I recently received a Playbook from Blackberry due their developer promotion. They wanted  more developers to code apps for their platform so they sent a free tablet to everyone who published an app on the App World in a certain time. I was one of the lucky developers who struggled themselves through the publishing and approving progress and I received the Playbook a few days after they had sent it to FedEx.

I really was looking forward to use it because I always wanted a tablet, though I wasn’t expecting too much of it. I own it now since 4 days and wanted to share my thoughts about it. Warning: I probably will often compare it to the Android platform because I’m an Android enthusiast and I use it daily.

The box and outside

Besides the tablet, the box contained a charger and a USB cable. The tablet was smaller than I expected but after a while I was really satisfied and now I really like the 7″ LCD display. The display is great, it has a resolution of 1024 x 600 and bright colors, perfect for watching videos and movies. The big border around the display is touch sensitive too, which features I’ll come to later. Left and right from the display are two speakers. On the top there is the power button, volume rockers, a play/pause button and a 3,5mm headphones jack. On the bottom is a micro USB port, a HDMI output port, and port for a dock. Even though it’s not that big it feels a bit heavy (0.9 lbs /425 g). You can’t remove the cover, therefore you aren’t able to remove the battery too. There is also no slot for an extra SD card so you have to manage it with the internal storage. There are 16GB, 32GB and 64GB versions, I own the 16GB one. It also has 2 cameras. The front facing one has 3MP and the back facing camera has 5MP. You can record 1080p video with it. The image quality isn’t perfect but better than a lot phones and the shutter is pretty quick. I’ll take some pictures outside soon and add them here so that you can make your own opinion.

A few additional specs: 1GHz DualCore,  1GB RAM, GPS, Gyroscope sensor. Source. And a word about the battery. It is okay and you can use your tablet a whole day or even longer without charging. I charged it about two and a half times in those four days and my family and I used it nearly all the time.

That’s all about the outside, now about the software.

OS + Look & Feel

The UI is pretty simple. It runs very smooth with nice animations. As I already said the border is touch sensitive too and has an important function. Depending from where you swipe from the outside to the inside you have different features. The left, right and bottom border is multitasking related and the top border app related. If you swipe from left to the center you switch to the previous running app, from right to the center to the next. If you swipe from the bottom up the current app minimizes and you’ll see all running apps with the screen how you left it in a horizontal list. You can close those apps or launch a new one from the app drawer. In my opinion this is the best feature because it always works without any latency, no matter if the current app freezes or you play a CPU intense game. You always get a fluid animation and can quickly switch applications. I even like it more than the multitasking on other mobile OSes. They did a great job there. The last swipe, from the top to the center will show you a menu which relates to the current app. For example in the browser you see all tabs and an usual browser’s navigation as you would expect it. On the home screen it will show the settings.

The keyboard isn’t that good because it’s hard to reach the keys at the middle of the screen with my thumbs. If I’m not mistaken you can download other keyboards from the App World but as far as I know there aren’t many.

Home screen

On the top of your home screen is a clock, a button to launch the settings app, WiFi, Bluetooth and orientation-lock indicator where you can dis- or enable those settings and a battery indicator where you can change the brightness, restart, turn of and put it into standby. On the bottom is a dock with a few apps (customize-able) and the app drawer with all apps.

Native apps

There are plenty of pre-installed apps on it. The standard apps like: Images, Video, Music Player, Camera, Email client, a browser, contacts and calendar app which are compatible with your Google account so you can sync your Google contacts and calendar. There’s also a file manager, adobe reader, Docs To Go, Bing Maps which compared to Google Maps isn’t that great. No offence MS The installed social apps are Facebook, Twitter and Youtube but Facebook and Youtube aren’t that good designed and Twitter is just launcher for the browser. Though I must say watching videos with the Youtube app is much better than on Android, it loads pretty fast, even high quality videos. There is also a Video Chat app which allows you, yes you guessed it, video chat or just voice chat with other Blackberry product owners. I haven’t tested it yet but I’ll hopefully soon. Oh yes, and there is a really beautiful weather app.

