With the release of the BlackBerry® 10 Adobe® AIR® SDK Beta, I thought it might be time to go back and see how much work it would be to take the sample app I wrote last year and get it going on a BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha. I was all set to spend the day coding and tweaking and working on a big long guide. Then I loaded the old build onto my device and…well, it basically worked already:
Turns out I had locked the app’s orientation, but neglected to actually specify which orientation it should be locked to. On the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet it was fine, since the default was landscape and that’s what I wanted, but the Blackberry 10 Dev Alpha is a portrait device. A quick change to add <aspectRatio>landscape</aspectRatio> to my app.xml (not even the code!), and I’m done.
Since I had specified the dimensions of the SWF in my main action script file, I didn’t even need to change any of the sizes of the menus or anything (though I probably should have just made everything scale dynamically in the first place). Either way, it only took me a couple minutes to sort out, and all I did was fix a legitimate bug. I didn’t even have to use the BlackBerry 10 SDK to compile it, since I wasn’t using any new APIs. So if you already have an Adobe AIR app, you are probably good to go. Congratulations on writing your first app for BlackBerry 10!
