Life by Bits & Numbers

I have just signed up for the early pick developer program Palm inc is having for the developers. I have missed the window a little, since the submission process started about a week ago, but I think with my wast experience with developing for mobile devices and having diverse development platforms (I develop on Mac (OS-X)  and (PC) Windows  pretty much simultaneously, leaves me pretty good chances to be admitted.

WebOS is supposed to be at least as appealing as Android and iPhone. I personally like much more Android development than the iPhone development, but this is probably due to openness of the Android and the fact that I actually have quite successful application for Android, while iPhone development didn’t result in end user product just yet. I am not even mentioning the Blackberry development…

You can submit the application here

I was contemplating quite a lot about the title for this post. Originally I wanted to give it the title of “Why developing for Blackberry sucks” but then I thought it might be too harsh and does not really reflect the content of the post which is about comparing the experience of developing for Android and experience of developing for Blackberry and settled for the current title. There were other titles revolving in my head, but all of them were just variations of  the original “why developing for Blackberry sucks”

I have been developing for Android for some time and lately I have been working on developing for Blackberry and I must say development for Android wins hands down in all aspects. Many times, especially frustrated with Blackberry buggy IDE or other cumbersome experience I wanted to write this post, but I had to find the time for it.

So what is so bad about Blackberry development? It starts at the very basics – development environment. Google has developed a very nice plugin for Eclipse which works very well and even has the basics of support for visual editing of user iterface screens. RIM – the company behind Blackberry for a long time had their own development environment – JDE. Written using basic SWING components, there’s no need to mention how bare boned and outdated it looked. They have recently introduced Eclipse plugin as well, but it is pretty buggy and half baked. It is hundreds times better than the first version of the plugin, but it is still from being stable and feature rich.

Then we have the emulators – gosh, why do I have to restart the emulator everytime I want to test a new build? It can take up to a few minutes to restart the emulators for the more advanced models. To feel the pain, just imagine the nightmare of programming the UI for Blackberry in that setup. And no, there is no visual helper that can show the layout quickly, not to mention visual builder.

The compiler, or more exactly the packager – “rapc” has many times weird problems and behaves like a whiny child with lots of attitude problems. Same goes for the MDS server emulator.

Compared to Android, this can be nightmare. Yes I’ve had some issues and observed buggy behavior with aapt while developing for Android, but it was quite easy to resolve. For the UI part of the development, Android beats Blackberry as well. Constructing layout using XML is much easier than writing actual Java code. (Apple had actually went one step furthergiving the developers visual tools.)

Localization is much easier in Android as well. Besides conceptually being easy, the support of the Eclipse plugin for localization is half baked and buggy and what’s most important, it is not that easy to find documentation on how to implement localization for Blackberry in Eclipse.

The last but not the least (and in fact probably most important) is the vibrant, enthusiastic and active community of the Android platform. It is so much easier to find answers to any problems you have while developing for Android. I was a little considered about Android being all open source in a sense that there is no central authority with central responsibility for certain things, and Blackberry has all this and it turns out that what many enthusiasts can do, easily outweighs any size company organized or not.

So, what is essentially ad aggregation network you might wonder. You certainly know ad network businesses. Even if you think you don’t, you encounter them everyday. One of the largest ad networks is the Google Adsense. Another example of huge ad network is DoubleClick, well, Google owns this one as well.

Publishers can sign up with an advertising network, place a snippet of code on their website, ad supported desktop application, or recently added mobile applications on iPhone, Android and Blackberry. Once the appropriate code snippet has been placed, the ads will start to flow to your visitors/users. You don’t have to worry virtually about anything except how to drive more traffic to you website/application and optimize the ads to give you best revenue. And that in fact makes a lot of sense to the publishers, since worrying about those two is quite enough to begin with and should be the only concern of the developer and/or publisher. Using advertising network relieves you from worries about where to get advertisers, how to bill them, implement an advertising platform so that you can track what is going on with the ads  etc… etc…

Let’s take a glimpse into the history of online advertising. (All said, also applies to software advertising as well, but online advertising accounts for such a large portion of the “computerized” advertising, that I will just mention “online” advertising).

Since the appearance of online advertising, certain companies understood that being the mediators between the publishers and advertisers is very solid and profitable business model and many companies made big utilizing this business model and still continue to make great profit out of this business.

Those advertising platform companies did not appear right away. There was a considerable amount of time when advertisers and publishers will “manually” find one another and negotiate rates. The usual business incentive quite unsurprising applied here as well. If you were a small publisher, it was up to you to try and find advertisers to sustain you online business model. However if you were reasonably large publisher, advertisers will line up for available space on your website.

You can imagine what a pain it can be to find an advertiser if you are a small web publisher. You would have to spend considerable amount of time solving this problem, instead of worying about improving your publishing media. This deficit was identified when the problem become large enough to be noticeable and to be profitable. Companies started to aggregate advertisers and publishers and act as a mediator (or the middle man) usually in highly transparent manner for both advertisers and publishers.

When you concentrate on doing one thing, you would usually do it much better than if you would be concentrating on doing several things.  Since those mediator businesses were concerned just about one task, they could offer much reacher experience both to publishers and advertisers, suplying advanced management and statistics tools. Advertisers were getting tools to make their campaigns target more specific audience and publishers in turn could receive much better revenue for the traffic.

Now we getting to the present where online advertising seems to be outgrowing the current model and requiring additional layer of aggregation. That’s where the ad aggregation and mediation networks come into play. Those networks do what ad networks did in the past. They aggregate advertisers and publishers, but instead of direct aggregatio, those mediator networks aggregate another ad networks. Those are essentially meta ad networks.

It would be interesting to see how successful those meta networks will become with time. Right now it is too soon to tell.