As you might already know I developed a BlackBerry application called Mobholicavailable on appworld
I wasn’t a pro in Java when I did that, but had the basics and knew c# very well.
The development experience was literally hell; well for one reason I’ve been used to something a lot better!

Here are a few points I think BlackBerry should improve:

* The BlackBerry Plug-in freezes a lot upon launch time (at least once every 3 times) and during normal development.
* Work on their views implementation; even if it’s Java they should work on something similar to Android in order to really separate the view and make it easier / more professional to develop on.
* Documentation is poor its been there for years now whereas in a matter of months the Android documentation ousted it in quality and quantity.
* Appworld should do more testing on the applications; I’ve seen applications on the featured list completely freeze or never worked once on my mobile.
* Appworld’s minimum application fee should be less than 2.49 euros!!! (this is beneficial for everyone!)

Now to be less negative, I’ve been working on Windows Phone 7 applications, the development experience is just 100 times better than the BlackBerry experience I had.
Richer tools are available for us (you can get them for free here) like VS 2010 Express and Expression Blend for Windows Phone 7 Beta

Training kit available for both gamers and normal application developers (XNA and Silverlight) available here.

I wrote a simple none technical article for the company I work for demonstrating a Proof of Concept of the first application I developed on WP7 for Renault. (the application has more functionalities and has changed a bit since)

If you’re an Android / BlackBerry developer I really invite you to check out the technical posts I wrote on developing on Windows Phone 7 available through this blog(specially the one with MVVM – since this is the hype,hot topic right now in .net development).

WP7 development still has a few missing things comparing to BlackBerry.
With BlackBerry I was able to access the phone’s calendar/ tasks etc..directly from the application; and I still can’t from a WP7 application.
Here’s the list of things you can do though: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff428753(v=VS.92).aspx

As a usual .net developer, I’ve been used and spoiled with various methods that are real time savers!

And to be honest while developing a blackberry application I’ve come across a lot of things that need a bit more of work in the Blackberry Java SDK.

Let’s say you want to disable a button on your application and not permit the button selection.

You see you can enable/disable the focus on the button, but you can enable / disable the button to be clicked/

So how do you disable the selection?

You might be satisfied by just removing and re-adding the button into the UI.

But here’s a simple way to overcome this small obstacle :

First of all you need to create a new class that extends from “ButtonField” :

   1:  public class MyCustomButton extends ButtonField 

   2:  {

   3:  }

After adding the constructors you need, you have to override isFocusable method :

If my button is disabled I don’t want it to be focusable so we’d return the isEditable() method.

So the class right now looks like this :

   1:  public class MyCustomButton extends ButtonField 

   2:  {

   3:     public MyCustomButton()

   4:      {

   5:          super();

   6:      }

   7:   

   8:      public MyCustomButton(long style)

   9:      {

  10:          super(style);

  11:      }

  12:   

  13:      public MyCustomButton(String label)

  14:      {

  15:          super(label);

  16:      }

  17:   

  18:      public MyCustomButton(String label,long style)

  19:      {

  20:          super(label,style);

  21:      }

  22:   

  23:      public boolean isFocusable()

  24:      {

  25:          //this is where all the magic happens.

  26:         //if my button is disabled then i don't want it to be focusable

  27:          return isEditable();

  28:      }

  29:   

  30:  }

So in order to disable our button right now and disable the focus all we have to do is call the setEditable() method and send false in parameter.

   1:  MyCustomButton btnHello = new MyCustomButton();

   2:  btnHello.setEditable(false);