Is RIM blowing it?

by Alex Handy 02/25/2011 08:50 PM EST

Jamie Murai is sick of trying to get the Playbook SDK to work. An excerpt from the excellent dissection of RIM's Playbook SDK registration and acquisition process is included below.

As I stated before, the [WebWorks] SDK didn't come with an installer, but being a developer I obviously have a lib folder hanging around, so I just drop it in there. Next, I go to install the Playbook SDK. For some reason, it thinks that the optimal place to install software on a Mac is my home directory. Not /Developer, not even /Applications, where 99.99% of software is supposed to be installed. But whatever, I guess you have your reasons, right? RIM? Bueller? So I just manually change the default install folder, as any user friendly installer should require. Then I move on to the Playbook simulator. Oh, I forgot to mention that you also told me I had to download VMWare Fusion to run the simulator. Nothing says user friendly like making me buy an additional piece of $80 third party software to run YOUR simulator. Luckily, VMWare offers a free trial, which by the way, comes in a single installer (see what I did there?). I’m kinda of confused at this point though. The docs say that I need to install the .iso image into VMWare, but the file I downloaded from you was an installer? I decide that maybe the docs are outdated, and you’ve come up with a nice installer for the simulator that wouldn’t make me use VMWare. So I go ahead an optimistically run the installer. Turns out, you’ve decided to put the .iso image in an installer, and just have the installer copy the .iso into a folder on my sytem. Cause you know, that’s so much simpler than just letting me download the .iso directly. The next part turns out to be pretty simple, having to just create a new VM in the usual way. VMWare gets the credit for that though.

To be fair, I would wager many of these decisions were made because of the BlackBerry's popularity with government contractors. But this early in the game, such government-style regulation accommodation will naturally offend a lot of early-adopters.

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