBerry PlayBook, which it calls the first professional tablet.

Transcript of live blog starts here:… Read more

RIM on the edge of a big move?

Research In Motion is known for basically one thing: making reliable smartphones that brought e-mailing from a phone to the mainstream. But it might be branching out very soon.

The Canadian company is the largest smartphone purveyor in the U.S., and despite the surging sales of Apple iPhones and Google Android-powered devices, RIM has held its ground--for now. Its BlackBerry accounts for 41 percent of smartphones in the U.S., and is second overall worldwide after Nokia.

But even though RIM has been able to hold on to its lead in smartphones, Apple's iOS software and Android are not staying put there. Both are moving on to bigger, more powerful mobile devices: touch-screen tablets. The iPad's runaway success has created a new device category for consumers who want to buy something that's lighter than a laptop and easier to type and browse on than a smartphone. And almost everyone is jumping in: Dell, HP, and Samsung are looking to get a piece of this market early on, too, which analysts expect to hit 15 million units this year, and more than 20 million next year.

RIM, somewhat surprisingly, is one of those with its eye on this market. Since the spring, reports have leaked out that the company was testing a tablet to work in conjunction with its smartphone. RIM was found to have bought the domain name "Blackpad.com," which has led some to nickname the yet-to-be confirmed device "BlackPad."

Word came last week that the company might even introduce the device today, when President and Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis and other execs take the stage at the annual developer gathering, RIM DevCon, in San Francisco. The device is not expected, however, to ship until closer to the end of the year.

If it does offer a sneak peek, it's a bold move to do it in the same venue Apple uses to announce its new iPhone every year (San Francisco's Moscone Center), but not more so than RIM actually making a tablet in the first place.

If RIM trots out a sister device to the BlackBerry, like a touch-screen tablet, it's a sign that the company isn't resigned to letting Apple and Android steal its market share without a good fight.… Read more

Devops to grow with cloud, data services (Q&A)

Devops is a relatively new concept that centers around the interdependence of development and operations and has been on the rise in the Web 2.0 world of virtualization and the cloud. The characteristics of devops include concepts like "architect, developer, tester, product manager, project manager--all in one" and "ability to write code beyond simple scripts" all working toward an ideal of managing infrastructure in an automated fashion.

One of the players in this market is Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of the Puppet Labs, which provides support and service to users of the Puppet open-source server automation tool, and is hosting its Puppet Camp 2010 next month in San Francisco. (Disclaimer: I serve as an adviser to Puppet Labs.)

I asked Kanies some questions about devops, automation, systems management, and the cloud.

Q: Give us a brief overview of the rise of devops and why it matters? Kanies: Devops is essentially a cultural movement toward more development-like operations. First and foremost this means acknowledging and impressing the fact that your infrastructure is code, so you should be using developer tools and practice to maintain and interact with it. It also means that you should have the same requirements of your infrastructure as you do of your applications--you need an API, high quality data, version control, access control, auditing, and more.

The reason it matters is that the problems of IT have outstripped its ability to deal with them--our tools and practices largely aren't built for a world where you can turn up 36,000 machines in a week or deploy 1,000 machines an hour, nor where your boss can expect full deployment of an application across thousands of nodes in seconds or minutes rather than weeks or months. Devops attempts to fix these problems with a culture and practice that adopts and adapts development tools in the infrastructure and builds a culture of delivery and agility. … Read more

What's next for BlackBerry? RIM reveals key DevCon plans

With the lukewarm reception of the BlackBerry Torch and with Android's steady onward march into market share, few pundits expected RIM to exceed its revenue estimates for the quarter.

Now with more BlackBerry Curves sporting OS 6 flowing into the market, RIM's continued courtship of application developers is crucial. To that end, the company released a video in which RIM talks about its developer strategy, and a not-so-secret list of services the company plans to announce at its upcoming BlackBerry Developer Conference in San Francisco later this month.

RIM's expected keynote announcements include unveiling a new social-apps … Read more

How To: Change Chrome's channel

People love Google Chrome, it's as simple as that. But did you know that Google puts out three versions of Chrome? In this How To video, we recap the differences and show you how to jump between builds, also known as channels, in Chrome.

Try jumping between the stable, beta, and developer's channels yourself using the installers for Windows (stable | beta | dev), Mac (stable | beta | dev), and Linux (all versions). Note that at the time of publication, the stable and the beta channels are synchronized, but that's not always the case.

Dev-Team inching closer to carrier unlock for iPhone 4

According to a recent tweet from Dev-Team member MuscleNerd, the carrier unlock solution is a step closer to completion for iPhone 4. The latest version of the carrier unlock requires Dev-Team to rewrite the entire baseband-unlocking code from scratch.… Read more