• ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
    18·
    6 hours ago

    Kids today will never know the joy of writing apps for Blackberry. You wrote them in Java, which was cool and the gang, but when you tried to compile your app and deploy it to your test device, every library module you incorporated into your app had to be signed independently by RIM’s signing servers. If you were lucky this took a few minutes; if you were unlucky it took 45 minutes to an hour. If you were really really lucky it never happened at all because one or more of these signing servers were completely down, and then you could just tell your manager that the signing server was down and go home for the day.

    And this would happen even if you’d only changed a single line of code. I got in the habit of making an enormous number of changes before running and testing anything, which is obviously not an ideal practice but was completely necessary in this case. I would also sometimes roll my own code to avoid having to include a particular module. My custom UI, for example, needed to use trigonometry functions but these were part of one of the cryptography library modules which were especially notorious for taking forever to sign. So I wrote my own sin() function instead.

    This was probably the main reason Blackberrys were murdered by iPhones, even more than their tiny screens with 16-bit color that RIM refused to upgrade until it was too late. iPhone app development also sucked thanks to its antiquated C-style language, but it was still lightyears beyond Blackberry. RIM was going around offering cash bonuses to developers to write apps for them (my company was offered $30,000 by them) but it still wasn’t even close to being worth it.

    • tetris11@feddit.ukEnglish
      3·
      6 hours ago

      Oh gosh you just triggered my memories of the maemo coding scene. Apps were not sandboxed despite it being a linux device (read: just assign every app its own user…), so to get anything published in Testing you’d wait hours for the build server to tell you that your app did not compile (despite it compiling fine in the SDK) and then a hours to days to get a green light that the app will be uploaded into the repo.

      Small changes/hotfixes? Forget about it, same process

  • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
    52·
    22 hours ago

    Hey look, they have 2 9’s. Sure they’re not next to each other…

  • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
    10·
    18 hours ago

    Why’s the news presenter holding a mic whilst he also has a clip mic on his suit jacket?

    Oh… and github was down?

  • 4am@lemmy.zip
    18·
    21 hours ago

    $ send_bot_cmd.sh --attack GitHub.com --waitfor=up

    Oh no, whatever will they do?

  • printf("%s", name);@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    2·
    21 hours ago

    A “gitt community” (double “t”) is, in one of my first languages, a community that thinks highly of themselves while not actually being a noteworthy community at all.