For me as developer that creates apps for the BlackBerry Java environment one of the best news of this years Devcon was, that the Java development tools are now available, as a first tech preview, for Mac OS X. I switched to Mac OS three months ago and the only reason for firing up the VM were the BlackBerry tools.

So I downloaded the tools when the were published and installed them. I was quite enthusiastic but my anticipations were not quite met. The current version only includes the OS6 library but our product timr needs to be released for OS5. The second drawback was that they just ported the rapc compiler but not the fledge simulator. The marketing statement on the BlackBerry site is:

On device loading and debugging over USB. No BlackBerry Smartphone Simulator required

Which means it is not possible to run it in the Simulator because there is no simulator. I hope they will port the simulator to Mac OS soon too otherwise the environment is not very useful.

The second thing they announced that I found very interesting was that they released their WebWorks SDK on github as an open source project. I like this decision a lot because I am a huge fan of open source and github - I hope I got the time to participate in this movement and a lot other developers will do so too.