For those developers who’ve been part of the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha program with either a BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha A or BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha B, there’s a date upon which you may have been keeping a watchful eye: June 30^th, 2013… the day the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha testing devices are set to be deactivated. Or are they?

The BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha testing devices were seeded to our development community in advance of the BlackBerry 10 launch to ensure hardware availability to our devs well ahead of launch. Now that launch has come and gone (and so too has the date for the BlackBerry 10 Limited Edition device!), those BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha testing devices start falling into the category of unsupported hardware since they were never intended to be a full commercial product nor do they support the full OS builds. But really, they still work, so why throw away a perfectly good device? Good news! You don’t have to.

If you saw the blog post advising devs of the BlackBerry 10.1 SDK OS update (SDK OS indicates that it’s not a full OS release, but rather an OS build that features a reduced set of apps – basically what you need to develop and build against), then you’ll be pleased to learn that the 10.1 SDK OS also had the side benefit of removing the date that was to disable the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha testing devices. In other words, for any BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha owners, if you’ve updated to the 10.1 SDK OS build, your device will continue to work beyond the June 30^th date, with no imposed expiry date embedded in the OS.

The BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha A hardware will continue to be officially unsupported and the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha B hardware will join those same ranks on June 30^th, but if you want to continue to developing apps against those devices beyond that date, you’re welcome to do so.

For more info on the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha program and to view other FAQs, please visit the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha web page.

If you’re currently developing for BlackBerry 10 or looking to get started, BlackBerry Jam Americas in Orlando, Florida is the place to be from May 14^th to May 16^th.  The session catalog and session scheduler are now live, and it’s jam packed (no pun intended) with over 60 sessions and more than 7 hands on labs.  But be sure to leave some wiggle room in your calendar, there’s still another 20 or so sessions and even more hands on labs yet to come!

Whether you develop in C/C++, HTML5, AIR, or Android, we’ve got sessions for you.  Whether you’re a newbie, a pro, a hobbyist, an enterprise developer, a game developer, a startup, or a professional development house… we’ve got sessions for you.  Whether you’ve just launched, you’re about to launch, in development, or just considering BlackBerry as a platform, we’ve got sessions for you.

A selection of what you’ll find:

• BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 Connection Service versus VPN… Fight!
• Lab: Android 201: Three Devices, One App! Developing for Tablet, All Touch and Physical Keyboard form factors
• Background Services – Event Driven Processing for your Application
• Lab: Adding a new Dimension to your BlackBerry Apps – Stereoscopic 3D (and other advanced applications for output to the HDMI display)
• Unity for BlackBerry 10
• Building for the Multi-Device Enterprise using Sencha
• The Ultimate Hybrid App, Native App Built with Web Technologies
• Demystifying NFC Payment
• Case Study: ESPN La Conexión

This year’s session catalogue offers more variety and diversity than ever.  Whether you prefer the traditional one hour session format or want to get some hands on time with the code in a 2 hour guided lab, come ready to learn, as we’ve got more content than ever before and loads of community speakers ready to share their lessons learned.  If that’s not enough for you, there will also be some bonus sessions running after hours where you can sit down face to face with our product managers and provide direct feedback on the tools and SDKs.

Check out the session catalog and plan your conference now!

Straight to the point: don’t let the deadline for the BlackBerry 10k Developer Commitment go whooshing by. If you’re looking to apply for the 10k Developer Commitment, the recommended submission deadline for submitting your apps to BlackBerry World is THIS WEEK! More specifically: the deadline to submit your app to BlackBerry World is January 11th, 2013.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, what the heck happened to January 21st? January 21st is still the deadline for submitting your app to the Built for BlackBerry program, but in order to even apply for Built for BlackBerry, your app first needs to be approved in BlackBerry World.

Here’s the order of operations:

1. Submit your app to BlackBerry World by January 11th to ensure that it’s approved in time for the Built for BlackBerry deadline of January 21st.
2. On or before January 21st, take your application that’s been approved in BlackBerry World, and submit it to the Built for BlackBerry program.
3. If you’re also applying for the 10k Developer Commitment, then once your application has passed Built for BlackBerry (will be complete before launch if you submitted by January 21st), submit your app to the 10k Developer Commitment program.

To be clear, apps submitted after January 11th are still eligible for Built for BlackBerry – that program will continue to run well past all these deadlines and still offers developers that distinction and all the benefits that come from earning the designation. But if you want to qualify for the 10k Developer Commitment, then Built for BlackBerry is a pre-requisite, and in order to allow enough time to pass both BlackBerry World approval testing as well as Built for BlackBerry testing before launch, then January 11th is the recommended date.

What if I submit after January 11th? The app might still get BlackBerry World approval in time for the January 21st deadline, but there are no assurances and you’re taking what could be a $10,000 USD risk.

Want more details? Check out the section of the terms and conditions labeled “HOW TO PARTICIPATE.” Now, stop reading blogs and get those apps in!