Browsing experience

The loading time of pages is pretty standard, not outstanding. The JavaScript performance isn’t that great. I ran the Sunspider 0.9.1 benchmark and it got a total score of ~2225ms. It’s not that bad but I think with another JS engine (V8) it can be much better. Chrome would kick ass on this device but you shouldn’t expect that Google will ever care about Blackberry that much.

The browser also supports Flash (currently 11.1) which is overwhelming. Compared to the Android browser flash loads faster (on Android sometimes doesn’t even load). You can watch streams, surf on Youtube, etc. It is just working great.

All in all I like the browser, it could be a bit faster and they could rethink the layout to make a better use of the screen but I was really impressed by the Flash support.

Gaming

On the basis of a dual core you can expect a great gaming experience. I played NFS Undercover and Tetris which were pre-installed, Modern Combat and Asphalt 6 which are both by Gameloft and downloadable for free. One thing what I don’t like about playing 3D games on smart phones is that you have these detailed 3D scenes on this small display and then you obstruct the view because you have to control the game somehow with your thumbs or the accelerometer. Gaming on a tablet is much better, because you have a bigger display and see enough.

I already spent a couple great hours playing NFS and Modern Combat online multiplayer and it was a blast. If you already own a Playbook you should take a look at PewPew and Run In Crowd, those are nice too. If you know a fun game I would appreciate it if you would post a comment.

App World

App World is the name of the App Store, Market or Play Store, depending which company you send your whole money to. Basically where you download your apps This part is a little bit more critical. Even though the PlayBook is a great device with a great OS on it there aren’t many apps in the App World, or I just can’t find them. In the Android Market Play Store there is an app for everything you can imagine and then 3 versions of it.

The interface isn’t that good either. I think it doesn’t look to good and the search could be improved too. It feels like a little chaos browsing on the App World and trying to find an app. About the free – paid ration it seems that most of the good apps are paid, more than you would except if you’re used to the Android’s Play Store. But if you’re like me and don’t mind about spending 3$ for a good quality app you won’t have a problem.

The only disadvantage here is the lack of apps so for you the glass is half empty but this is now our job, developers who received a PlayBook, to fix this. The PlayBook is like an awesome car without fuel.

Other features

Another great security feature is that you see the app’s permissions at its first start. There are also checkboxes if you don’t want that a certain app has this permission. For example Facebook requests for access to your files on your SD card and the camera.

In the settings you can enable file sharing via USB and WiFi.

Conclusion

You might have noticed that the positive aspects outweigh but please mind that this is just my personal opinion. I have used it since 4 days and stuff could be wrong due the lack of research. Summarized I love it. It’s a great tablet and if you are planing to buy one I can totally support that. Before I had it I thought I wouldn’t  write apps for it but after I used it one day I was overwhelmed and it convinced me that I’ll soon begin to dig into some BlackBerry code. I also thought about making a video to show some features but I think I already explained the most important stuff.

You may heard of the extended Free PlayBook offer from BlackBerry. If not, basically if you upload an app, no matter in which language you write or have written your app, they will offer you a free PlayBook when your app gets approved. So I wanted to take the chance and grab one of these, even though it’s not an Android tablet

 chmod 777 /path/to/VMWare-Player-bundle-file 

  sudo /path/to/VMWare-Player-bundle-file 

The next step is a little bit harder and requires more time (and probably nerves) On the main page is just the Windows and Mac version, of the PlayBook 2.0 simulator. After searching the developer site I found the resources of the PlayBook for all platforms. http://us.blackberry.com/developers/resources/simulators.jsp Unfortunately after installing and running I noticed, that this is a old version. It’s 1.0.8

Then open VMWare and press “Open a Virtual Machine” browse to the directory and open the vmx file. The last thing you have to do is to set up eclipse to run your app (Window > Preferences > BlackBerry > BlackBerry Tools SDK and click on “Add…”), but this part is documented enough here.

