Blackberry Programming

So now that I'm done with school, I've been dabbling with programming again. My first post-graduate school project was to make a game for my kids on my Blackberry. I've done PalmOS and WindowsMobile programming in the past, but these were all C/C++ based. With my newly discovered free time, I decided that it was time to tackle both Java and RIM devices.
I'm the kind of person that really wants a project when trying to learn new things, so I decided that a simple game of Hangman for my daughter would be a great way to dive in. The biggest obstacle I had were the dev tools. Trying to decide between Netbeans, Eclipse, or the Blackberry JDE is just the first of many decisions along the way. To be honest, I haven't really figured out all the pros/cons between them, and my learning is still in progress. My friend Ryan also helped me out to get a running start and so it only took me a few days before I was able to make my first Hello World application. After that, I quickly discovered some of the positive aspects of Java and J2ME in particular. Using J2ME felt quite a bit like using many of the excellent cross-platform frameworks that I've encountered in the past. In only a few evenings of work I was able to get a fairly decent Hangman implementation up and running to the point that Lucy didn't want to give me my phone back. The unexpected side-effect was that my son had his feelings hurt because I made a game for his big sister and he didn't get one. Fortunately, I had an inspiration to make an Etch-A-Sketch type drawing application for him. This let me explore further depths of J2ME, and in only a couple hours, I had a game for him too. I really look forward to playing more with my Blackberry and J2ME and so far have found it to be a very positive experience.