living in the past

In the process of testing some mobile web code in a Blackberry, I’ve realized how much I hate BlackBerries. Not the device really, which I could care less about. Really, it’s the software, and by software I mean browser. I hate the BlackBerry browser.

Its rendering is inconsistent between operating system version as well as devices. Not just little inconsistencies, but really large ones that are impossible to predict. How about a very simple bit of 10-year old HTML standard as follows:

1

<input src="path/to/img" type="image" />

In testing, a device would render the image one page, but not render the image on another. On some pages, the browser would render the image in one input, but not render the image in another. So… you support the tag… sometimes? But not all the time. If the browser feels up to it at the moment.

Another bit of horrible-ness that I can’t even attempt to explain. A user clicks on a link to a restful URL. The browser goes to… a different URL. Not just using the wrong HTTP method, which I could understand. But a completely different URL? Uh… what?? What do you expect me to do with that, BlackBerry? Look forward to the constant suspense of wondering whether a phone will follow the links I suggest to it?

Anyways, I’m trying to get a BlackBerry simulator to run on my mac. My first attempt was a complete failure, so here’s me documenting steps to make sure that I can repeat any potential success.

First of all, I’m doing this on a VM of Ubuntu running in VMWare. Trying to get wine to run natively on my mac wasn’t quite a dead end… after a certain point I just realized that I’d have to use macports or something similar in order to resolve the dependencies with any sort of ease.

1. sudo apt-get install build-dep wine
2. sudo apt-get install fakeroot
3. git clone git://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git ~/wine-git
4. cd ~/wine-git
5. ./configure
6. make depend && make # walk away for an hour
7. sudo make install
8. # download the simulator from the blackberry site
• for me this was BlackBerry_Simulators_4.6.1.94_8900.exe
9. wine BlackBerry_Simulators_4.6.1.94_8900.exe /extract:c:\\
10. wine msiexec /a c:\\SimPackageInstaller.msi /qn
11. wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Research\ In\ Motion/BlackBerry\ Smartphone\ Simulators\ 4.6.1/4.6.1.94\ \(8900\)/fledge.exe

So, the big caveat is that this doesn’t work yet. The simulator loads, but the OS doesn’t run in the simulator. I’ll experiment and see if I can’t find out what’s going wrong.

Note: installing wine using apt-get did not work. I found on a blog somewhere that the package is out of date, and certain more recent fixes make wine more compatible with the simulator.

Edit: Finally got the simulator to run without crashing. It still can’t reach the network, but at least this is something:

1. wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks
2. sudo mv winetricks /usr/local/bin
3. winetricks corefonts vcrun6 gdiplus # runs as local user
4. winetricks comctl32 comctl32.ocx msls31 msxml3 msxml4 msxml6 riched20 riched30 tahoma #not sure if these are really necessary

Now… why is the blackberry browser not connecting to the internet?… from my blackberry simulator, through my windows emulator, through my ubuntu virtual machine, to my mac’s network stack. Whew.