I hope it works for you and if not don’t hesitate to leave a comment.

I was playing and searching around for how to exclude a URL from the security constraint in the web.xml file in App Engine. For my application everyone has to be authenticated to access anything in the application and I don’t want to add every URL to the pattern. So my first security constraint is just the url-pattern to “/*” and the role-name to “*” too.

<security-constraint>
   <web-resource-collection>
      <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
   </web-resource-collection>
   <auth-constraint>
      <role-name>*</role-name>
   </auth-constraint>
</security-constraint>

If you now want to exclude one or more URLs you just have to add another security-constraint and without the auth-constraint tag. This will exclude these URLs.

<security-constraint>
   <web-resource-collection>
      <url-pattern>/dataReceiverServlet</url-pattern>
   </web-resource-collection>
</security-constraint>

I’m currently “rewriting” Smart Phone to make a nice tablet layout and implement all the new features for the 1.4 release. So I started (I know a little bit late) to taking a look at fragments porting the layouts to fragments. Then my first problem appears. The text color doesn’t change to black when i set the theme to Theme.Light (or Theme.Holo.Light for v11 and above) in the application tag. I posted a question at StackOverflow. (I temporarily fixed this by setting the textcolor to black manually)

Then I ran into another problem. Fragments isn’t able to show a Aialog. If you’ve ever opened or used Smart Phone you might know that it has a ton of custom dialogs. I didn’t want to port all the Dialogs to FragmentDialogs, so I made a kinda listener interface in the Fragment which tells Activity to open a dialog. So I had the business logic in the Activity again. Later I remembered, the logic of an Fragment has to be in the Fragment, because when someone opens Smart Phone on a tablet he sees 2 Fragments in one Activity. On a phone you get just 1 Fragment and the second one is in another Activity. So what I’ll have to do is porting all my custom dialogs to FragmentDialogs, which will lead to a bunch of more problems.

After that, I continued writing at my second activity which displays all the conditions, settings and plugins in one list. I thought it would look neat if i separate these three types in three lists and put them in a ViewPager with pretty indicators at the top. I found the ViewPagerIndicator library by Jake Wharton on GitHub which is exactly what i needed. This will be my second Fragment. It should include the indicator and the ViewPager with the three lists. This isn’t really a problem now, I’m just not quite sure how I should write it, to make it scale-able and efficient. It should be a custom Fragment working like that: Fragment > ViewPagerIndicator, ViewPager > ListView, ListView, ListView

While wracking my brain about that another problem came up to my mind. On a phone I have 2 Activities. First one is a list of profiles and the ActionBar displays a “+” to add a new profile and a share button which fires the share intent. A click on a profile opens the second Activity. A list of conditions, settings and plugins. Now the ActionBar displays a pen for renaming and a colored rectangle to change the color indicator (a 1.4 feature). On a tablet i display these two Fragments in one Activity. I could just merge the ActionBar buttons, but that would overload it and I also think confuse the user. So I need the redesign the ActionBar for tablets and think of a new way to display all the actions.

I also noticed that the first Activity loads twice as long as usual, since I packed the layout into a Fragment. It could be my code, which isn’t efficient enough, but all I did is copied the existing code into a Fragment. All these problems appeared in just 2 days of trying to port my app to support Fragments. I don’t know if I’m the only one who had to face so many problems or am I just stupid.

It has been a while since I continued working in Smart Phone, because I had a lot other things to do and I also had some problem with the new ADT r14 plugin for Eclipse. But after a few days racking my brain about it, I fixed the library projects and was able to continue coding. Now I want to share the upcoming features of SP with you.

The first are the color stripes on the left side of each profile. The colors are generated randomly and will be used in a new widget to activate or deactivate a single profile. You will be able to change the color by long pressing on the profile. Take a look at the first image

Secondly I improved the widget which is included since 1.3. Previously the widget lets you activate profiles manually and showed you the last profile you activated through the widget.

