Yes, but there is a reason (believe it or not) that they gather personal information. The whole notary thing was news to me, but it was the one part of the debacle that actually makes good sense.
The blackberry eco-system is to a certain extent based on trust. But the trust is backed by accountability. Every piece of code that runs has to be signed by RIM† using your personal signing key. That way if somebody writes an app that does something bad, they know exactly who is to blame.
It is kind of the opposite of Apple's walled garden approach, but it achieves the same goal - that end users can trust the software from dodgy third party devs like you and me. In Apple's case it is because they 'carefully' cough vet the apps. In RIM's case it is because they will come down on you like a ton of bricks (wrapped in legal weasels) if you do anything dodgy.
†This applies even for you writing and testing code on your own device. You have to send the code to RIM who sign it and munge it up with their 7 secret herbs and spices and then they send you back a binary file that is what you actually install.
RIM needs to study Conversion 101. Do you remember the bad old days of e-commerce, where you had to register for an account before you can add something to the shopping cart?
RIM's challenge here is to convert developers into RIM developers, i.e. people who are going to make them money. Why throw in any more hurdles than necessary?
Information should be requested at the last moment it is required. For instance, initially ask for an email just to ensure it the SDK results in a computer being vulnerable to security issues. Deployment to a virtual machine running beta versions should not require any code signing.
It does require code signing, because deploying to a machine for testing is the same process as releasing it into the wild.
On the Blackberry for instance, I could put up a web page with a link to my test file and you could download it directly to your device.
Hence everything needs to be signed before it can run.
Now, that said, the crusty old IDE that they had for Blackberry development had an emulator built into it. Being an emulator there were certain things you couldn't do (make calls, bluetooth etc).
If you asked "why didn't they just do another emulator?" that would be a good question. Complaining about the code signing is not a good question - it is far too fundamental to how their whole infrastructure works.
Also, the code signing process itself is automated, so in terms of interrupting you workflow it is not too bad (if you have a good internet connection) - 15-30 seconds or less -I've seen corporate build files that were worse... much much worse. /twitch
The blackberry eco-system is to a certain extent based on trust. But the trust is backed by accountability. Every piece of code that runs has to be signed by RIM† using your personal signing key. That way if somebody writes an app that does something bad, they know exactly who is to blame.
It is kind of the opposite of Apple's walled garden approach, but it achieves the same goal - that end users can trust the software from dodgy third party devs like you and me. In Apple's case it is because they 'carefully' cough vet the apps. In RIM's case it is because they will come down on you like a ton of bricks (wrapped in legal weasels) if you do anything dodgy.
†This applies even for you writing and testing code on your own device. You have to send the code to RIM who sign it and munge it up with their 7 secret herbs and spices and then they send you back a binary file that is what you actually install.