daniel bigham.ca

This section lists all blog posts, regardless of topic.

ActionItem Icons
July 10, 2012

It would be lovely if RIM provided us with some standard ActionItem icons, such as the ones used in their sample apps and screenshots of first party applications, but as of yet there aren't any.

Here are a few icons I have recently created. Feel free to use them.

Delete: (see here)

Instructions:

Bug: Read-Only TextArea Triggers Keyboard
July 10, 2012

In creating an instructions screen for my Baby Names app, I discovered that the Label control doesn't yet support multi-line text, and so a TextArea control must be used with editable: false.

But touching the TextArea to scroll it causes the keyboard to appear, which would appear to be a bug, so it's not a very good workaround.

To reproduce:

import bb.cascades 1.0

Page {
    content: Container {
        background: Color.create ("#FFFFFF")
        layout: DockLayout {
        }
        TextArea {
            editable: false
            text: "A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P"
        }
    }
}

I've created a Jira ticket on the BB issue tracker:

https://www.blackberry.com/jira/browse/BBTEN-102

Tax Forms
July 10, 2012

I recently received an email from App World on the subject of setting up tax forms. They provide a PDF with some information on the reasons for submitting the W-8 tax form for the United States, which is that otherwise developers are required to pay the maximum rate of 30% for sales into the US.

So I started investigating, and it is a bit of a rabbit hole.

The W-8 form asks for you to enter a tax identification number. But I don't have one, so another form needs to be filled out and mailed to the IRS. But that form requires you to know information about tax treaties between the US and Canada, so you are directed to a giant document detailing various tax treaties between the US and other countries, which I don't understand.

And on top of all that, one of the forms requires that you get a photocopy of your passport notarized by a notary public.

What a mess. Knowing how many Canadian devs there are, I'm not sure why RIM doesn't provide some more explicit guidance on whether or not it is worth going through all of this trouble. Why not tell devs directly the scenarios in which it makes sense to go through all of this trouble? It seems very inefficient for each developer to have to do all of this investigation -- it's duplicated effort.

I've posted this on the forums:
http://supportforums.blackberry.com/t5/BlackBerry-App-World-Development/Tax-Forms/td-p/1805935

And I've emailed: customersupport@blackberrycommerce.rim.com

Update: See here for some answers

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