There is a way to get Blackberry to be built and signed, on Mac, Linux & Windows. Heres how:

BB Ant tools

Need I say more? Well for the most part no, these tools work exactly like described. All you need is the JDE bin and lib folders, and the ant tasks for bb-ant-tools.

However if you need to get the signing tool to work, there is a little bit of info you need to know:

The signing tool looks for 2 files: sigtool.csk and sigtool.db
These must be in the bin folder for the JDE, alongside the SignatureTool.jar.
If your on windows, this works fine. If your on mac or linux, this doesn’t. Why? Because the SignatureTool is stupid.

It looks for the files like this: “..\bin\sigtool.csk”. So on anything that doesn’t use \ for dir seperators, this doesn’t work. You can trick it though, by making a softlink:

% ln -s bin/sigtool.csk bin\\sigtool.csk
% ln -s bin/sigtool.db bin\\sigtool.db

The signature tool now finds the files, yay!

Most people think the signature tools are restricted to your machine. However they are not. The csk and db file can be put on any machine, and the signatureTool will work. Be careful you don’t distribute your registration files though, because thats what RIM use to trace a malicious application.

For our development, I have put the JDE’s bin and lib folder into our subversion repository. So all developers can sign and build without needing to install the JDE, and it doesn’t matter what OS they are running either :)

Hope this is useful to someone, because theres not much info out there on BlackBerry development on other OS.

Posted: April 28th, 2008 under Blackberry, J2me.
Comments: 2

I asked myself a question: “Hmm, I wonder if its possible to sync my N95 with my mac”. My answer: “Doubt it”…

Funny that, I am now not only able to sync my N95 with my Mac, I also don’t need todo anything because it does it all automatically when I move my N95 within bluetooth range of my Mac. I love my Mac :)

For those wondering how I did it, I followed this useful guide that pretty much walked me through it. To summarise what you need from that post:

1. iSync

   This was already on my Macbook with Leopard.

2. Nokia N95 plugin for iSync

   This was probably the only step that caused me problems. The latest version of iSync is 3.0, and Nokia’s iSync plugins are only for 2.4. So in the end, I had to purchase a plugin from here. It was only 8 pounds though, so for me it was well worth it.

3. Home Zone

   This is what detects when your device gets in Bluetooth range and starts a script. You can get it from here.

4. Automator app for the sync

   You can get this from here. You just need to unzip it, and put it in your Applications folder (or somewhere you can find it).

I recommend following through the guide though, its pretty straight forward :)

Posted: April 10th, 2008 under Mac.
Comments: none