For those who don’t me, my name is Pratik Sapra and I work as a Gaming Consultant on the Developer Relations team at BlackBerry. In my role, I work with game developers on the technical side and help them bring awesome gaming titles to the BlackBerry platform. I am really looking forward to this weeks Game Developer Conference along with the rest of the BlackBerry gaming crew.

In that regard, I am very excited to share that we have a great set of in-booth sessions (Booth 1216) lined up at our GDC booth. We will be presenting a wide range of topics covering everything you need to know about game development on BlackBerry 10. You will be hearing directly from BlackBerry gaming experts on topics including Native Development, Cocos2dx, Unity, Scoreloop and many more. We will be kicking off each day with a general overview session followed by a set of how-to sessions focused on specific topics and technologies. Scroll down below for the full session schedule.

Wednesday, March 27^th

10:00 – 10:15AM            Native Game Development on BlackBerry 10

11:00 – 11:15AM            How to set up a native game in under 10 minutes on BlackBerry 10

1:15 – 1:30PM                  How to add gamepad support to BlackBerry 10 games

2:00 – 2:15PM                  How to write an HTML 5/ WebGL game on BlackBerry 10

2:30 – 2:45PM                  How to write an Adobe AIR application on BlackBerry 10

3:00 – 3:15PM                  How to write a multiplatform game on Blackberry 10

Thursday, March 28^th

10:00 – 10:15AM            Social Gaming on BlackBerry 10

11:00 – 11:15AM            How to bring your Unity 4 game to BlackBerry 10

1:15 – 1:30PM                  How to port your iOS game to BlackBerry 10, Tips & Tricks

2:00 – 2:15PM                  How to bring your Cocos2dx game to BlackBerry 10

3:00 – 3:15PM                  How to add Leaderboards and Achievements to BlackBerry 10 games using Scoreloop

Friday, March 29^th

10:00 – 10:15AM            Building your Gaming Strategy for BlackBerry 10

10:30 – 10:45AM            How to add in-game advertising to BlackBerry 10 games

11:00 – 11:15AM            How to add in-app payment services to BlackBerry 10 games.

1:15 – 1:30PM                  How to package, publish and distribute your BlackBerry 10 game on BlackBerry World

2:00 – 2:15PM                  How to save BlackBerry 10 game state in the cloud

2:30 – 2:45PM                  How to convert, build and debug BlackBerry 10 games with Visual Studio

Here’s all the info on where we’ll be at GDC 2013!

http://www.gdconf.com - Booth 1216

Developing Cross Platform Mobile Games (Presented by BlackBerry)

Steve Grenier  |  Senior Software Developer, BlackBerry
Sean Paul Taylor  |  Team Lead, Gaming, BlackBerry

Location:  Room 3022, West Hall
Date:  March 27
Time:  3:30PM – 4:30PM

In this session, BlackBerry Gaming R&D experts Sean Paul Taylor and Steve Grenier will discuss some of the challenges and solutions when developing and distributing cross platform mobile games. Topics will include open-source options, with a focus on design and implementation details when developing your own cross platform game or engine. GamePlay3D, BlackBerry’s open-source, cross platform game framework will be used as a case study. Platforms discussed will include BlackBerry, Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS X and Linux.

Professional Game Engines for BlackBerry 10 (Presented by BlackBerry)

Scott Flynn  |  Blackberry Lead Developer, Unity Technologies
Ramprasad Madhavan  |  Gaming Consultant, BlackBerry

Location:  Room 2002, West Hall
Date:  March 27
Time:  5:00PM – 6:00PM

In this session, find out how to easily bring your games to BlackBerry 10 using new SDKs from major game engines such as Unity 4 SDK.

Building your Gaming Strategy for BlackBerry 10 (Presented by BlackBerry)

Anders Jeppsson  |  Director – Global Head of Gaming Category, BlackBerry

Location:  Room 3022, West Hall
Date:  March 28
Time:  5:30PM – 6:30PM

BlackBerry is currently rolling out its next generation BlackBerry 10 mobile computing platform and phones world wide. With over 70k apps available at launch on January 30th, all major game engines and with over 80 of the most commonly used open source projects already ported, going cross platform easier and makes more sense than ever before!