In SP 1.4 the widget shows you the the last profile which gets activated either by you manually or automatically because of conditions. You also will be able to activate another profile and/or deactivate the current profile. Secondly the widget just displays those profiles which are enabled and used. As you can see the “meeting” profile isn’t enabled in the screenshot #1 and doesn’t get shown in screenshot numbero 2.

The 1.4 release will also include support for multiple languages. In this version English and German.

That’s all for now

Best,

Dominic

I know I lately didn’t blog as much as I should, but I’m trying to be more active again.

Some time ago, I wrote another ListView tutorial for Cre8ingApps, which is btw a great blog and community about mobile news and development. I decided to write another ListView tutorial, because I think, it’s the most used UI widget and nearly included in every application.

So what is this tutorial about?

As the title says, it’s about clickable widgets, in our case ImageViews, in list items. Take a look at the screenshot to know what I’m talking about. So if you’re interested go ahead, try it and if you have any questions || suggestions, just leave them below.

CLICK ME to get to the tutorial and the source code is available here: Widgets in ListViews tutorial (265)

I just published he new version of Smart Phone. I made some big improvements in this version.

The screen bug which turns on the screen every 5 minutes on some devices is now gone. I also worked hard on the location condition, I completely rewrote the location service and improved it a lot.

The biggest change in this version is the new ability to activate profiles manually through the new widget. Place the 1×1 widget on your home screen and there’ll appear a list of all profiles when you press the widget. By pressing one of the profiles it will acquire its settings.

I also published  a new plugin in the Market. The StartApp plugin launches an installed application on your phone or tablet. Download it here:

https://market.android.com/details?id=at.bartinger.startapp

It’s also open source. Grab the code here: https://github.com/Bartinger/StartApp-plugin-for-SmartPhone

That’s it! Have a smart day

Can’t wait for the next Minecraft update? Mojang released (not the official release) a Minecraft 1.8 pre-release update. Notch is happy for you to try it.

Final release at: 12th of September

How to get and install it:

1. Download the new minecraft. jar  http://assets.minecraft.net/1_8-pre/minecraft.jar
2. Go to your .minecraft/bin folder
• Windows: %appdata%/.minecraft/bin
• Linux: ~/.minecraft/bin
• OS X:  ~/Library/Application Support/.minecraft
3. remove or rename the existing minecraft.jar and copy the downloaded one in the bin folder
4. Start Minecraft and have fun.

Server: http://assets.minecraft.net/1_8-pre/minecraft_server.jar

New stuff:

• Flying in Creative mode: Double tap the SPACE bar
• Sprint: Double tap W
• Eat: Hold right mouse button longer
• Multiplayer server list

Fixes summarized:

• Clouds won’t go through buildings anymore.
• Rain and snow will now render faster.
• Skeletons now hold full-size bows.
  • Skeleton arrows originate from about their eyes to the bow, instead of above the head.
• The snout on pigs will protrude from their head.
• Pressing F will no longer alter render distance/fog, but will still be adjustable from the options screen.
• Passive mobs will randomly flee if attacked by the player or other mobs (such as Wolves).
• More Mob-To-Mob interactions.
• Armor bar moved to above hearts, due to food bar.

New features:

