Project Documentation

QuiltMaker  -  Platform

When the quiltmaker project was first started we initially had targed the Blackberry platform for development. As research into the platform APIs and development enviornment began the Moterola DROID phone was prepairing to hit the market. When we became aware of this release the Android application stack was evaluated so as to determine weather development would progress on Blackberry or swith to Android.

After evaluating Andriod the decision was made to continue with development utilizing Blackberry. The pricipal drivers in this decision were:

  • The current time investment already made on Blackberry RIM development.
  • The stability factor of the current verion of the RIM 4.7 runtime. It has been out for a reasonable duration and version changeover appears to have stabalized.
  • Android version 2.0 is new.
  • Stability of the Android 2.0 libraries is unknown. There are likely to be changes at this point in the libraries lifecycle.
  • The differences between the RIM libraries and environment and the DROID libraries and environment look to be reasonably large. This would require scrapping the current source code and effectivly mean staring over.

 

Having made this choice Blackberry development continued. And time passed. And finally we had the initial demo version of the Blackberry quiltmaker app. And then I went to buy a new phone!

 

And plans changed. Actually going and utilizing the various phones on the market made it clear that Blackberry would be a thing of the past. Blackberry was good for very simple apps but just did not feel like a good fit for full blown apps that were now possible on the other platforms. Additionally the total Android market ownership continues to increase, while Blackberry has started to drop.

 

So the Android environment is the currently supported platform for project QuiltMaker. Since the initial version of the application is complete it is not anticaipted that this decision will change.