Comment by HorizonXP | Hacker News Reader

Comment by HorizonXP | Hacker News Reader

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I've been using a device for several months, and have been developing on BlackBerry 10 for even longer. It's a joy to use and develop for.

I write most of my apps in Python, and they work beautifully. I'm able to rapidly prototype and make changes as needed. Having done a lot of Android development, I can say the BlackBerry development tools and methods are actually easier and better to use. I think iOS dev is still more mature though.

Sales for my app have been decent. I need to push out an update soon, and do some more marketing to help it out though.

As a user, the device is great. I'm running the release OS on a Dev Alpha B, but I'll be getting a limited edition device once I ship this prototype back. It's smooth, fast, and works the way I expect it too. Again, having several Android devices, I can say that that OS never worked quite the way I did.

Could you give more details as to how you develop with Python? Is it done via PySide? My impression was that you could only use C++/Qt, HTML5/JavaScript or Adobe AIR for BB10. I plan to get a Z10 soon with the intention to port an application from Windows Phone along the way. I was mentally preparing for C++, but if Python works good enough then I may skip C++ altogether (I did some small PySide apps in the past, but this time I'd like to learn QML).

There are two approaches to using any interpreter. One is to using python wrappers and existing python GUI toolikits simply by using the "official" QNX/Python hook entry point into the app lifecycle. [0]

The other is to go deeper and integrate with cascades UI and process messages between the QML/Qt framework and a python event loop. [1] Project going this route can be found at http://hg.microcode.ca/blackberry-py/src/

Other "semi-supported" interpreters include Lua and Erlang. [2] I'm sure someone has a ruby vm by now.

[0]: http://peterhansen.ca/blog/bbx-python-direct-entry-point.htm...

[1]: http://peterhansen.ca/blog/blackberry-tart-preview.html

[2]: https://github.com/blackberry

BlackBerry-Py is the project I'm currently using. More specifically, the Tart branch.

(Disclosure: I'm one of the lead contributors.)

>I write most of my apps in Python, and they work beautifully.

Ah! If only you could code android apps in python. That is a plus for BB in my book.

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