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
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.