I just got a Blackberry for work, and I've been looking around for some simple applications. The entire experience reminds me of looking for Windows Mobile software; a bunch of small, money grubbing companies trying to nickel and dime people for things they have no business charging for. $5 for a crappy theme that you obviously spent 15 minutes on? No thanks, I'll make my own. $15 for your E-Book reader? I already made a mistake when I bought your shitty software for my PDA two years ago; I won't be fooled again. What a bunch of thieving bastards.
The good news is that I did manage to find a couple of decent applications. Here they are:
- MidpSSH: Mobile SSH client. Brian dug this one up. The source is also a pretty good reference for MIDP development.
- Opera Mini: The crackberry comes with a half-assed built-in browser. Opera Mini makes up the other half by resizing images and scaling the page so it fits nicely on your screen.
- jmIrc: Decent mobile IRC client.
Also, Blackberry Freaks and GetJar both have lists of free software for the Blackberry. Actually, GetJar is useful for any J2ME/MIDP-capable device; that's where I got most of the software for my Samsung t809. There's also midlet.org, although everything there seems to be straight out of 2002.
The best overall Blackberry forum I've found so far seems to be Blackberry Forums. I particularly like the developer forum.
I also managed to get the MIDP SDK up and running
without too much effort. You basically just uncompress the archive
wherever, then add the $MIDP_DIR/classes directory to your
classpath when compiling your .java files. It includes an
MIDP emulator which works fine for several applications I've tried, and
also seems to hate the JAD files I'm generating for no apparent reason.
Oh well. Here are the interesting MIDP and Blackberry development links
I've dug up:
- Sun J2ME MIDP 2.0 API Reference.
- Blackberry JDE on Linux: The information here looks a bit dated, but it still might be useful.
- J2ME Low-Level Network Programming with MIDP 2.0
- Bill Day's java ME Archive.
- MIDlet JAR Signing.
- Device programming with MIDP: Great three-part series on the MIDP API. The articles pre-date MIDP 2.0 but they include plenty of examples and links for additional information. Be sure to click the Print link at the bottom to view all the pages concatenated together.
Fire an email or comment my way if you've got any more useful links.