I spent the bulk of last night and early this morning trying to set up an environment for building an AIR app for the Blackberry Playbook using Flash Builder, the AIR SDK 2.5, the Blackberry Playbook plugin SDK, and the Blackberry Playbook simulator. While the Blackberry website had a lot of excellent documentation concerning setup and getting started, I ran into an error when deploying an application to the simulator. I receive error: ‘Username or password is invalid or not specified or time on the device is out of sync’. Apparently, according to google, I’m not the only one getting this error. It appears that some were able to keep playing with the time until it finally worked, while others gave up and could not find a solution. Each time I installed the simulator it would get my current time, determine that I’m on the East Coast, and then subtract five hours off my time. I’m pretty sure this is the root of the error. I unfortunately, do not know how to resolve it. Setting the time to match my computer’s time does not work. The simulator only gives me five timezones to choose from, and none of which is the appropriate time zone to offset the five hours needed to have the appropriate time.

So I fall into the ‘I give up’ category. After spending a couple hours troubleshooting the issue with zero results to show for it I’m moving on. While the installation of all the necessary components is a little excessive in my opinion (especially compared to setting up for Android app development), the guidelines presented by Blackberry are thorough and well-written. Also note, that running the simulator requires VMWare Fusion if running on a mac. While, I’m not completely sure why this is required, it is a pretty sharp piece of software that I’m glad I was introduced to.

It’s unfortunate that what is most likely a minor bug creates so much havoc, but perhaps I’ll try again in a month or two and hope Blackberry has had a chance to resolve the simulator issue.