One of the first things I did with the PlayBook -- or, rather, with the lack of one -- was to build a simulator. Not the SDK simulator... everyone has one of those. I mean a physical one. It's nothing more than an old copy of a Rand McNally world atlas with a couple of sheets of thin steel wrapped around it to stiffen it and add weight, some black construction paper and a sheet of clear plastic for the screen area.
On the PlayBook, not only can you drag from the lower left corner to make the virtual keyboard appear, but inside an application you can still get the System menu to appear by dragging from either the left or right upper corners.
The top bezel "swipe down" action is reserved for applications to use for their own purposes, but they've left a region about 50 pixels wide at either end along the top edge of the viewable region where if you swipe down you'll get the System menu instead of the application's own menu.
So far, I can't see anything associated with the bottom right corner. [Update: although this may of course be different by the release date, or the third beta SDK, the bottom right swipe would trigger an orientation change. Since the simulator doesn't support this yet the swipe is ignored.]
I'm rather new to ActionScript3 (and AIR) though I've done a lot of Javascript in the past. In fact, I'm so new I wasn't aware until a week ago that ActionScript had evolved so much since I first checked it out when AIR was in its first beta. I was impressed to see that it is now a "real" language. Anyway, following are some random notes covering useful features I've stumbled over, as a reference for myself.
As mentioned in an earlier post I've been perusing the PlayBook simulator's filesystem in an effort to learn more about its architecture so I can improve my ability to build good apps for it.
Since I don't have any Flash/Flex development tools other than the freebie command line stuff, I tried using the command line debugger to monitor trace() output in my ActionScript code. It didn't work.
While building a filesystem explorer I discovered several mechanisms left for developers, which let you get into the PlayBook simulator. The most obvious and useful one is a simple telnet interface, to which you merely need to know the userid and password (but these were pretty obvious). [This feature was replaced with an SSH interface in more recent versions. -Ed]
This post contains notes taken during the PlayBook webcast on December 9, 2010, not necessarily understandable out of context.
The first time I built and installed the sample HelloWorld app I was annoyed to find that it didn't include a way to close itself. It has only a "Push Me" button which opens a page to ask for your name so it can greet you with it.
The BlackBerry Help Center page on removing your application using the command line says that the command line blackberry-airpackager utility supports an -uninstallApp argument. In the version I downloaded (as part of SDK 0.9.1) this option is actually on the blackberry-deploy utility (presumably having been moved).
Also, the arguments shown are now incorrect. After checking the help output (by running the utility with no options) and experimenting a bit, the following pattern worked:
blackberry-deploy -uninstallApp -device 192.168.40.128 -password XXX -package MyApp.bar
Micro-frameworks are all the rage lately. Though they've doubtless existed for as long as Python web development has been taking place, the recent release of bubble, juno, and now Flask have more people talking about them.
I've been fighting with the complexities of the major frameworks for a while now, lately getting fed up with the shocking list of dependencies brought in by TurboGears2, and fighting with Pylons and its view of how I should do unit testing and many other things.