Supported Platforms

When the quiltmaker project was first started we initially had targed the Blackberry platform for development. As research into the platform APIs and development enviornment began the Moterola DROID phone was prepairing to hit the market. When we became aware of this release the Android application stack was evaluated so as to determine weather development would progress on Blackberry or swith to Android.

After evaluating Andriod the decision was made to continue with development utilizing Blackberry. The pricipal drivers in this decision were:

• The current time investment already made on Blackberry RIM development.
• The stability factor of the current verion of the RIM 4.7 runtime. It has been out for a reasonable duration and version changeover appears to have stabalized.
• Android version 2.0 is new.
• Stability of the Android 2.0 libraries is unknown. There are likely to be changes at this point in the libraries lifecycle.
• The differences between the RIM libraries and environment and the DROID libraries and environment look to be reasonably large. This would require scrapping the current source code and effectivly mean staring over.

Having made this choice the currently support platform for QuiltMaker are Blackberry mobal devices. In particular the initail app release is sized specifically to operate on the 9000 family of phones such as the Tour 9630 smartphone.