With the new simulator, we finally have access to the shared folder for app data, so we can inject images or other things for our apps to consume, or examine data generated by our apps. Yay!
We can also look into the app's private storage directory, provided we use the "-devMode" flag when building with blackberry-airpackager. (This hasn't been documented, only noted in passing by Elena, and it didn't work in earlier sims.)
Installing a .BAR built with this flag installs the app using a different group id, of which the "devuser" is a member. With that, you can connect via ssh/scp/sftp and looking into any of the data in the app's "sandbox". Nice... (thanks guys, very useful!)
The problem is, that they've pre-assigned exactly six special groups, dev0 through dev5, corresponding to gid 900 through 905. That would be adequate if, as I suspect, they had intended that when you uninstall one of the devMode apps, the group id immediately becomes available for use again. Unfortunately it doesn't appear to, at least not always and not right away.
I just installed six apps with devMode, and even though I had then uninstalled several of them, when I installed the 7th one it went in under group id 906. The next one was 907.
I thought at first that would make the feature unusable, but then I decided to try uninstalling all of them. Now I can reinstall and one app goes in as dev2, and a previously uninstalled one as dev4, so I can access both.
I think that basically means there's a limit of 6 simultaneous devMode installs, and some additional uncertainty involving when those gids are again available for other apps.
Not critical after all, but an issue to be aware of if you are working simultaneously with many apps, or test fixtures, and want this "devMode" access to them. I guess you just have to treat it as a resource to manage carefully.
