This June and July our EMEA superstar evangelists will be heading down to Africa to spread the BlackBerry 10 love.

If you have never developed for BlackBerry 10 before and would like to learn how to go from nothing to a fully functioning app using either HTML5 or C++/Qt Cascades, then you should come and join us for one of the tour stops around the continent.

Our team will be on hand all day to give you all the tips and tricks you need to build a beautiful app that users will love and value.

To find out more and to register for a place check out the links below. Spaces are limited and are filling fast so don’t wait!

BlackBerry Jam Tunisia 14th June

BlackBerry Jam Kenya 21st June

BlackBerry Jam Ghana 1st July

BlackBerry Jam Nigeria 3rd July

BlackBerry Jam South Africa date tbc

As developers, when we have an idea for app, we can build it. But what if you’re not a developer, but you have the idea for the next great app? Dandy recently launched their beta where people can share their app ideas with the Dandy community and help build an amazing app together. Last week, I spoke with Karl Allen-Muncey and Taylor Jones during BlackBerry Live to talk apps, BlackBerry 10, and building the next great app.

…and here’s a little Story Maker video that our own Melanie Masson put together!

The BlackBerry 10 app ecosystem is thriving today because of the awesome work of you, our developer community. On Wednesday, May 15th, we celebrated the winners of the 2013 BlackBerry Developer Community Awards at the BlackBerry Live Tweet Up. Thank you again for the over 200 nominations and thousands of votes on HashAwards and on Twitter. Here are your 2013 winners!

Must Follow BlackBerry Developer on Twitter - Joel Ortiz

Must Follow BlackBerry Developer Evangelist - Luca Filigheddu

Most Helpful Developer Community Forum Member - Peter Strange

Most Helpful Developer Relations Team Member on Twitter - Brian Zubert

Best Built for BlackBerry App – CB10

Best Open Source Project for BlackBerry – bbui.js

Best Scoreloop Integrated Game - Jetpack Joyride

Thank you again to everyone who nominated and voted – see you in Hong Kong for BlackBerry Jam Asia!

Next week is BlackBerry Jam Americas 2013 and as a member of the Developer Relations team, I’ll be stationed at various locations over the three days helping out developers when I can. Better yet, i’m also hosting a lab that I hope you will find a lot of fun and very informative on stereoscopic 3D and HDMI output for your apps. I’m also presenting a session on getting the most out of Momentics to help you build and package your apps in an efficient manner and streamline your development process. This is something all developers should care about since saving time during development often means you can take on more projects and earn more in the process.

JAM54 – Lab: Adding a new Dimension to your BlackBerry Apps – Stereoscopic 3D ( and other advanced applications for output to the HDMI display)

My first experience with stereoscopic 3D, like most people, was from playing with a ViewMaster as a child. In the years since, I have experimented with stereoscopic photography, utilizing stereoscopic 3D graphics in 3D modeling and rendering software I worked on in university and during the first few years of my career, and now I am reviving some of that early work in my spare time and applying that knowledge to develop stereoscopic software for the BlackBerry 10 platform.

Stereoscopic 3D represents another way your app can engage with its users and set it apart from the competition. Imagine users playing your game on the big screen with the game play literally in their face or taking a look at NASA rover stereoscopic photos with their smartphone and feeling like they are looking out the window at the Red Planet. That’s the kind of emotion and excitement that this technology brings to those who truly appreciate it.

The techniques we will review in the lab produce stereoscopic 3D output via the HDMI display in a manner that should be compatible with the majority of 3D TVs and monitors in the market today.  The diagram below provides an overview of what type of output is generated and I will have sample code on hand so that attendees can dive right in and integrate it into their applications.

Is that all we will cover? Absolutely not. The stereoscopic techniques rely on HDMI output. HDMI output can be useful in a number of other types of apps as well. We will review some other use cases and show how the existing sample code can be adapted for those purposes. If you want to incorporate stereoscopic 3D output into your app or if you just want to know how to output content to the HDMI display in general, join in on the fun. After the lab is over, the 3D TV will be moved into the Jam Space for attendees so you will have the rest of the event to access the TV and test the changes you make to your apps and demo your efforts to others.  I’m looking forward to seeing what our developers produce with this new tool in their arsenal.

