Blackberry software development and global warming

How are Blackberry mobile devices and global warming related? Well it’s a tenuous link but regular EDN Europe contributor David Marsh recently wrote an article entitled “Blackberry sweetens SCADA solution” that did just that. David led with mention of a study that presumably proves that observed global warming can’t be tied to solar activity thereby presumably indicting “carbon-heavy human habits.” Now I’m not going to touch that argument, but David’s story actually moved on to focus on wireless schemes to implement SCADA (supervisory controls and data acquisition) activities in installations such as remote water-quality-monitoring stations. It turns out that a Blackberry and a GSM link offer one such option.

Now I read the article with interest because it was clearly applicable to any number of embedded control applications. But I also read with interest because I’ve been disappointed in the availability of third-part applications for the Blackberry. A few months back our corporate IT folks forced me to move from a Treo to a Blackberry. It was very easy to find a broad variety of applications for the Treo such as a voice recorder application for capturing interviews that I conduct in my everyday job.

When I received my Blackberry 8800, I did a brief search for such applications and came up empty. I had read that the mobile carriers preferred that device makers not support third party applications, and I attributed my lack of success in my search to that mistaken notion. Then along comes the aforementioned article and I find that actually you can download Blackberry software development tools for free.

I had been looking in the wrong places obviously, although I thought I had performed some Google searches. But Research In Motion (RIM), the maker of the Blackberry doesn’t make things easy. Go to the main RIM site at www.rim.com and you’ll be hard pressed to find an indication of third party applications or development tools. On the other hand, the URL na.blackberry.com will lead you both third-party software and development tools.

I suspect one of our EDN editors will do some hands-on work with the Blackberry as an embedded system controller at some point. Meanwhile, I’m just happy to have found a voice recorder application from a company called Shape Services. I’ll report on how well that recorder works in a few weeks.