Does anyone here own or develop on a Blackberry Playbook? Yeah yeah... I'm being serious.

The Native C/C++ SDK was a few hundred MB to download, followed by a quick install, and then just a couple of hours of wait while the code signing key was generated and emailed back to me by RIM. All in all, it took about 30 seconds to read all of the necessary instructions, and there were zero unexpected headaches. People say that it's a pain in the rear to develop on the Playbook but so far I can't see how that could be an accurate opinion.

I found some nice short samples to get up to speed on basic Playbook development. It looks like it's pretty easy to dive right in, and OpenGL ES 2 is so lean and mean that it's just awesome:
http://openbbnews.wo...s-book-samples/

But anyway, does anyone here even own or develop on a Playbook? If so, have you released anything for it? Have you reached the magical ~$1000 sales threshold that automatically gets you ~$9,000 free dollars from RIM?

Total aside: I don't think I'd charge money for any apps that I ever release, but I do wish that there was a forced charityware option that sells an app for a buck or whatever, and then transfers the money directly into an account of some well-known charity like the SPCA (awww, kittens!) or Lung Association or whatever. I mean, the RIM-generated eligible charity list could be pretty small to keep things simple / guaranteed legitimate, and the app buyer could be the one to choose which charity from the list ends up getting their buck or whatever. I wouldn't see a dime, and I wouldn't care to. Seriously, I have little faith that if I released a charityware app -- for free, like it's done now, with no forced donation option -- that many people would voluntarily make a donation like I ask them to. Perhaps the set of all developers in the world that crave this kind of forced charityware option is even smaller than the set of Playbook developers? ;)

Total aside: I don't think I'd charge money for any apps that I ever release, but I do wish that there was a forced charityware option that sells an app for a buck or whatever, and then transfers the money directly into an account of some well-known charity like the SPCA (awww, kittens!) or Lung Association or whatever. I mean, the RIM-generated eligible charity list could be pretty small to keep things simple / guaranteed legitimate, and the app buyer could be the one to choose which charity from the list ends up getting their buck or whatever. I wouldn't see a dime, and I wouldn't care to. Seriously, I have little faith that if I released a charityware app -- for free, like it's done now, with no forced donation option -- that many people would voluntarily make a donation like I ask them to. Perhaps the set of all developers in the world that crave this kind of forced charityware option is even smaller than the set of Playbook developers? ;)

I've thought about this myself. But I figured you just make the app, contact the charity and ask them to register a google Play account (or wherever) and give them the file to upload and mention it was a donation from you, the developer. I figure the organization can promote the app as a fundraiser, and you can at least have on your resume some app that sold a thousand times more copies than if you released it commercially.

[quote name='taby' timestamp='1336606246' post='4938814']
Blah blah blah.

I've thought about this myself. But I figured you just make the app, contact the charity and ask them to register a google Play account (or wherever) and give them the file to upload and mention it was a donation from you, the developer. I figure the organization can promote the app as a fundraiser, and you can at least have on your resume some app that sold a thousand times more copies than if you released it commercially.
[/quote]

This is good to know. Thank you. So basically I would donate the app to the charity and get them to publish it? That would be an interesting way of going about it.

[quote name='taby' timestamp='1336606246' post='4938814']
Does anyone here own ... a Blackberry Playbook? Yeah yeah...

Yes.
[/quote]

Cool. Thanks for speaking up. I honestly didn't think anyone would reply, so this is good to know.

Fellow Playbook developer here I'm not using their native SDK, though, I'm using Marmalade (so I can deploy to iOS/Android/Playbook at once).

The App World is an interesting place, as people are desperate for good apps. I'm about to release an app called Phyzicle on the App World: ...

It's gonna be $1.99 so we'll see how well it sells on the App World... Either way, I believe the $10,000 incentive is for BB10 (their smartphone platform), not Playbook OS.

Ok, that video is absolutely epic, and I hope that your release works out well for you! The mixing of the colours was very great.

I was not aware of Marmalade, and I'll have to check that out.

Yeah, sorry I was confused a little bit about the whole $10,000 incentive thing at first. From what I understand, they're still committed to put BB10 out for Playbook, but with the less than certain release date of some time after BB10 phones come out / some time before the end of the universe. I hope they don't take too long, because it looks pretty nifty.

Also... I tried to send you a private message, but it said that you can't receive any more messages. Is your message box full?

Ok... so, average users do realize that when you vote someone else's post down (for absolutely no reason) that it's permanently documented in a database, and that multiple GD.net folk have the ability to see who did it, right? Just checking!

...

OK, I will fire off an email to you. Thank you.

Given that you are in the habit of giving really decent replies here, I don't think that it's my place to question your opinion here. I thought that it was maybe just some random punk going around randomly downrating random posts. I do apologize for jumping to conclusions.