Times have changed and RIM has learned a few lessons. Developers no longer have to pay RIM merely for the pleasure of developing an app, but they do still face an unclear process for deploying to a test device. For both my own sake and for other developers, I’ve attempted to do a comprehensive write up of the process of deploying a BlackBerry WebWorks app to a PlayBook tablet. It consists of ten rather involved steps, but after the first time you do it once the process shrinks down to just the two last steps.

All right – let’s both take a deep breath and get started.

Before you attempt to deploy a WebWorks app, fill out the BlackBerry Code Signing Keys Order Form. While this costs you nothing, there is a 24 to 48 hour delay to recieving your key, so try to do this as soon as possible. You will eventually receive two *.CSJ files by e-mail that will allow you to complete the rest of this process: A ‘PDBT’ token used during your debugging, and an ‘RDK’ token used to sign your completed app when you submit it to the App World. Make note of your Registration PIN as you’ll need this in a step listed below.

Step One

Download Adobe AIR SDK 2.7 and the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK for Tablet OS for Windows. (For the WebWorks SDK download, you’ll need to register before you can download the EXE installation file.)

Step Two

Unzip the Adobe AIR SDK to C:\Program Files (x86)\AdobeAIRSDK . Install the WebWorks SDK to the default location (on my Windows 7 PC, that was to C:\Program Files (x86)\Research In Motion\BlackBerry WebWorks SDK for TabletOS 2.1.0.6 ).

Step Three

Now that we’ve got all of the utilities of the SDK set up, we’ll set up our Windows PC to be able to sign applications to be deployed to a tablet in development mode. Open a Command Prompt and input the following:

cd ".\bbwp\blackberry-tablet-sdk\bin"
blackberry-keytool -genkeypair -keystore sigtool.p12 -storepass myp12password -dname "cn=My Company Name" -alias author
blackberry-signer -csksetup -cskpass mycskpassword
blackberry-debugtokenrequest -register -cskpass mycskpassword -csjpin myregistrationpin mycsjfile.csj

To explain each of these lines step by step:

• Line #1 changes the directory to the \bin folder of the BlackBerry Tablet SDK.
• Line #2 creates the file sigtool.p12 using the password value of myp12password and the author My Company Name. I’m told that commas in the author name cause issues, so avoid that.
• Line #3 sets up long term keys for communication with the signing authority server under the password mycskpassword, and generates the file mycsjfile.csj.
• Line #4 registers your machine with the signing authority server, referencing your CSK password of mycskpassword, the Registration PIN you entered in the BlackBerry Code Signing Keys Order Form (myregistrationpin) and the ‘PDBT’ *.CSJ file you received via e-mail.

Step Four

To move forward, we need an app to deploy. For the purposes of this guide, let’s deploy a sample application we know works. Download Marco van Hylckama Vlieg’s Unit Converter application from GitHub (click the Downloads button on the right side, select the *.ZIP file). Unzip that application into a local directory (for our example, C:\Development\UnitConverter\ ).

Step Five

Create a zipfile out of the contents of C:\Development\UnitConverter\ (the root directory should have config.xml in it, not a directory containing that file and others) and place it at C:\Development\UnitConverter.zip. Then run the following command which will create the file C:\Development\UnitConverter.bar:

".\bbwp\bbwp.exe" "C:\Development\UnitConverter.zip" -o "C:\Development"

Step Six

Let’s prep our physical PlayBook tablet to accept apps in development mode. Swipe down from the menu screen to reveal the configuration menu. Select Security, Development Mode, and set Use Development Mode to On. You’ll be required to set a password, which for this example will be devicepassword.

When this is complete, swipe the configuration menu back upwards and take notice of the new icon of a person with a gear in the top-right corner of the PlayBook’s display. Tap this icon to reveal the Development Mode menu. Take note of the IP Address value, as we’ll need it for the next step (for this example, we’ll use the value of 192.168.1.101).

Step Seven

Our next step is to create a debug token that allows us to place test versions of applications on our PlayBook tablet. Open a Command Prompt and input the following:

cd ".\bbwp\blackberry-tablet-sdk\bin"
blackberry-debugtokenrequest -cskpass mycskpassword -keystore sigtool.p12 -storepass myp12password -deviceId 0x12345678 "C:\Development\DebugToken.bar"
blackberry-deploy -installDebugToken "C:\Development\DebugToken.bar" -device 192.168.1.101 -password devicepassword

To explain each of these lines step by step:

• Line #1 changes the directory to the \bin folder of the BlackBerry Tablet SDK.
• Line #2 creates a debug token as a *.BAR file, requiring your mycskpassword, your keystore file sigtool.p12, the password to your keystore myp12password, your PlayBook’s PIN (About > Hardware > PIN) with the characters 0x placed in front (0×12345678), and the path and filename of the new debug token file, C:\Development\DebugToken.bar.
• Line #3 transmits the debug token to your PlayBook, requiring you to input the tablet’s IP address 192.168.1.101 and the password you set in development mode, devicepassword.

