[varunsain]

Can RIM stop with all the glossy design business and start with some serious work on their software development?

Things are getting complicated beyond explanation on the pb.. After months of waiting for the OS2.0 i have a feeling everyone will need to wait for a few more months for BB10 phones for everything to work rite..

[aviraldg]

In my (humble) opinion TAT is currently one of the best things about the Playbook. TAT designs and makes awesome experiences (including all of Android, originally.) What RIM needs to do is to make more of their concepts into actual apps. I'd be willing to pay for them. Others would too.

(This, from a developer)
I've had a look at all the different ways you can create apps for the Playbook and potentially BB10 too - and the truth is, there is simply no "good" way to make native apps. The native environment has no UI toolkit, and isn't suitable for developing anything but games. TAT Cascades (their new UI framework) is the only thing that can fix this.

RIM needs to get TAT to work on products, not concepts.

[sleepngbear]

Oh he11 no ... I want more TAT. Let's get that SDK wrapped up and get to work on TAT-ifying the rest of the delivered apps on the PB.

[BB.David]

I don't know, seems we've being hearing about TAT this, TAT that over the past year... but we never actually seen anything come out of it.

Is there anything on the current PlayBook OS that's from TAT?

[Hawkeberry]

Scrapbook I think

[aviraldg]

BB.David - Calculator, Scrapbook, Videos, Pictures, <others I may not know of>. The rest are all concepts (but working concepts - check out MWC demo videos for example.)

Cascades, which will be the primary UI toolkit for PbOS and BB10 was/is being developed by them.

[kb5zht]

Oh he11 no ... I want more TAT. Let's get that SDK wrapped up and get to work on TAT-ifying the rest of the delivered apps on the PB.

I totally agree, and also we need to simply see some of tat's stuff executed and released.

On the recent cb podcast Kevin said he calls TAT "Teasers are Torture" because we keep seeing demos but nothing released. Rim NEEDS this stuff in their products. UI improvement is but one of the many huge steps they need to get back into the game.

[peter9477]

As someone pointed out a while ago, it's not like the people doing the demos are necessarily the same group that's involved in the core work with Cascades or the apps. Whipping off a few demos isn't a major project for them, so I'm pretty sure it's not slowing them down in any significant fashion.

It comes down to:

(a) don't do any demos and take, say, 6 more months to be ready, or
(b) do cool demos to keep people excited and take, say, 6.1 more months to be ready.

I know which I'd choose, in their shoes.

[greatwiseone]

Give TAT a break. I think they actually like doing stuff like this instead of creating the Cascades SDK and designing BB10 UI interface. TAT seems to have a very different culture from RIM, and I think these projects allow TAT people to keep being creative. It's interesting to see at DevCon that they have a CANADIAN as the Director of Advanced UI working with TAT in Sweden whereas in most of their acquisitions, the CEO of the previous company (like Torch Mobile or QNX) stays on to run that side of RIM's business.