 JAM39 – Build and Packaging for native apps

As your app portfolio grows, you are probably trying to come up with ways to reuse code you wrote in a different application or organize it better, turnaround changes faster. Maybe the app’s download time is a little slow and you want to improve on it but don’t know how? If any of these questions apply to you, you want to attend this session. We will run through some tips and tricks we use for internal apps and some little known options available in the Momentics IDE to help you develop a build system to be more efficient during the development process.  We will show you some tips on how to build a Qt or Cascades shared library. If you develop on multiple platforms, we will share some tips from our porting guides on how best to create a shared pool of code that you can build on multiple platforms. If you want to use a shared library developed by someone else, we’ll show you how to integrate that library with the IDE for seamless integration with your apps.

These sessions are just the tip of the iceberg of the session catalog at this year’s conference. Join us in Orlando and learn a lot about what you can do now and what’s coming in future versions of BlackBerry 10. I am looking forward to seeing some familiar faces and to meeting more developers again this year.

Voting for the 2013 BlackBerry Developer Community Awards is now open! We’ve been overwhelmed with the positive reception from the community this year and are proud to announce the finalists below.

Having a hard time deciding who to vote for? Well, the awards seek to honor those that have gone above and beyond to actively engage and help fellow BlackBerry developers so make sure your choices reflect that. You’ll have until May 12, 2013 to cast your ballots for a winner in each category so start voting for your favorites today!

The 2013 BlackBerry Developer Community Awards finalists in each category are:

Must Follow BlackBerry Developer on Twitter

1. @jcarty Jerome Carty
2. @johnbiibs John Bibal II
3. @flashinstructor Joel Ortíz
4. @TheMarco M van Hylckama Vlieg

Must Follow BlackBerry Developer Evangelist on Twitter

1. @demianborba Demian Borba
2. @jorgecasar Jorge del Casar
3. @edgarparada Edgar Parada
4. @filos Luca Filigheddu

Most Helpful Developer Community Forum Member

1. peter9477 Peter Hansen
2. Zmey Andrey Fidrya
3. Jtegen John Tegen
4. peter_strange Peter Strange

Most Helpful Developer Relations Team Member on Twitter

1. @n_adam_stanley Adam Stanley
2. @bzubert Brian Zubert
3. @WaterlooErik Erik Oros
4. @PBernhardt Paul Bernhardt

Best Built for BlackBerry App

1. Blaq
2. SayIt
3. CB10
4. Gadget Box

Best Open Source Project for BlackBerry

1. bbui.js
2. OpenDataSpace
3. GoodCitizenCascades
4. Endare / ParkInGhent

Best Scoreloop Integrated Game

1. WordsPlus
2. Run in a crowd
3. Jetpack Joyride
4. Super Hexagon

Users can vote and follow along with the award’s progress through our online page. This year’s winners will be announced at the BlackBerry Jam Americas TweetUp on May 15, 2013 in Orlando, Florida. If you want to get a feel for how the awards will work, check out this video below from last year’s ceremony.

Now that you know who’s up for the vote during this year’s BlackBerry Developer Community Awards, who are you hoping will win? Let us know who your favorites are in the comments below.

On 16^th and 17^th May we will be sponsoring Mobilism 2013 in the Amsterdam. The show is in its third year and we are really excited to be involved again.

Just to spice things up a bit this year we are sending our resident developer Erik Johnson along to give a workshop on BlackBerry 10 Mobile Development. There is tonnes of info packed into the session and Erik may have one or two devices to hand out to the folks who engage and ask great questions too! Here’s just a few things you will learn if you head along:

• How to build and deploy an entirely JS/HTML based application on a BlackBerry platform?
• What is running the JS based application on BlackBerry and how it differs from other platforms?
• How to include platform specific features including BBM and other plugins into your mobile web applications?
• Overview of the toolset, environment and eco system including how to properly debug mobile web applications using Web Inspector on BB10?
• Road map for the future of Web on BlackBerry 10, what is next?