Step Eight

We need to add a blackberry-tablet.xml file to your application, and will need to retrieve two values from our packager first. Run the following:

blackberry-airpackager -listManifest "C:\Development\DebugToken.bar"

Scroll back up through the output and make note of the following values:

Package-Author: My Company Name
Package-Author-Id: gYg7vhn3Q-5hjwnvbn67ckm3uvn

Create a new file called blackberry-tablet.xml in the same folder of your app as config.xml with the following contents:

<qnx>
	<author>My Company Name</author>
	<authorId>gYg7vhn3Q-5hjwnvbn67ckm3uvn</authorId>
	<category>core.all</category>
	<action>play_audio</action>
	<buildId>1</buildId>
	<platformVersion>0.1.0.0</platformVersion>
	<icon>
		<image>icon.png</image>
	</icon>
</qnx>

Step Nine

Re-do Step Five (create a zipfile, output a *.BAR file) to repackage your app with the blackberry-tablet.xml inside it.

Step Ten

Would you believe this is the last step? It’s straightforward, too – it simply deploys your *.BAR file to your PlayBook:

".\bbwp\blackberry-tablet-sdk\bin\blackberry-deploy.bat" -installApp -password pass -device 192.168.1.138 -package "C:\Development\UnitConverter.bar"

You’re Done!

Assuming the result of your last step contained the message “result::success”, you’re done! Take a look at your PlayBook’s menus and select your application. It should start without issue and allow you to explore your app’s performance on a real-world PlayBook device.

As mentioned earlier, after this first deployment you’ll only ever have to re-run Step Nine and Step Ten to load updated copies of your app onto the device (plus the occasional upload of a new debug token, as each last 10 days).

References

• BlackBerry Code Signing Keys Order Form
• BlackBerry WebWorks SDK for Tablet OS
• BlackBerry Support Forums: Where can I find Adobe AIR SDK 2.5?
• GitHub: Unit Converter
• Development Guide: Configure signing for tablet applications
• Development Guide: Create a debug token from the command line
• BlackBerry Developer’s Blog: Getting Started Tips for BlackBerry WebWorks SDK for Tablet OS
• MELLISdesigns Official Blog: Install Blackberry Playbook Debug Token Guide
• BlackBerry Support Forums: blackberry-template.xml category choices
• BlackBerry Support Forums: Backup and Restore BlackBerry Code Signing Keys

Tweedless

Tweedless, available free of charge, is a (nearly) fully-featured Twitter client for the PlayBook, with the five icons in the top-right corner of the user interface dedicated to the Home screen (all tweets), Direct Messages, Mentions, Compose Tweet and Compose Direct Message.

What differentiates Tweedless from other Twitter applications – and is the primary manner in which the author describing it – is a Twitter app that “helps you separate the signal from the noise.” In practice, this has a third of Tweedless’s UI dedicated to a “User Filter”, where the selection of one or more of the accounts you are following allows you to view only those tweets. Tweedless keeps track of the number of times you select an account, and over time “automatically sorts who you interact with most” – permanently moving those users to the top of your list for easier selection in the future. The User Filter can be swapped (using the selector at the bottom right) to a Content Filter, allowing you to view only tweets with images, videos or links in them.

The five icons in the top-right corner of the user interface dedicated to the Home screen (all tweets), Direct Messages, Mentions, Compose Tweet and Compose Direct Message. Finally, actions you can take upon a tweet (mention, retweet, direct message or view profile) can be taken dragging your finger to the right upon a user’s profile icon to reveal a set of buttons for those purposes.

Despite the innovative interface, I find using Tweedless an uphill challenge due to three factors:

First, the absence of lists in Tweedless is a huge detractor to my Twitter experience, and is the reason I can’t in good conscience refer to Tweedless as a full-featured Twitter client. I use lists to group the accounts I follow by topic (News, Finance, Software Development) in order to bring context to the tweets I am looking at – User Filters and Content Filters can help compensate, but only partially or awkwardly.

