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Samsung Galaxy S III: Early ImpressionsAugust 17, 2012
I bought the S III today and have had lots of fun playing with it. Overall, I'm extremely impressed. Here are some of the things I've liked, in no particular order:
Screen resolution
Similar to BB10, the SIII has a 1280x720 screen resolution, which is very pretty. These retina display class screens really raise the user experience bar.
Phone body
I have the "blue"/gray version of the phone, which has a brushed metal under plastic appearance. I like it! It looks sophisticated enough to avoid the "cheap" feeling that some phones have. For example, the Google Nexus phone that was released recently, while decent, has a bit of a "cheap" feel to it.
Thickness/weight
The phone feels fairly light, and feels thin. That's a great combo and will delight users.
Appearance and usability of UI
I like the appearance and polish of the UI. When viewing the "Apps" screen, it does feel somewhat dated / simplistic in how it's just a giant matrix of icons, but it works. The home screen is great: I like the prominent time, the temperature, the weather icons, etc. The image behind the time/weather even changes when it gets dark, which is a great touch. Having the Google search bar front and center is brilliant, even with one-click access to a voice search. I hope RIM is taking notes on that.
The widgets and feel of the UI is quite good. It feels modern, pretty, and fast. The transition between screens when swiping left/right is great -- side-to-side rotation, and smooth as butter.
Camera
One of my favourite features of the phone so far has been the picture quality. I took a few photos of our daughter while she was in the shade of our garage and I was extremely happy with the quality of the photos. I'll have to use the camera some more to get a better sense, but my feeling at this point is that it is a far superior camera to the PlayBook camera. I really hope RIM puts a solid camera in BB10, because using your smartphone as your primary camera is an awesome use case. But it's a use case that starts to quickly wilt if the camera is only mediocre.
Menu and back buttons
The "menu" and "back" buttons at the bottom light up when they're touched, but disappear when not in use. It's like magic. When they're not visible, all you see the is brushed metal look of the phone body. Cool!
Unlock
To unlock the phone you drag your finger. When your finger touches the display, it creates the effect of touching water. It's elegant and adds a nice touch.
Summary
These are only my very early impressions of the phone, so I'll keep using it and will perhaps share further thoughts later on.
Having an Android phone and iPhone in addition to a BlackBerryAugust 17, 2012
This week I decided that in addition to owning a BlackBerry, I should own an Android device and an iPhone. I feel this way because never having owned an Android or iPhone, I feel somewhat ignorant. I want to have a clear sense in my head how well various use cases are executed on each of the leading platforms.
I also think it would be useful to be able to experience the leading apps on each of the platforms. As an app developer, it's a shame that I have no idea what the top Android and iPhone apps are, or what they're like.
Another pull is that, working for Wolfram Alpha, I want to be able to play with devices that integrate our knowledge engine: Siri and S Voice. Back in October, before I had had so much success on App World, I almost switched from BlackBerry to iPhone because of Siri. Siri represents many of my CS passions converging, so not having Siri is a bit odd for me.
I bought a Samsung Galaxy S III today from Wind Mobile, and I've been delighted with the device as I played with it this afternoon. I will share my early thoughts in a separate post.
Converting PlayBook AIR apps to BB10August 17, 2012
Now that I've
gotten past the strange compilation errors I was running into, I can make some forward progress on figuring out how to get PlayBook AIR apps compiled and running using the BB10 AIR SDK.
Given how important it is for RIM to get developers to bring their PlayBook apps to BB10 prior to launch, it seems extremely odd to me that they haven't given devs a guide on how to port PlayBook apps to BB10. RIM is doing a lot of things right with their recent developer relations efforts, but this isn't one of them. I mentioned this to Garett (RIM developer relations) when we chatted for an hour, and he got back to me that a guide for converting PlayBook apps to BB10 was planned but not currently available.
So, I'm left to hack around and see if I can figure it all out...
Version of AIR: 3.1
UberschallSamsara pointed out to me that the version of AIR required by the BB10 AIR SDK is 3.1. This was a surprise to me since the installer says:
Please select the folder of the existing Adobe® AIR® SDK 2.6 or higher installation. You can download the latest AIR SDK from http://www.adobe.com/products/air/sdk.
Or select the folder of the existing Adobe® Flex® SDK 4.5 or higher installation.
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I took a look on RIM's website to see if I could find any reference to 3.1 being required and found it
here. One can find this page by clicking on the "Requirements" link below the installation button on
this page. If 3.1 really is required, then it seems like a bug that the installer says "Adobe® AIR® SDK 2.6 or higher". Others on the forum suggest that 3.1 is the highest version that can be used, so perhaps version 3.1 isn't strictly required, although the requirements page previously mentioned does explicitly say "Adobe® AIR® SDK 3.1 or higher".
The link on the requirements page actually takes you to a download page for AIR 3.3 as of August 17 2012.
Version of AIR SDK in App XML file
UberschallSamsara pointed out to me that the version of AIR is actually specified in the app XML file, which I hadn't noticed before. This probably explains some problems I ran into trying to get PlayBook apps to compile with more recent versions of the PlayBook SDK. (I had to append the
-swf-version=10 option to the
mxmlc command)
Extensions in App XML file
After examining the
Creating your first application with the Command Line Tools page, I noticed the following in the app XML file:
<extensions>
<extensionID>qnx.fuse.ui.skins.QNXSkins</extensionID>
</extensions>
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It would appear that this is now required to be in your App XML file.
Referencing ANE files when running blackberry-airpackager
After examining the
Test applications using the command line page, I noticed that ANE files must be referenced when running
blackberry-airpackager.
Code changes required to compile
The following is a log of changes that I needed to make to the code to get it to compile, and any frustrating things that I came up against.
  | Many global replacements were required, so I downloaded a Windows Grep to help out. See here. |
| Global search & replace: |
| Old: import qnx.dialog.AlertDialog;
New: import qnx.fuse.ui.dialog.AlertDialog; |
| The above (and possibly other things below) may be necessary due to changes made to the AIR framework prior to BB10, although I'm not completely sure. |
| Global removal: |
| alert.dialogSize = DialogSize.SIZE_MEDIUM;
or:
alert.dialogSize = DialogSize.SIZE_SMALL;
It would appear that BB10 doesn't support this form of dialog size specification. |
| Global removal: |
| import qnx.dialog.DialogSize; |
| Global search & replace: |
| Old: qnx.dialog
New: qnx.fuse.ui.dialog |
| Global search & replace: |
| Old: qnx.ui.
New: qnx.fuse.ui. |
| Global search & replace: |
| Old: flash.text.TextFormat
New: qnx.fuse.ui.text.TextFormat |
| The Image class no longer supports the setSize method, so .width and .height need to be set explicitly. |
Additional changes required
At this point, I was able to get my app to compile and start.
| Because the app was designed for the PlayBook, I made it landscape-only. This isn't ideal for BB10 since BB10's default orientation is portrait. |
|  | Created new graphics in Photoshop for BB10. |
| None of my labels were showing up because the textWidth property of Label was returning NaN. |
| Forum post
This forum post has since been answered and has got me up and running, although I'm still confused as to whether this is a bug or by design. I think it's a bug. |
Once I got this far, things roughly worked. Additional things that needed changing:
| I used a NavigationPane on the Help screen with a "Back" button rather than my home-brewed "Done" button. |
| I struggled quite a bit trying to get scrolling working on the Help screen. The scrolling mechanisms I was using on the PlayBook didn't work in BB10, and the scrolling mechanisms in BB10 took some cajoling to get working. Looks like RIM may have some bugs to fix in this area. |
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