What’s the Difference Between Appeal and Re-Submit?

Currently, you have the ability to re-submit your application if does not pass Built for BlackBerry. So when should you consider re-submitting your app versus using your one appeal? Only use the Built for BlackBerry Appeals process If you have received a Built for BlackBerry rejection and you believe the current version of your app is Built for BlackBerry worthy. For example, if you have submitted a “single-function” app of significant quality to be reconsidered as part of the Built for BlackBerry program, you may want to appeal. However, you may only appeal one time.

However, if you have received a Built for BlackBerry rejection and have made changes to the application to better align with the criteria necessary to be designated as Built for BlackBerry, then you should re-submit the application since you can have up to three attempts for a positive vetting decision.

Bottom line: if you rework the application, you re-submit. If you think the application should be reconsidered as is, then use your one appeal.

How to Appeal

If you choose not to make any changes to your application and want to enter into the one-time appeal process:

1. Go to the Built for BlackBerry website.
2. Click on Appeals
3. Complete the Built for BlackBerry Appeals Wizard.

Your appeal will be sent to the Built for BlackBerry Appeals Team where the special panel of Built for BlackBerry Appeals Experts will vet the appeal and record their decision. You will be notified of the decision by the Built for BlackBerry Appeals Team. The decision of the Built for BlackBerry Appeals Team is final.

We’re adjusting the Built for BlackBerry program to include an appeals process, to both respond to requests from you, our developer community, while remaining committed to the goal of Built for BlackBerry: to recognize high-quality applications that showcase the power of the new BlackBerry 10 platform. Thank you for your interest in the Built for BlackBerry program and your feedback. Keep those posts and tweets coming!

On January 30th, more than 200 developers got together to celebrate the launch of BlackBerry 10 at the Red Bull house in Recife, Brazil.

You can see all the 154 pictures on our #BBJamSessions Facebook Page

Here’s your chance to get recognized! BlackBerry is now accepting developer nominations for the BlackBerry Achievement Awards.

The BlackBerry Achievement Awards (formerly the Wireless Achievement Awards) have been renamed to highlight the diverse BlackBerry community. These awards aim to recognize and reward exceptional developers, business leaders and entrepreneurs at the annual BlackBerry Live conference hosted in Orlando, Florida in May 2013.

With the rebranding of the BlackBerry Achievement Awards, a series of new award categories have also been introduced to make sure we recognize the wide variety of BlackBerry success stories.

Award categories include:

1. App of the Year
2. Putting Customers First
3. Mobile Innovation of the Year
4. Making the World a Better Place
5. Entrepreneur of the Year

To be considered for an award, nominations must be received by March 22, 2013.

Award recipients will receive a series of incentives for their participation. Prizes for first place award recipients include: travel and accommodations to BlackBerry Live 2013, conference passes, extensive BlackBerry training, BlackBerry 10 smartphones and more.

To read more about the BlackBerry Achievement Awards, recipient prizes and the selection process, please visit: http://www.blackberrylive.com/special-programs/achievement-awards

Check out the nomination page for more details or feel free to email achievementawards@blackberry.com

What’s Count.ly? It is a real-time mobile analytics platform that shows information by using eye-catching visual elements. Görkem provided me with a test account and after logging in, I was very impressed by what I saw. The UI is gorgeus and the amount of useful and critical information a dev can get about their app is impressive.

Moreover, it’s an open-source project in which the team aims to discuss the future of Count.ly in an open, democratic environment. They offer the developers the opportunity to take part in the community, to send bug reports, feature requests, to provide fixes and best practices. It collects data from mobile phones, and visualizes this information to analyze mobile application usage and end-user behavior.

Having the ability to see how your users behave is critical for the success of an app. Developers can get a clear picture on what’s working well and what’s not working, what their users like the most, what the least/most used feature is and, last but not least, how much time people spend in your app and doing what.