One thing we heard over and over again during the BlackBerry® Got Game Port-a-Thon was that developers loved getting almost instant responses to their questions from one of the many members of our Developer Relations team.  Why stop a good thing?  Starting Wednesday, November 21^st and continuing right up until January 30^th, we’ll have be offering live time in the forums, where you can expect to get responses as quickly as we can type them.

How will it work?

Two hours a week, every week, we’ll address one of the developer audiences listed below.  We know we have an active developer community, and we want you to participate.  Since there’s no way to lock a forum thread, we’ll go low tech: if you know the answer to a question and you intend to respond to it, simply reply to the thread indicating “got it” then go ahead and type your response.  This simple claim of ownership will prevent multiple devs from responding to the same question at the same time.  And as per usual in the developer forums, if your question was answered, mark it as “solved” or if you see a good response, put a “like” on it.  Basically, just give recognition to those who deserve it.

When and where?

Mondays:
Marmalade: 10 AM to 12 PM (GMT-5) in Marmalade’s developer forums.
Sencha: 12 PM to 2 PM (GMT-5) in Sencha’s developer forums.

Tuesdays:
Cascades™ – BlackBerry Java porting to BlackBerry 10: 10 AM to 12 PM (GMT-5) in the BlackBerry developer support forums.
PhoneGap: 12 PM to 2 PM (GMT-5) in the BlackBerry developer support forums.

Wednesdays:
Qt: 10 AM to 12 PM (GMT-5) in the BlackBerry developer support forums.
jQuery: 12 PM to 2 PM (GMT-5) in jQuery’s developer forums.

Thursdays:
BlackBerry WebWorks™: 10 AM to 12 PM (GMT-5) in the BlackBerry developer support forums.
Android: 12 PM to 2 PM (GMT-5) in Stack Overflow.

Fridays:
AIR: 12 PM to 2 PM (GMT-5) in the BlackBerry developer support forums.

Watch for more time slots to be added in the near future to better accommodate our developers in Asia-Pacific.  See you in the forums!

What’s in an icon?  A lot.  Quite simply: it is the single most viewed part of your entire application, and it’s a major part of your brand.

So, when I tell you that based on design reviews and user reviews, we’ve updated icon sizes for BlackBerry® 10, changing from 150×150 to 114×114, you can either take the approach of saying: ok, great, my existing icon will automatically scale down or you can take care to make sure you update your icon accordingly.  I recommend the latter.

If you’re migrating your app from the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ to BlackBerry 10 smartphones, you’ll want to pay even more attention to your icons: you’re moving from an 86×86 icon size up to 114×114.  Scaling up your images is definitely a much worse experience than scaling down – pixilation looks cheap and to the user, your app will stand out on their application screen as “one of these things is not like the others,” but for all the wrong reasons.

For the full details on the new size plus a lot of great tips for design considerations for your icons on BlackBerry 10, check out the updated BlackBerry UI Guidelines document.  And hey, when you’re done looking over the guidelines for the icons, check out the rest of the document too.  It’s full of useful tips for making your application look and feel its best on BlackBerry 10.

For those of you with BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha testing devices, you’ll see this change take effect in the November beta OS drop.

Today in our Mississauga, Ontario office,  we’ve assembled various members of our BlackBerry® Runtime for Android apps team to review the end-to-end experience for our Android developers. We have people from our Waterloo office on-site, in addition to folks from Redwood City and even Prague joining via teleconference.

What we set out to do today was remove ourselves from being employees here at Research In Motion, and just be developers. In doing so we are putting ourselves in the shoes of our developers by going through the process of repackaging our own applications for the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ and BlackBerry 10 devices. Members of our tooling, documentation, development, support and management teams are all sharing ideas on where we may be able to improve our offering to make it as simple as possible to repackage your existing Android apps.

This morning we all started the day by cleaning our laptops of all our development tools. After installing the standard Android SDK tools, we built up our sample applications and existing projects, to start with a fresh Android environment that our developers would typically be coming onto our BlackBerry platform with. We then looked at our developer microsite and went through the documentation and resources that a net-new developer would be looking at to ensure that everything is in its proper place and easy to comprehend. We finished off our morning session by critiquing our online packager through each step of verifying and repackaging an APK file through various use cases. Moving onto our afternoon session now, we’ll be taking a close look at our BlackBerry plug-in for ADT through the install, setup, debugging, and deployment stages.

And here’s your chance to have your feedback hit the eyes and ears of the people who are responsible for ensuring your success as a developer. Tweet us your gripes, suggestions or comments to the @BlackBerryDev Twitter channel using the hashtag #BBDevXP and we will put it up on our white-board to address it.

In the room we have folks playing the roles of new Cascades™ developers. Some are trying to approach development from the point of view of open source developers. We have gamers looking at developing games. There are those wearing iOS developer hats and looking to bring existing apps to BlackBerry. We have developers and product managers from the Czech Republic and Sweden joining us online.

