RIM’s Top Picks for Developers

Despite the fact that I find the most compelling aspect of the BlackBerry to be the retro-style “Breakout” bricks and paddle game, it’s for sure that plenty of people love them to bits. Madonna sleeps with one under her pillow by all accounts and my wife’s friend’s husband recently issued his spouse with a, “It’s the BlackBerry or me,” decree. Well, she’s from Kentucky – what do you expect?

Anyway, love them, hate them or harbour a passing indifference to them – the email-enabled PDA is with us to stay and we all know it. It does make you wonder why it’s taken RIM so long to formalise a physical meeting for developers on its device, but it has finally come about. The BlackBerry Developer Conference is planned for the week of October 20, 2008 in Santa Clara, California.

So what does RIM think is hot in the handheld space right now for software engineers interested directing their ‘next big thing’ towards the BlackBerry?

ENTERPRISE APPS - corporate developers should extend business systems to the mobile workforce says RIM. Let’s hope we hear the word ‘security’ plenty of times huh?

CONSUMER APPS – what exactly is a ‘lifestyle’ application then? Developers don’t typically use this term themselves so should we be wary? It is games, is it PIM, is it a travel planner and map. Alright alright I know, it’s all of those.

TOOLS – there’s a new BlackBerry Java Development Environment (JDE) and a JDE Plug-in for Eclipse and Visual Studio.

RICH INTERNET APPLICATIONS - RIAs will make a showing too apparently alongside AJAX, streaming video and GPS.

LOCATION-BASED SERVICES – you’d be worried if RIM hadn’t mentioned these, but they did. But we do seem to have been talking about them for years without really seeing too many of them emerge haven’t we? When will my mobile phone tell me where the nearest toilet is then?

OK, I was only joking about the Breakout game.