So we can’t think of any reason for you not to go along if you are attending Mobilism!  To register for the session visit  http://mobilism.nl/2013/workshops

The Cascades Framework uses a modular approach to store, access, and display data in your apps.

There is a good chance you will need your app to interact with external data – the raw data for your app. The format of the external data can vary depending upon your needs and Cascades provides classes that help you manage three common data formats: XML, JSON, and SQL.

First, let’s look at a table comparing BBOS and BlackBerry 10 Data Storage:

USER File system

BlackBerry 10 introduces a file system (recall on BBOS there was no file system). So, what to know about the file system? Firstly, the working directory is where your app is started – it is also called current directory and the sandbox ($sandbox/app). Access to files and folders in the working directory is controlled through Unix-style groups and permissions. Key point: never hardcode absolute file paths – all should be relative to your sandbox.

Please review the following file system diagram:

And visit this page :

https://developer.blackberry.com/cascades/documentation/device_platform/filesystem/index.html

For more information on the file system.

Secondly, let’s look at working with XML, JSON, and SQL. The following provides some code snippets for all three along with links to more information.

XML

The following is a code snippet on how to load XML using a GroupDataModel

// Create the data model, specifying sorting keys of "firstName" and "lastName" 
GroupDataModel *model = new GroupDataModel(QStringList() << "firstName"
                                           << "lastName"); 

// Create an XmlDataAccess object and load the .xml file. The QDir::currentPath() 
// function returns the current working directory for the app. 
XmlDataAccess xda; 
QVariant list = xda.load(QDir::currentPath() + 
                         "/app/native/assets/employees.xml", 
                         "/employees/employee");

For more on XML data, please click “Working with XML”

http://developer.blackberry.com/cascades/documentation/device_platform/data_access/working_with_xml.html

JSON

The following is a code snippet on how to create a JSON Data Access Object and load the JSON file

// Create a JsonDataAccess object and load the .json file. The  
// QDir::currentPath() function returns the current working  
// directory for the app. 
JsonDataAccess jda; 
QVariant list = jda.load(QDir::currentPath() + 
                         "/app/native/assets/employees.json");

For more on JSON, please click “Working with JSON data”

http://developer.blackberry.com/cascades/documentation/device_platform/data_access/working_with_json.html

SQL

The following is a code snippet on how to create SQL

 // Create an SqlDataAccess object 
    SqlDataAccess sda(home.absoluteFilePath("mySQLFile.db")); 

    // Create a table called Employee in the database file 
    sda.execute("CREATE TABLE Employee( firstName VARCHAR(50), 
                 lastName VARCHAR(50), salary INT);"); 

    // Insert employee records into the table 
    sda.execute("INSERT INTO Employee (firstName, lastName, salary) 
                 VALUES ("Mike", "Smith", 42000);"); 
    sda.execute("INSERT INTO Employee (firstName, lastName, salary) 
                 VALUES ("Joe", "Brown", 55000);");

For more on SQL data, please click “Working with SQL”

http://developer.blackberry.com/cascades/documentation/device_platform/data_access/working_with_sql.html

In conclusion, the data files that you work with in your apps are stored in the file system on the device. Different file system locations have different permissions; in some areas, you can create new files to store your app data, while in others, you can only load data from existing files. If you want to access your data files using the method that works best for you, you need to understand where your data files are located in the file system. Please follow this link “File system access for app” for more information.

Data files that you package with your app (when you compile the app) are located in the assets folder in the file system. Your app has read-only access to this folder, which means that you can load data from files in this location, but you can’t save new data in these files. When you create new data files dynamically while your app is running, they are stored in the data folder. Your app has full read-write access to this folder, so you can load and save data using files in this location.

Now on to Part 9!!