Comment by faluzure
9 days ago
I had some fun history with this OS.
First, we had ICON computers in my elementary school, we'd all try to spin the trackball as quickly as it would go. Not sure if we ever broke one.
The second is when I worked at BlackBerry. I was building a feature that allowed you to use your QNX BlackBerry as a Bluetooth HID device. You could connect it to any device and use the trackpad + physical keyboard to remotely control a computer. It was fantastic. You could hook your laptop up to a project and control slides from your BlackBerry.
Then some product manager with questionable decision making told me to lock it down so it would only work with Blackberry Playbooks for "business purposes", rendering it effectively useless (since Playbooks are all ewaste). I distinctly remember that meeting where Dan Dodge argued that since it's a standard, it should not be locked down.
I respect Dan Dodge for that, I don't think I'd work with that PM again.
QNX became BlackBerry 10—-still the best mobile OS. Too bad only a dozen of us ever used it.
My Passport was my favourite phone ever, I think if apps like WhatsApp hadn't stopped supporting it I might still be using it.
Oh wow - I didn't realize that ICON was based on this - I remember it was quite advanced in comparison to the generic PC computers at the time.
With one exception - you could crash other ICON systems or the overall network just via machine-machine chatting functions.
KDE Connect is honestly just that but better in some respects. And honestly, it's great.
I wish we were able to preserve the ICON experience in an emulator. I bet even a browser has enough compute power to emulate a network of them.
Bridge/Blend was cool shame it was restricted to Playbooks and desktop software. Slipstream had some pretty solid ideas.
FWIW, I used that HID function you worked on and I loved it too!