Just a couple of weeks ago, it seemed like the BlackBerry PlayBook was borderline vaporware – with all its glass enclosure protection at press conferences and such. But yesterday RIM unleashed the BlackBerry PlayBook SDK and OS simulator to the public, showing that the PlayBook indeed is not just an mp4 on repeat.

As soon as I got home from the office yesterday, I downloaded the files offered at the BlackBerry developer site and got straight to playing around.

iPhone and Android developers might be a little miffed at first with the PlayBook simulator. It’s not an atomic program like what you have the the iPhone or Android simulators, but comes in the form of an ISO OS install image. Getting the ISO to install on Virtual Box, my first choice, proved difficult. I checked the PlayBook dev forum threads and saw that I wasn’t the only one who ran into issues with Virtual Box. With VMWare, on the other hand, it was simple a simple process of mounting the ISO on a Linux based (Ubuntu) VM with an IDE hard drive (note that it did not install to a SCSI drive – the default hard disk type).

After initially getting it installed, I found that I had to restart the VM a couple of times before it began responding properly. Perhaps it was because I was also running Camtasia in the background, but eventually I was able to click on the various buttons without the OS freezing on me.

I then took a stab at installing the HelloWorld app (that comes with the PlayBook SDK) onto the simulator. I first tried to use the Flash Builder 4 approach to install the app, but ran into some errors doing so. In fact the Flash Builder 4 IDE integration with the SDK seems hit and miss. I then turned to the command line (in Windows) and ran the BlackBerry AIR packager program, pointing to the ip address of the simulator VM as the target device. I rarely get things right the first time, so I was somewhat stunned to find the HelloWorld app install and run without much difficulty.

I captured the whole thing to share the process. This is my first tutorial video in a while, but I expect to make some more for the PlayBook and Adobe AIR. Enjoy.

You are likely registering the keyboard listener too early. It’s likely that you are calling an init() method where you register the keyboard event on creationComplete. Instead, call the init function later on. Try registering the event in the applicationComplete event handler.

More info here:
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/communityengine/index.cfm?event=showdetails&productId=2&postId=304