• At least 9 new crafting recipes.
  • Stone Brick.
    • Stone Brick Slabs.
    • Stone Brick Stairs.
  • Brick Slabs.
  • Brick Stairs.
  • Fence Gates. (<< Awesome)
• The ability to place pressure plates on fences.
• Different game modes.
  • Creative mode.
    • Flying in Creative mode (I didn’t find out how to enable flying yet)
    • Unlimited resources, instant digging
• At least three new mobs.
  • New Enderman mob.
    • They take damage from water.
    • They emit black smoke particles, and will most likely drop “Ender Pearls”
    • They teleport and attack you when you look at them.
  • New Silverfish mob.
    • Very rare
    • Will spawn rarely when mining a block.
  • New Blue Spider mob.
    • They spawn in Abandoned Mine Shafts.
    • Their attacks are venomous, and turn the player’s health yellow upon being poisoned.
    • Have a unique mob spawner.
    • They are smaller than regular spiders.
• Zombies drop a new item instead of feathers, Rotten Flesh.
• New features in the terrain generator
  • Optional NPC Villages with farms and “town borders”.
    • Possibility of players to “claim” land in villages.
    • Wells for villages.
    • Contain “Smithies”.
    • Will spawn only on flat areas.
  • Underground Ravines including canyons on the surface and ledges to walk on.
  • Strongholds, consisting of 4 new blocks: Stone Brick, Mossy Stone Brick, Cracked Stone Brick, and Iron Bars.
  • Abandoned Mine Shafts.
  • Naturally found Cobweb.
• Totally new, fractal-based biome code.
  • 7 new biomes.
    • “Mushroom biome“. which will include Huge Mushrooms
    • Rivers flowing through/in between biomes.
    • Ocean Biomes, that are deeper and larger than before.
    • Mountain biomes.
    • Swamp biome.
  • Possibly new rainforest biomes.
  • Possible Volcanoes.
  • Larger Biomes.
• New combat Mechanics.
  • Hold-to-charge bows.
    • 3 different charged states; takes less than 1 second to fully charge.
    • Fully charged bows causes the player to walk slower.
  • Critical hits.
    • When the player hits a mob while jumping.
    • When the bow is fully charged.
  • Player blocking attack animation and hostile mob attack animations, possibly more player animations.
• New farming options, more interesting farming.
  • The Cocoa Bean tree Jeb was talking about could be implemented.
  • Plantable pumpkins and melons, each with a central stem that grows to max size and spawns a fruit next to it.
  • Melon Seeds.
  • Pumpkin Seeds.
• New Food System.
  • There is now a food meter.
    • Food no longer heals directly but indirectly.
    • If the food meter is above a certain point, heals  about every 5 seconds.
  • Food will be stack able. (<< Awesome)
  • Food takes 1.6 seconds to consume.
  • There is now a food eating animation.
  • 5 new food items.
    • Cooked Chicken.
    • Raw Chicken.
      • Has a chance to “give you a disease”.
    • Raw Beef.
    • Steak.
    • Melon Slices.
  • Cooked Porkchops have a different texture.
• New achievements.
  • Kill a skeleton with an arrow at 50 meters.
  • Possibly attempting Shoot the Moon with an arrow.
• Sprinting: By double pressing the forward button, the player will move faster.
  • Sprinting will be limitless, but will deplete your food bar.
  • Hitting a mob while sprinting sends them flying about 8 blocks.
  • Jumping while sprinting boosts the jump to a length of 4 blocks.
  • Sprinting makes particles come up from the ground.
• Glass Panes.
  • Can be mined and picked up without breaking.
• Possibly Spike blocks, Jeb initially considered Spike Pistons, but then pondered making a Spike block that can be pushed by the
• Arrows will get stuck on mobs when they hit.
• Vine blocks.
  • They will not be climbable.
  • Player can walk through them.
• Improved chest model with a 3D lock and an open state/animation.
• The ability to convert Creative worlds to Survival worlds ingame. (<< Awesome)

Graphics / UI / Audio:

• C418 mentioned new Minecraft music.^[98]
• New improved lighting — day/night cycles will not require chunk updates. Lighting will be updated via a texture, whose coordinates are the block’s sky light and block light levels.^[100]
• Warmer light from torches.
• Moonlight is blue.
• New texture for Moss Stone.
• Sliders for field of view and Brightness in video options.
• Redesigned HUD, including two new features, food and experience bars.
  • Killing a mob gives you tiny flashing Experience Orbs that add to your experience.
• New launcher.
  • Possibly a web Applet launcher.
• A lot of new sounds and some changes, such as minecart sounds and shear sounds, also a change in the sound of rain.
  • New bow sounds (including hits), new door sounds, big slimes sound, and walking skeletons sound more skeletony.
• New particle effects.
  • Performing a critical hit on any mob will cause ‘sparks’ to fly.
  • Explosion particles are now shockwaves instead of smoke.
• The ability to see the world seed when pressing F3.
• A new main menu background.
• The version in the main menu will be in the lower left, instead of the current upper left.