We hope that these diverse perspectives will help us better understand the experiences of developers starting out with BlackBerry development.

We all started on http://developer.blackberry.com and at the outset we had a debate on whether it’s clear on what technology a developer should use. After clicking C/C++ the debate continued. What does the sponge cake represent? Why do we need to differentiate technologies right away when a single IDE has them all? As an iOS developer do I go to porting heaven or do I choose Cascades? Can I have Raw OS access, be Open Source friendly and interact with Bluetooth sensors when I choose Cascades? We were a bit confused on what choice to make and why and we’ll take that feedback to improve the site.

Tell us your thoughts on getting started with BlackBerry 10 Native development. You can follow what’s going on here by following  @BlackBerryDev, using hashtag #BBDevXP.

The day continues….

With a two to three month window between API feature complete and the gold release, we thought it was an excellent time to conduct a full end-to-end developer experience review… and we’re doing it across all our tools and in the full public eye.

That’s right – today we’re bringing together teams from all across the company to sit down with a clean PC (or Mac), start from http://developer.blackberry.com, and end with a full app that is signed, debugged, running in simulator, and running on a BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha testing device.  We’ll walk through our own samples and tutorials, navigate our own documentation, and build a few apps all using the exact same tools and resources that you do.  And while we do it, we’re going to be blogging our progress here on the Inside BlackBerry Developers Blog. We’ll be sharing some videos of our review on the BlackBerryDev YouTube channel, logging bugs in the Developer Issue Tracker, and tweeting about what we find. All in an effort to make our tools better and show our devs just how much we love them.

Want to join in?  Submit bugs throughout the day to the Developer Issue Tracker and tweet them to @BlackBerryDev using the hashtag #BBDevXP.  We want your feedback and we want to make our tools better.  Have your say!

We announced the solutions that were chosen for implementation at BlackBerry Jam Americas. The implementation for all three challenges were discussed and solutions posted to github during the Unconference Day at BlackBerry Jam Americas.

Pumano Dmitriy
Horizontal 3D carousel gallery without arrows #StumpTheBlackBerryDevs http://t.co/84XjiQJu

rcmaniac25 Vinnie Simonetti
@BlackBerryDev How do I make this in Cascades #StumpTheBlackBerryDevs http://t.co/IC5wnbJi

pbillings512 Patrick Billings
@BlackBerryDev I want a hide/unhide area that can reveal extra info like today’s date, etc. #StumpTheBlackBerryDevs http://t.co/XdyKJB9z

See a solution that you wish we’d implemented? Follow the lead of one of our public developers, implement a stumper, and submit your solution to our github repo!

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Derek Konigsberg, who some of you may know better as @dkonigs.  For those of you who may not know Derek, he’s been developing apps for the BlackBerry® platform since 2006 (starting with BlackBerry handheld software version 4.1), so he’s seen quite the overhaul to the platform.  Long story short, my conversation with Derek about his questions on BlackBerry® 10 development inspired a really neat idea: Stump the BlackBerry Devs.

How do I stump someone and who am I stumping?  Provide us with a design or mock-up that you think would be difficult to be implemented using our Cascades™ UI framework. The Cascades tools development team will try to implement your submission in a flexible manner that involves no hardcoding of values and that is flexible enough to handle multiple screen resolutions and multiple form factors.

Here are the details:

Mock up a design for a screen, making it as beautiful or as ugly as you like.

• It doesn’t matter how you create it – use a professional design tool or draw it on a napkin.
• Don’t worry about a data source, we’ll be using dummy data anyway.

Throughout the month of August, submit an image of your mock-up to the @BlackBerryDev Twitter® account using the hashtag #StumpTheBlackBerryDevs.

• Final day for submissions will be August 31, 2012.
• If an image isn’t worth a thousand words and you feel the need to describe your design with more than the 140 characters of Twitter will allow, feel free to submit multiple tweets to explain your design.

We’ll choose three of the most difficult or creative submissions and throughout the month of September, and then we’ll get to work implementing them using the R8 SDK beta release that Tim Neil talked about here.

At BlackBerry Jam Americas, we’ll host a session during the Unconference Day where we’ll reveal the chosen designs, explain how we implemented them, and walk you through the reasoning behind the approach taken. For any features of the design which could not be elegantly implemented, we’ll do a few things:

1. Implement the solution per the design using hardcoded values.
2. Provide an alternative solution that is consistent with Cascades design principles.
3. Explain the design decisions behind Cascades for why the solution could not be delivered per what you’d submitted.
4. If applicable, add new features to the roadmap which would allow this design to be implemented in future and publicly share the tracking of those features via the BlackBerry Developer Issue Tracker.

In parallel to the activities at BlackBerry Jam Americas, we’ll also post the code for the solutions to our open source repo at blackberry.github.com and will share a detailed walkthrough of the solution to this blog.

Sound like a fun challenge?  I hope so.  Now let’s see what you’re made of…can you stump the Cascades R&D team?