Signing Servers Down Again

Posted by jiGGaK on January 28th, 2010

It’s 10:00pm EST, Jan. 28th and RIM’s signing servers have been down for the last sixty minutes. This wouldn’t be such an issue if the rest of the BlackBerry development tool suite wasn’t such a steaming pile of crap! Quite literally the only component that works - is the compiler.

The simulator doesn’t sim and the signing tool doesn’t sign. These two issues cause a serious problem.

First the simulator. If you take an OS 4.3.1 simulator and a device also running OS 4.3.1 the two will behave very differently in a few subtle, but important ways. My gripe is localized to the mmapi api (handles audio/video playback). Long story short, the simulator can’t be trusted so we have to debug device/OS idiosyncrasies on the device itself.

But hold on a second. The signing servers aren’t working so I can’t debug on the device in all it’s developer friendly glory with lack of usable debugger and lack of even something as simple as a means to read text written to freaking standard output!

Thank you RIM! Thank you for wasting my valuable time. Thank you for reminding me that no amount of money can justify writing software for this platform any longer.

(10:30, signing servers still not working)