Hello everyone! Paul Bernhardt here from Developer Relations. Today we are going to talk about something a little different. Most of the time, when we post a sample app up on GitHub it’s pretty small, designed to demonstrate one core concept and give you something you can copy/paste into your own apps. These toy apps are great, and not going away, but sometimes it can be hard to see how things would fit together in a larger, fully realized application.
Enter the “Showcase App.”
We at BlackBerry have been working on a series of larger samples that are actually useful apps in their own right. We’ll be building them like a real app, taking into account things real developers would need to think about, like following UI guidelines, integrating with platform features and even what we had to do to meet the Built For BlackBerrry criteria. You can expect to see multiple blog posts covering different aspect of the apps, and these apps will also get updates and more features as we go. To help with that, you’ll notice that our links to GitHub will generally refer to a specific commit. This so that when you show up a few months or years from now to this post (hello!), you can refer to the version of the app that the post was written about.
The first of these apps we’re releasing is CloudyPics (written by me). The idea is to have a fully featured camera app that integrates with cloud storage solutions. It will eventually show you, the developer, how to use almost all aspects of the Cascades camera API, but for now has just a few features:
Manage the camera roll (including pointing to Box and Dropbox)
Feel free to go take a look now. Over the next few posts, I’ll be talking about each of these features. Next, I’ll be adding more features like a UI to control all the camera settings, a focus rectangle and email integration.
You can always grab the latest version here. If there’s something else you want added, or you have any questions or comments, let me know in the comments below or on Twitter at @PBernhardt!
