Some notes on QNX – the new BlackBerry PlayBook OS

Sep 30, 2010 by

So, as you probably already know, the coming BlackBerry table will be powered by the QNX pronounced almost like Unix – “ku-nee-ks”. So what is QNX?

Below are some notes from the session delivered for developers right after the tablet was introduced during the keynote speech at the DevCon2010.

QNX – is a highly distributed, self healing POSIX compliant, real time operating system.

Real time here basically means preemptive partitioning, which in turn means patented scheduling mechanism for dynamic resource allocation. Here we are talking about CPU as the main resource.

Self Healing – since the system is based on POSIX – message passing, only the core kernel (0.1 million lines of code in total, compared to 70+ million lines in Windows and 9+ million lines in Linux kernels) and the process manager are at the core, all the other processes, can be hot restarted. The key issue here to take home is that QNX is highly modular system unlike the much more monolithic Windows and Linux systems. The monolithic kernel only consists of the microkernel and the process manager – a small partition of all OS code which can be highly optimized and is easier to monitor for bugs. All the rest of the OS systems are “hot pluggable” modules which run in their own processes and can be restarted without taking down the whole system. This is the main point of QNX being highly resilient system and the term used by Dan Dodge the co-founder and the CEO of QNX systems - self healing.

QNX will support Adobe mobile Air and Flash for start and is fully capable of running the Java JVM which should enable the table to run any Java applications written with native BlackBerry SDK for OS 6.0 (and probably anything above level 6.0 SDK). There is also an option of a native C/C++ development for QNX. Momentics – the native developer environment – an Eclipse plugin. QNX is apparently company #3 to join the Eclipse project early on – at the Eclipse 1.0 stage and the main contributor to the C/C++ CDT project. The Momentics environment has a rich set of tooling for coding, debugging and profiling the natively written applications for the QNX.

If you are interested in the latest updates, you should head to the following resources:

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    Android expands support for paid application to more countries and developers

    Sep 30, 2010 by

    In a recent blog post, Google announced that it is significantly expanding payment support both for developers and the users.

    Developers in 29 countries will be able to sell their apps and users from 32 countries will be able to buy paid apps. The most recently added countries in which the Android users will be able to buy apps are: Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Israel, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Sweden, and Taiwan.

    Addition to support of paid application distribution is expanded to the developers in the following countries: Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland and Taiwan.

    Android is closing the paid application gap with the iPhone quite fast, while BlackBerry still lags behind.

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    BlackBerry Developer Conference – subjective notes – note one

    Sep 27, 2010 by

    From the few sessions it was clear that RIM as a whole is still not getting it – the consumer market for smart phones has long surpassed the enterprise market. They are still trying to cater to weird enterprise scenarios and impress developers with these capabilities. RIM has to wake up and realize that the number of developers caring about enterprise features declines exponentially.
    Same as with the networking which is a pure hell because there are at least 7 different ways to establish a network connection, they are trying to cater to different scenarios and have all these different ways of doing pretty much the same thing in 5 ways. Seriously – WHY??? Just give us one but RELIABLE way of doing something. Don’t you get it that we – the developers don’t want to implement something in more than one way and then debug it forever or yet, to have to implement something in 3 ways because you are not sure (and don’t really have a good way of telling) which way will work for every specific user. You have to start repeating this every day as your daily mantra – the simpler it is, the less it breaks. This is a universal engineering fact. Would you please already get this? When you do it will make the life of developers so much easier.
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    BlackBerry Developer Conference 2010 is tomorrow

    Sep 27, 2010 by

    BlackBerry Developer conference is starting tomorrow. I have arrived to San Francisco at noon today and just had a relaxing day browsing the sity, visiting the beautiful Chinatown and the Coit Tower from where you can see pretty much the whole city. It’s my second time in San Francisco, first time being here about 1.5 years ago for the Google I/O 2009 (so sorry had to miss it this year…). San Francisco is an interesting city and I like it, but it is a little dirty for my snobby Bostonian taste.

    Anyhow, this is not about the city. BBDevCon 2010 is tomorrow and I am expecting it to be a turnkey for me, it was a long time of love and hate relation between me and BlackBerry. The platform is not evolving (yeah yeah, BB OS 6 – whatever… this is so 3 years ago) and in the super fast paced space as mobile, standing still is actually equals to moving back as everyone is innovating with the speed of light.

    I will be looking for cues as to whether RIM will be able to at least maintain its current user base and improve his ways in treating smaller indie developers.

    There have been rummors about BB Tablet – BlackPad, to be announced during the BB DevCon 2010. I am personally very skeptical about it, but we will see. Also – it is almost clear to everyone that RIM will announce it’s advertising API availability to the public – not great news though. They have the worst performing advertising so far, and this is one of the major points for me personally, if there is no promising (I am not even wishing for bright) future on the horizon, BlackBerry will be the last platform to receive any attention on my list.

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    Facebook is down – funny tweets collection

    Sep 23, 2010 by

    Apparently today Facebook was down for 2 hours and for some even more… I did not pick up long time on this since I do not use Facebook, but just accidentally I wanted something and I tried to load it and boom I got:

    Not sure whether this is a localized event I went to twitter to see if others had this problem and man I was in for some good laughs. Here’s the collection of funniest tweets during the time that the Facebook was down:

    Ant check out the Twitter trends. How “DNS Failure” sounds to you as a trend – huh?

    UPDATE: Apparently it wasn’t just my “original” idea to collect funny tweets, many other websites did so as well, what is interesting that there are about 20-30 different tweets overall which just keep repeating from site to site. Are we short of funny twitter-ers? People obviously do care. Maybe they are just afraid Facebook coming after them in revenge? (just kidding of course, or am I?). Let me know what you think in comments.

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    Is RIM going down?

    Sep 20, 2010 by

    For the last several month I’ve been thinking about the future of developing for BlackBerry and whether it even makes sense to bet on the BlackBerry OS. The learning curve for BlackBerry development is very steep, which makes it a huge hurdle for the newcomers to the platform, but works for the advantage of the companies and developers who already took the plunge and were swimming the quirky waters of BlackBerry OS for some time.

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