marc paradise

As you may have heard, RIM released a podcast app yesterday.   RIM has now released several apps that have already had commercial equivalents released into App World:

• Google talk/live chat/et al — IM+ and one or two others.
• Twitter -> UberTwitter and others.
• Podcast app -> Podcatcher

This is a worrisome trend as individuals and companies have devoted considerable time and resources to creating apps for sale in the RIM app store — only to be undercut with free apps released by RIM itself.  What’s to say that tomorrow, they’re not going to release an SSH client?  Or any of the other apps that make this platform great?

Competition is a good thing (frankly – the commercial offerings in all cases are better than what RIM has developed) but this is kind of like they’re saying, “Hey, thanks for contributing to our available Blackberry apps and helping to build a customer base.  We also really appreciate the great app ideas. Now f!@# you.”

It really has to give any new (or existing) BB app developer pause when considering whether this is a platform worth building on.

Things are taking a bit longer than I expected to get the next bbssh release out — I’m currently struggling with converting the underlying encryption technology to the native BB platform encryption. There are quite a few benefits: it will give support for more encryption algorithms, reduce memory usage, and reduce the installable size. From what preliminary results are showing it may also be a little easier on the battery.

It’s turning out a bit trickier than I expected though. On the one hand, it’s been an uphill battle. On the other hand, I’ve been learning quite a bit about cryptography

Expect an update sometime later this week. There are other fixes included too — so if things remain stalled for too long I’ll release an update that doesn’t include the crypto changes.

For those of you using BBSSH (or midpssh), do you still need SSH v1 support? It seems that the de facto standard is v2 these days, and has been for the last several years. OpenSSH itself has been defaulting to ssh-v1 being disabled in the latest versions.

So I’m wondering if you still find yourselves connecting to servers that do not support ssh v2? If there’s no audience for it, I can discontinue v1 support in BBSSH and shave off a few KB.

Please reply below and let me know.

Here’s a kind of loose roadmap for BBSSH’s planned development combined with a planned feature list and status. As it stands now, it is actually functional to the point where I’m using it on my own BB, but I’m more forgiving of certain issues than I’d expect anybody else to be.

Expect the first public OTA download beta in 2-3 weeks.  If you’d like to play with it before then, I would appreciate any early feedback – just drop me a comment here and I’ll send you the link by this weekend (or later if you contact me later…)   If you’re not able to provide feedback and bug reports, please don’t request an early build at this time.

(continue reading…)

I’m in the midst of setting up the site and customizing the appearance a bit.  In the relatively near future, you’ll find my own thoughts here on subjects technical and otherwise.