Second, the profile icons pulled in by Tweedless appear to be sized on the small size and scaled up as needed, making the entire application look less crisp than we know is possible.

Thirdly and most detrimentally to the use of the application is that the scrolling motion in the application is somewhat broken. Dragging your finger across a list of tweets moves the list too slowly, a quick swipe upwards or downwards to view the next page of tweets instead sends you down two or three pages worth instead. There is no industry standard for expectations of what a slow or fast swipe will do on a touchscreen device, but the current behaviour is unusable. This, even more than the lack of lists, led me to investigate what the other options were for Twitter clients on the PlayBook.

Blaq

Blaq ($1.99 USD) comes to the table with a terrific and truly complete list of features: Lists, username auto-completion, profile viewing, in-app website and photo previews and even embed.ly support. The user interface is fairly traditional, with a 50/50 split between the timeline and a compose tweet input box. Icons to view the Home Screen, Mentions, Direct Messages, Lists, Compose Direct Message and Refresh Tweets are located in the bottom right corner and are easily accessed with your right thumb.

While Blaq gets many of the essentials right, one minor and one major fault mar the value of this application. The minor issue is the way that the edge of the tab that slides out as you look at a Web/photo preview or a profile overlaps the main timeline, making a couple of characters in each unreadable. The major issue is that the current version being sold on App World, 1.0.6, is completely missing the Direct Messages, Lists and Compose Direct Message functionality – clicking any of those icons is unresponsive. At the current time, Kisai Labs has not communicated an ETA on a fix via their blog or Twitter account.

Despite having at least half of its expected functionality completely broken, at just $1.99 USD Blaq is for the moment the Twitter application of choice for the BlackBerry PlayBook, especially if you have faith that Kisai Labs will expedite a fix to correct these issues. Having to deal with situations like these is a bit of an indictment of the current state of development on the PlayBook, but it is my hope that the positives of the platform prevail and better options present themselves to its loyal users.

Taking the phone back to the office with me, I got on the line with Rogers technical support who provided me with the steps used to initiate a hard reset of the phone:

1. Power off the phone. At the pattern lock screen this can be accomplished by holding down the power button, or by popping out the battery.
2. Press and hold down both volume buttons on the left side of the phone.
3. Now also press and hold the power button on the right side of the phone.
4. When the phone turns on, a black screen with only the text “I896″ and “Samsung” on it will appear. At this point, let go of the volume buttons, but continue to hold down the power button.
5. A few more seconds will elapse and you will find yourself on the debug menu. Four items will appear in the menu: “reboot system now”, “reinstall packages”, “delete all user data”, and “delete cache data”.
6. To remove the pattern lock, we need to select the third option, “delete all user data”, by pressing the volume down button twice and selecting it by pressing the power button.
7. A new screen will appear prompting you to confirm your choice. Do so by pressing the volume down button until you reach the “yes” option. Press the power button to select it.
8. The phone will now wipe all user information from its memory and return you to the debug menu. Select “reboot system now” to restart your phone and the phone will behave as if it was being started up for the first time.

References: Hard reset not working (among other things) on samsung captivate – please help!

Commonly, this criticism traces back to the lack of proper Microsoft Exchange support on the device. Sure, you could always have your G1 log in and poll your Exchange mailbox using the standard IMAP4 e-mail protocol, but then you’ve sacrificed all the features that make consumers and corporations choose Exchange over simple e-mail: The integrated contacts list, the terrific calendar functionality,  extra e-mail features, built-in security, and a first-class desktop application for when you are at your desk.

And who’s to say that criticism isn’t well warranted? With its full QWERTY keyboard rounding out the input options aside from the clickable trackball and touchscreen, the G1 was immediately considered to be a potential competitor to Research In Motion’s BlackBerry line of devices, which currently serve as the default mobile communicator for today’s workforce. A lack of Exchange support out of the gate soured many on the notion that their BlackBerries could finally be replaced with a new, more multimedia-capable, “fun” device. (Apple’s iPhone, while delivering “fun” in spades, never got more than a moment’s consideration due to its lack of a physical QWERTY keyboard.)

I’d like to say that the original reason I began to delve so deeply into this topic is that one of the key services I developer for is externally hosted Exchange mail for small to mid-sized companies, but that’s not true. The truth is, like most developers, I carry a device that allows me instant access to my work e-mail on the occasion that system issues arise that require a developer to resolve. For years a BlackBerry device served this decidedly unsexy purpose, but when on day one of the T-Mobile G1′s release we managed to snag one (despite our headquarters being located in Toronto, Canada), I was an immediate convert. I set my G1 to log in to my work e-mail every 30 minutes and attempted to wean myself off depending on my BlackBerry 8700g.

