I interpret "I have watched in envy as my wife could get so much done on her phone" as regarding how many apps are available for one phone and how few were available for his Blackberry.
It's great if the phone at launch has all sorts of modern features, but this same sort of device/feature envy will exist if Blackberry can't attract significant developer attention.
Well, if the incentive is there (I haven't researched much into the SDK yet), I'll develop for BB10. I really see the potential here and how this OS can really make an impact on the mobile landscape. I hope other developers will share the same sentiment after using the phone itself... Really, what isn't to love about it, judging from the reviews? It's a great platform and I'm planning to buy one as soon as it's released.
I think other developers will see the value in BB10 as well and create apps for it. We all know the big companies like Rovio, Facebook, Amazon, and Mojang will obviously at one time or another port their apps to work with BB10, but if we can get the smaller, part-time developers on this bandwagon, we have a very viable contender here.
This. In my opinion BB10 will live or die on third party support. You can have a great OS, but people won't adopt it without a good number of high quality apps.
I haven't looked into development for BB10. But I know that previous versons were horrible to develop for. You wouldn't believe the number of times I've heard BB developers curse over having to have dev build signed by BB servers. Especially during heavier server times, where the servers went down for long periods of times. fixing this alone would do wonders in helping BB10
I've never done any legacy BB development, but coding for the playbook / BB10 is pretty excellent. Write C/C++ like you normally do for any *nix/Qt type system (using the Eclipse based IDE); Compile locally and deploy over the air to the device; stdout/err get sent back to the Eclipse console. I remember being really surprised at first at how easy it was to rip through the build/deploy cycle. The dev kit is pretty well done.
I can say with certainty that there is no RIM server involved beyond getting a Dev cert at the very beginning. You can develop offline and deploy over an ad hoc LAN or USB - so there's no requirement for Blackberry to sign your dev builds.
Anyway, if you haven't looked into it, do. There's also a bunch of BB folks on github porting libraries and such to BB10, so if the library you want isn't in the SDK, it may already be ported. Though in my experience it's pretty easy to just build most vaguely POSIX compliant code yourself.
It's good to hear they've improved the development experience. It was something that I think that really hurt them in the past. I will have to take a look into it when i find the time.
It's great if the phone at launch has all sorts of modern features, but this same sort of device/feature envy will exist if Blackberry can't attract significant developer attention.