BlackBerry use of the simulators

Question

Hallo,

on the BlackBerry homepage you can download different simulators for every different model. There are a lot fo simulators there...

My question is, how do you develop BlackBerry applications:

1. do you use the simulators - can you relay on them. If an application works on the simulator, does it works 1:1 on the phone?
2. Do you develop for every model a different UI, as the screensize is different?

Thanks you very much for your replay?

Answer 1

1.simulator are meant for this purpose only.. 2.No we dnt need to create different UI for different screen size

use this on your master page

<meta name="viewport" content="initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;" />

Answer 2

1. In most cases application behaves same way. However, there are functionality like networking, drawing performance, io performance, app permissions, which should be tested on the real device.

2. You can use custom layout (just override sublayout on screen or manager) and commit with one app version for all models. But if there are skinned controls, background etc its better to store resources in separate folders according to screen size of model, and use them during automate build with ant (bb ant tools)

See also
What is the best practise in blackberry development for reaching the widest range of smart phones? Blackberry User Interface Design - Customizable UI?

Answer 3

There are a number of important differences between the simulators and the real devices, some of them are:

• Enforcement of code signing restrictions on some APIs (can be enabled on the simulator, but off by default)
• Nuances of opening network connections (its more complicated if you want it to always work on a real device)
• Performance of storage I/O (i.e. loading/saving data from an SD card)
• Performance of floating-point math (real device has no FPU, so its slower)
• General performance (simulator tends to be faster, for the most part)

So for 99.9% of your development, the simulator is fine. But you should still test on a real device. Also, please make scalable UIs that dynamically size themselves based on the screen size. Every time I see a device-size-specific UI, it makes me want to strange the developer. (because they either have a zillion builds of their app, it bloat it all the way out with tons of fixed-size graphics)