At first, I was only partially successful: The “pull” method of checking e-mail, coupled with the lack of access to my calendar and contacts, required me to hold on to both devices, even if the BlackBerry mostly resided on a desk at home. But as I began to explore the inroads on Exchange support for the Google Android OS via various web forums (Android Community being a standout), a solution emerged: NitroDesk’s TouchDown For Android and Exchange.

For starters, let me allow the people at NitroDesk to make their introduction in their own words:

TouchDown lets you access your corporate Email, Contacts and Calendar right from your Android-powered phone. Works with Microsoft Exchange Server 2003/2007 SP1 and with most online Exchange hosting providers.

With TouchDown, your office email, calendar and contacts are available right at your fingertips. You can choose how long to retain your email on your phone. You can choose to download ALL your Exchange contacts to TouchDown any time you want, but get all changes automatically every time you check your email.

You get quick access to your day’s agenda, optimized for viewing on your phone. You can choose to dismiss past events to simplify the view.

My first use of TouchDown left me with a conflicted view, as via it basic Exchange functionality did exist but was hugely limited. Today, however, a preview version TouchDown made available to paid customers (yes, TouchDown is not free, but we’ll get to that later) boasts the key feature that truly turns the T-Mobile G1 into a corporate-friendly device: Push e-mail via Microsoft ActiveSync. In layman’s terms, new e-mail is displayed on your G1 as soon as it’s received by your mail system. In my case, this meant that I no longer was made aware of important e-mail a half hour after its arrival in my mailbox.

My quibbles with the latest version of TouchDown are minimal: The user interface for the account configuration screens has a few buttons that are uncomfortably small to be pressed using the touchscreen. The lack of a “Select All” function on the e-mail view means I have to individually highlight each message I want to delete if I have a number of messages arrive at once. Lastly, the cost of the application, which I’ll discuss separately.

NitroDesk offers two flavours of TouchDown:

1. A free version, whose limitations are an Inbox-only view of e-mail with a history of one day, and read-only access to your contacts and calendar. You can download and install this version by searching for “touchdown” in the Android Market.
2. A paid version of the software, which costs $29.99 USD. This version gives you access to all of e-mail folders with a message history of as long as you’d like, full read/write access to your contacts and calendar items, and as of this writing, push e-mail via ActiveSync in the 2.0.000 preview copy of the software.

My customer support experience as a paying customer has, to date, been excellent, with even a mixup with billing on my end taken care of quickly (we mistakenly ordered two copies of the software while only needing one). NitroDesk’s developers also seem to be extremely open to input on bugs and features to be included in future releases.

As push e-mail functionality becomes official for TouchDown, I expect that more consumers and organizations that at first turned away from the T-Mobile G1 as an enterprise-ready mobile device to get on board – especially with the release of the G1 outside of the United States (1, 2) and more cell phone providers and developers get behind the platform.

To prove I’m putting my money where my mouth is, I’ll be saying goodbye to my BlackBerry for good as of Monday. I encourage other tech workers stuck with unsexy mobile devices to follow suit.

TenGO: Speeding up PocketPC text input
Operationally, I’ve had some concerns that are largely the result of my own impatience and poor handwriting. On the user input side of the story, I haven’t a chance in hell of getting my writing recognized by any device that uses a touchscreen/stylus interface. That leaves me the less than speedy option of a tiny on-screen keyboard.

A free program called TenGO, however, has taken this option and heavily optimized it. The twenty-six letters of the alphabet remain laid out in QWERTY form on-screen, but the innovation of T9 text prediction is pulled into play to reduce those twenty-six corresponding separate keys into just six. Check out the on-site video for a pretty amazing demo.

Opera Mini 2.0: Speedier than IE
Despite what FireFox users will tell you, Internet Explorer remains the faster – but more security issue ridden – browser of the pair. The Opera browser has for a long time presented a dark horse option whose primary goal has been to be the fastest graphical browser available. Opera Mini 2.0, for its part, leaves Internet Explorer for Windows Mobile 5.0 in the dust; I know what I’ll be using from my mobile browsing from now on.

Google Maps: Finally on Windows Mobile 5.0
Google Maps likely needs absolutely no introduction, but I have found its fast download time (on Rogers’ EDGE data network) and touchscreen-oriented interface to be superior to the BlackBerry app I’ve become familiar with.