Multiplayer:

• Multiplayer server list.
• Improved server join screen: The server join screen will feature a list of servers.
• Player List – Press tab in multiplayer and player list comes up.
• The ability to allow moderators to enter creative mode in SMP.

Modding:

• Modding Support.
• Including easier changing of the max level (map) height.
• The terrain generation code is tidier.

If you still don’t have a Google+ profile, really want one, don’t know anyone who could invite you and can’t find an “invite link” somewhere on the web. Although I don’t think so but if that’s the case I’m sharing my link with you

https://plus.google.com/i/BT_5I2gqZL0:XdhHyKqGNJU

I really really like Google+ so far. Before it came out I spent about 70% on Facebook and 30% of my social media time on Twitter. But since Google+ is so awesome I spend about 60% on Google+, 20% on Facebook and 10% on Twitter. Sorry Twitter I follow to many people on Twitter so I lost the Overview of my timeline. Maybe if I organize my tweeps and unfollow some people, I’ll use it more often.

The principle of circles is great. Share the information with just the right people. Like in life. I think your boss shouldn’t see the photos of last weekend.

The next awesome feature is called Hangout. I had a couple of Hangouts with some Android developer at Google. Reto Meier holds weekly hangouts called Android Developer Relations Hangout where you can ask them questions. I also had some Hangouts with people of the Google+ Team and I joined the Longest Hangout  a couple of times.

Typically I don’t write about topics like this, but I really liked it there and i decided to write a few words and show some photos I had taken. I stood up early in the morning on the 19th of august and flew  with 3 friends and just a backpack to Cologne. Arrived at Gamescom my first impression: OMG, this is huge. There were 5 halls full of games, game publishers and game developers.

I tested a lot of unpublished games which will come out this fall and or later, but for most of the popular games like Battlefield 3 and Guild Wars 2 the queue was too long. If you want to play one of these games you can schedule 4 hours waiting time. I played Risen 2, because I really liked the first part of this game. It’s a beautiful designed single player RPG. I also played some retro games like “Pong”, on the original console with the original controllers and “Space Taxi” on the Commodore C64.

I finally got my hands on the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play and played the most awesome game Minecraft, Asphalt 6 by Gameloft and a few others. It’s a really nice gaming phone and if you like playing games on Android and often have to kill some time, this phone is perfect for you. The buttons and the touch analog fields are great. The only problem was, that the shoulder buttons (R and L) are a bit to small, but I think you can get used to them. I also take part at a Xperia Play competition by CreatingApps where I could win one of this devices. I could make an unboxing video or some Minecraft showcase videos if i win and if you want to.

Another thing I really was excited about was the Nintendo 3DS. I never thought that the 3D effects could look so good without glasses. At first you’ll see just two images. A tip: If slide up the regulator  slowly your eyes will get used to the effect and you’ll see everything in 3D.

You know what? Which game I discovered there too? I’m sure you know it and maybe you even have it installed on your phone. Exactly! Angry Birds. I don’t know why it was there and I didn’t play it either, because everyone knows what Angry Birds is.

At the Gamescom a Case-modding competition had taken place too. If you don’t know what Case-modding is. It’s basically building a creative case for computers, xboxes and ps3 consoles. There were some pretty cool cases shown and built. For example a computer,where the motherboard was under water.

Also at Gamescom the Dota 2 International Championship had taken place with a price of 1.000.000$ for the first one and 250.000$ for the second one. I’m not a Dota player, but the final was an exciting game to watch and there were an awesome atmosphere.

I think these were a few words more than I planned but who cares

Have a nice and smart day.