

Kayak: We’re Very Sorry BlackBerry Users - creativityhurts
http://www.kayak.com/news/we-re-very-sorry-blackberry-users.bd.html

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sheckel
This is why commas are important :-)

We’re Very Sorry BlackBerry Users vs We’re Very Sorry, BlackBerry Users

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jwcacces
With RIM's lack of recent innovation, both parsings are correct! :)

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blocke
"Our website does work on the BlackBerry browser"

So the mobile website works with BlackBerry but not Android? Huh.

The minute you open the keyboard in Android some Javascript scroll thing
freaks out and insists on hiding all of the page content on you. It's
impossible to use and has been broken for months (both Android 2.2 and 2.3 on
sub-4.3" phones). I had just assumed it was only intended for iPhone users and
used Orbitz instead.

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makmanalp
Hey, thanks a lot for the feedback! I work at KAYAK so I'll make sure this
gets to the right people. I don't work on mobile but usually it gets QA'd on a
plethora of devices but maybe they didn't hit your corner case somehow. If
you'd like to give a bit more information such as specific device names or
other stuff, you can reply here or just post feedback at:

<http://www.kayak.com/feedback/form>

All feedback always gets read and routed and engineers quite often reply to
feedback from their area.

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daleharvey
I havent tested the kayak site, but I had problems with the page randomly
scrolling when typing on android

the fix was utterly ridiculous and I have no idea as to why this fixed it, but
it certainly helped

    
    
        body > * { -webkit-backface-visibility: visible; -webkit-transform: none; }

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blocke
Huh. That is really odd. That could very well be what's going on with the
Kayak site. I just assumed there was some helpful autoscrolling thing going
on.

Thanks for sharing!

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nonsequ
Ouch. I haven't seen a lot of companies make announcements like these. Usually
they build low-quality apps and just leave them to languish on App World. I've
heard that it's actually more expensive to develop an app for them than other
platforms? Does anybody know the relative manpower needed to develop for each
major platform - iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone?

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bstar77
Probably just one dev to maintain the platform, but it's more than that. You
then have the business stakeholders, you have the QA resources, you have the
designers, etc. When you add the whole thing up, it could be a resource drain.
It's a lot easier to scuttle the whole thing than have to worry about it every
time you want to introduce a new feature/design.

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Loic
I use Kayak a lot. I don't know the quality in the US, but in Europe it is
working great. But, I have never installed the Kayak App, why? Because of the
insane number of permissions it is requesting, like getting my unique ID, my
phone number, the right to call for me, etc. This just says: "I will not
respect your privacy." way better than any TOS.

OT: This is something I simply hate from the Apps in general (on Android in my
case), they request way too many rights for most of them.

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dhimes
I think it's important to maintain a strong, usable mobile site that gives as
much app functionality as possible. That way they won't leave their users
helpless in mobile. And, who knows? Maybe that's enough.

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blantonl
jQuery mobile and HTML5 have the potential to significantly disrupt the mobile
app industry.

However, the "App Store" model still retains significant strength in the
fulfillment of delivery of content to the phone, meaning, someone can
currently search for what they want, be given multiple options, and execute
accordingly.

Maybe what the HTML5 and mobile community needs is "App Store" type
functionality?

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gurkendoktor
> jQuery mobile and HTML5 have the potential to significantly disrupt the
> mobile app industry.

Maybe in the future. The PlayBook supports HTML5 apps and we pulled a jQM app
from RIM's store because it was so unbearably slow. Another client just wanted
a quote on "fully portable" app, I downloaded some that were built with
PhoneGap+jQM and they were terribly slow, on an iPhone 4S.

Just two anecdotes, but what seemed reasonable in desktop Chrome has not
worked out for us yet on mobile.

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dhimes
This is good to know. I'm currently wondering how I should handle the mobile
version of a web app I'm making. I had thought that people could just use the
web site, but it sounds like that's a little far fetched (I'm heavy on
javascript, light on server scripting).

Of course, I could change that for the mobile site if I needed to, but then I
have two things to keep in sync so I'd rather try to avoid that situation.

What about local storage? Seems like an app is the way to go for that.

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kennethologist
Way to make a stand kayak. This gives me confidence in my decision to not
write a mobile app for the Blackberry. I wonder if more will follow this...

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ghshephard
A couple thoughts here. First - I think most people know by now that
Blackberry is going through a bit of a down swing. It's clearly the underdog -
so what Kayak is doing here isn't particularly brave or leading edge.

On the flip side - they just signaled a huge opportunity for any entrepreneur
who wants to write a travel comparison app - you no longer have Kayak as the
competition.

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mclin
Haven't looked into it, but supposedly with BB6+ you can make apps with
HTML5/JS. I switched back from iPhone for the bold 9900. It's come a long way.

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edlea
If you're not familiar, it's definitely worth checking out WebWorks
(<https://bdsc.webapps.blackberry.com/html5/>). Even though it is advertised
to work on BB5+ it's only really worth considering at 6+.

Also, definitely worth a look is bbUI.js
(<https://github.com/blackberry/bbUI.js/>). It's still very much beta, but RIM
are doing a lot of the UI hardwork for you; without it you end up with a white
screen and have craft the UI yourself. It's a bit like jQTouch for BlackBerry.

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wiradikusuma
Hi edlea, how flexible/complete is it in terms of API compared to native Java?
(RIMlets) And how's the performance of the resulting app? (e.g. is it sluggish
like PhoneGap's?)

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anthemcg
Thats about as subtle as they can be about it.

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canistr
I find it comical that they're still maintaining development for Nokia of all
brands.

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rsynnott
Nokia had 13% of the smartphone market last quarter, putting it third behind
Apple and Samsung.

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daimyoyo
Hasn't Nokia abandoned Symbian in favor of WP7? Presuming they have, wouldn't
developing for that platform be the same as spending resources to come out
with an app for SideKick?

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ghshephard
But, you build (and support) for the market that exists today, in addition to
preparing for the market that's coming tomorrow. I think Kayak is saying that
they believe Blackberry is neither.

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thought_alarm
Android in a BlackBerry Bold case, with BB inbox, email, IM, BBM, text entry,
autotext, profiles, auto on-off, holster support, and stock Android for
everything else. I would buy it in a heartbeat, if such a thing existed.

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nodata
Why would it need to be a BlackBerry? Most (all?) of that stuff works or could
work (if BlackBerry wrote it) on standard Android.

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recoiledsnake
Big takeaway seems to be that Windows Phone is taking over BB as the third
ecosystem.

