[Shanerredflag]

Quick question and I apologize in advance if this is a totally simple thing...I'm not a dev and am curious:

1) Bb10 is a totally new OS, as such did every app need to be re written to work on it?

2) When iOS is replaced as it inevitably will be what becomes of those 700k plus apps written for it...will every app need to be re done for their new OS thus starting all over again on the app count?

Thanks in advance...apologies if this is a stupid question.

[kevinnugent]

1) yes
2) yes - unless they make it backwards compatible which is likely.

[Shanerredflag]

Thanks much.

[Thunderbuck]

The upside: because this essentially a new ecosystem, it's going to be the better part of a decade before apps become obsolete. In the case of iOS, they're going to hit a wall. Soon.

[RubberChicken76]

Quick question and I apologize in advance if this is a totally simple thing...I'm not a dev and am curious:

1) Bb10 is a totally new OS, as such did every app need to be re written to work on it?

Somewhat. I think of it under the hood as BlackBerry Tablet OS 3.0. BlackBerry OS apps won't work on it at all. If I remember right, PlayBook apps can be ported quickly. It also supports many Android apps, so some of them will run in the Android Player. Also, it supports some of the standard game libraries so many of the games can be ported over quickly.

2) When iOS is replaced as it inevitably will be what becomes of those 700k plus apps written for it...will every app need to be re done for their new OS thus starting all over again on the app count?

I actually don't know. When Apple introduced Mac OS X (iOS's big brother) in 2001 or so, they actually had a "classic mode" that would enable it to run the original Mac OS apps. It was in several versions of OS X before it was retired. They might take that approach again. Maybe not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Environment

[Shanerredflag]

Thanks for the insight gentlemen...Mr Thunder are you ready for Rendezvous?...man I miss that festival!

[Thunderbuck]

Thanks for the insight gentlemen...Mr Thunder are you ready for Rendezvous?...man I miss that festival!

Heyyy! I'm guessing you lived here? Yeah, we're always up for a party here!

[mikeo007]

The upside: because this essentially a new ecosystem, it's going to be the better part of a decade before apps become obsolete. In the case of iOS, they're going to hit a wall. Soon.

Just wondering...what part of iOS (in your mind) will make its apps become obsolete exactly? If you take a look at the APIs available on BB10 and the APIs available on iOS, they are extremely similar.

[Thunderbuck]

Just wondering...what part of iOS (in your mind) will make its apps become obsolete exactly? If you take a look at the APIs available on BB10 and the APIs available on iOS, they are extremely similar.

I'll admit, it was more of a generalization than anything else. Platforms age, and sometimes new features come along that don't really work with the original platform, so there needs to be kludgy shims built to make it work. Build enough kludgy shims and the whole OS starts to bog down after a while.

BBOS hit its wall a few years ago, hence the effort to get a QNX-based OS ready. Apple can certainly try to apply a new UI to iOS, (or new UI features, at any rate), but they too may find themselves needing to look at overall architecture eventually.

[mikeo007]

I'll admit, it was more of a generalization than anything else. Platforms age, and sometimes new features come along that don't really work with the original platform, so there needs to be kludgy shims built to make it work. Build enough kludgy shims and the whole OS starts to bog down after a while.

BBOS hit its wall a few years ago, hence the effort to get a QNX-based OS ready. Apple can certainly try to apply a new UI to iOS, (or new UI features, at any rate), but they too may find themselves needing to look at overall architecture eventually.

I think that more than anything, it depends on the foundation that is being built upon.
Look at Microsoft Windows. Sure, it's had its off moments, but for the most part has functioned very well. A lot of Windows hasn't changed since the days of NT 4, it it still looks and performs well, with no end in sight.

Insert another desktop OS (OS X, Linux) and the story remains much the same.

BBOS is an example of how not to do it. The OS was limited from the start, and the design was rather in-hospitable to the idea of apps.
That's why they've moved onto QNX and Neutrino, they needed a fresh start, there was no use in pumping additional work into the Java based OS.

iOS is based on Apple's fork of the Mach kernel which has performed very well in Apple's desktop OS and performs equally well in BSD. There aren't any apparent areas where Mach or OS X are lacking.

[KermEd]

My personal thoughts here but...

Apple hasn't done a thing except lose money since the loss of Steve Jobbs. The last few contributions they have made are well... Uninteresting. And uninteresting + technology don't mix well.

With that said, you can build cross platform apps. On average they don't work "quite as well" but they cover more ground.

Marmalade, AIR (will eventually become HTML5), HTML5 (jquery / sencha / phonegap), C++ and QT (in some cases) are of varying cross platform abilities.

Apples objective C is proprietary iOS thing that much like Mac OS - has little impact on the world when moved off a Mac. Just as Cascades and BBUI are of little value to anyone not using BlackBerry. And ADT (Android) is of no real use to other platforms either other than Android.

You just need to pick smart. Sometimes it makes sense to select a language you are less familiar with if you don't want your code to expire in a year. No matter how much the 1-os proprietary language has been prettied up.

Ed

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