Hearing about the free Blackberry Playbook offer, I’ve decided to jump on the bandwagon and see what the platform has to offer and how it is to work with. Its running on the Adobe AIR platform, which I am not familiar with at all. I did some Flash and Actionscript development for a project course in university several years back. It wasn’t anything extensive and I haven’t done anything since. I figure its a good chance to look at what’s new out there. However things are not off to a good start. Let me highlight a point with the Tablet Simulator. When you try to install it on a 64-bit Windows machine you get this message:
Win64 not supported
The author of the package you are installing did not include support for this platform
I immediately recognized this as an installer issue since I’ve seen this problem with other softwares. But I was expecting better from a big player like Blackberry. Especially after someone complained about the SDK installer having the same issue a month ago. They did manage to create 64-bit compatible installers for the SDK since I didn’t have any problems installing that. But no one bothered to check the Simulator installer for the same issue. This is not very developer friendly, especially for a company just breaking into the Tablet market and trying to play catch-up with the competition.
I don’t understand how companies can casually overlook 64-bit platforms as they represent the future and many developers have already jumped on board. Its understandable if this was for a consumer product and they didn’t want to support 64-bit systems. But this is a product specifically designed for developers. If you’re not making things easy for your target audience, then you’re doing something wrong.
After some searching I found a post by another developer who came across the same problem. (BTW, there don’t seem to be too many articles about this). I followed his suggestion and opened the installer with 7-zip. Inside there browse to
InstallerDataDisk1InstData
and extract the contents of Resource1.zip. Inside Resorce1 go to
$IA_PROJECT_DIR$installerdata
and the ISO file that we need will be found sitting there. The ISO file is meant to run on VMWare Player. So clearly it has no 32-bit/64-bit architecture issues. Its just the installer that Blackberry couldn’t bother fixing. How stupid is this.
Update: As you can see from the image at the top of the post, I was able to finally get the Simulator running. This just confirms that the Simulator indeed works on 64-bit machines. Its just the installer which doesn’t.
