Web Dev Chronicles

Spent the day at an Adobe/RIM event aiming to introduce the Blackberry Playbook to folks who will be creating apps for this new mobile ecosystem. I said right from the start that this was going to be a hugely successful device and the more I see of it the more I'm convinced that RIM is going to have a great year in 2011.

Looking around the room of attendees provides a quick assessment of something RIM is going to be able to achieve that Apple simply can't. A diverse mix of people are here, but most notably is the sea of suits and t-shirts. About a dozen of the FlashinTO crew are here – from where I sit I see Hugh, Matt, Tim, Dave, James, Paul, Tom, Peter and Mikko – this is a group representing some of the top Flash developers in the city. Then there are the full suits, those clearly on the enterprise business end of the spectrum and somewhere in between are the khaki pants whom I'm guessing are the corporate developer contingent. 

Why is this important? One of the things that Apple's struggled with is getting into corporate/enterprise environments. They've made some improvements via their support for enterprise email servers but that's about it. They face a few challenges that will be hard for them to surmount given their overall consumer driven strategy. First, they don't meet many of the corporate security standards that exist industry wide. Second, they have no real mechanism for closed distribution of apps. For example, imagine you're a hospital that wants to build a tablet based app for reviewing patient records. Certainly you aren't going to let Apple approve this app, host it on the App Store and then have your users install it on their devices. RIM makes all these scenarios and more possible. They are experts in this space and the iPad has made big enterprise hungry for a sexy tablet experience. I think the Playbook is set to fulfill this desire. UPDATE: the previous notion that you'll be able to install apps in a closed environment has not been answered by RIM yet. As of now, App World is the only route outside of using development mode to get apps on the device. That said, I'd still speculate that this will eventually be possible, I think it would be foolish for RIM to not make this possible.

I also can't help but think that this partnership between Adobe and RIM is a huge win for Adobe. AIR is massively integrated into the Playbook experience. The next release of Adobe's tooling is going to be heavily geared towards mobile development for Android and Blackberry, with an emphasis on using common code bases for multiple device development. Renaun even suggested this morning that in all likelihood, Flash Player 10.2 – which is slated to have Molehill, the new 3D api – will be available as an update for the Playbook. The full set of tooling from Flash Professional to Flash Builder will have support for these new development paths – previews of much of this are already available. 

Some of the interesting features of AIR on the Playbook are user notifications, messaging across AIR apps, web view for HTML rendering and the ability to access C++ extensions from within AIR. The C++ extensions are not an Alchemy based feature, rather they are a new thing that will be part of the native sdk for Playbook. I think the real beauty of using AIR on the device is that there is so much great functionality in there that fits perfectly on a mobile device. RTMFP support for local peer to peer device communication, local SQLite storage, pure AS3 or Flex development, touch support, etc are all there. In a quick break time discussion we just had we're also guessing that access to OS level features will be made available via the C++ extensions meaning Adobe won't need to keep their AIR updates running concurrently with RIM's QNX based development. Out of the box the QNX libraries give AIR access to all sorts of device level info like battery status, native activity indicators, alerts, QNX UI components and lots more.

The most notable thing in talking to developers here – many who've done iOS development and many who have not had time to learn – is a palpable excitement about having not just the ability to build Flash based apps for browsers, but to have OS level integration into a tablet device. Everyone is feeling optimistic about the possibilities of the Playbook. Having the Flash community on-board is a major coup for RIM as they bring with them a full suite of existing apps. Think Aviary or Audiotool. Imagine these running on a tablet.

If I had money to bet, I'd be putting it into RIM stocks as I think the Playbook stands a solid chance of both turning things around for RIM and electrifying the tablet market.