When we met, BlackBerry 10 was not supported yet, but they were very interested in investing in our new upcoming platform (after the conference, even more!) and for that reason, twenty days after, they finally published their first SDKs for BlackBerry 10.

What’s so special with Count.ly?

• It has a dashboard
  • where you stay up to date
  • where you can easily monitor your data with graphics
  • which shows you everything at once with no need to dig in several pages
  • where you can track unlimited number of applications and switch between your apps, games and ebooks

• It has a special user behaviour stats experience in which;
  • you can track and visualize your users’ behaviours
  • you can see your application’s in-app performance
  • you can understand your customer’s behaviour and where user left off
  • you can observe your players closely to ensure success and maximize your online game revenue

• You can build better apps, games and ebooks;
  • by measuring and evaluating mobile app engagement as it enables optimization of mobile content
  • by exploring where a spike occurs and by personalizing and optimizing your app according to stats
  • by the help of the support that Countly offers for leading smartphones (iOS, Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry)

• You can produce electronic reports with customizable charts and tables, showing how your application performed for a given period, add / remove pages through report generator.

Also, Count.ly is free. You can install Count.ly in-app analytics tool on your server to track unlimited number of mobile applications, if you want.

Here is what Onu Alp, Soner, co-founder of Count.ly, told me:

“The best feature of Count.ly is custom events: we help developers identify in-app purchase patterns, defining the best flow for payment. This is a crucial factor towards maximizing revenues in e-books and games. We are thrilled with what BlackBerry provides in their next-gen mobile OS, and decided to invest in BlackBerry 10 SDK. Being the most complete open source, real-time mobile analytics app in the world, we believe Count.ly will provide a lot of value for BlackBerry 10 developers”

If you are a BlackBerry 10 developer looking for a good option for in-app analytics, Count.ly is definitely a great choice. The team is also very accessible and happy to help if needed.

You can download the Countly WebWorks SDK from GitHub here, while the Cascades SDK can be download from here.

We’ve been working the last few months with the team at Sencha to bring the support for BlackBerry 10 out of beta and ready to be used by developers.  We’re glad to announce with Sencha that the wait is over! Performance and a full BlackBerry 10 theme are here for BlackBerry 10.  Now, you can develop visually compelling applications using components in Sencha Touch 2.1.1 without worrying about the performance. The Webkit rendering optimization from the BlackBerry 10 Web platform combined with the Sencha’s performance optimization resulted in great venue for the developers who are developing this application for the first time. Additionally, these optimizations will also help developers who have already developed a Sencha Touch application and are looking to bring it to the BlackBerry 10 platform.

If that wasn’t enough by itself, we are very happy and excited to announce that the latest Sencha Touch release has the full support for BlackBerry 10 theme.  As mentioned at BlackBerry Jam 2012, Sencha is committed to supporting BlackBerry 10 and we’ve been working together with their team to bring these new visuals to their product. With this theme support you can start building BlackBerry 10 themed HTML5 applications using Sencha Touch to give your application the BlackBerry 10 native look and feel. Sencha and BlackBerry are committed to delivering the best platform for building BlackBerry 10 applications with open web standards. The latest Sencha Touch release delivers the BlackBerry 10 native look and feel to most of the UI components such as Forms, DataView, Carousel, List, TabPanel, NestedList and Navigation View. Let’s take a closer look at some of these UI components, styled for BlackBerry 10.

Form Elements

Form Elements are one of the most common mobile UI elements, and a building block for many applications, and Sencha has given that native BlackBerry 10 look and feel to them. So, if you want your application to look and feel like a BlackBerry 10 application, you should definitely take advantage of these form elements.  The input adapts to the virtual keyboard as well.  If you have an input type of password or email, keyboard changes configuration to match the input type using standard HTML5 integrated elements.

Action Bar

Sencha Touch also includes BlackBerry 10 specific components. The first one we’ll look at is the action bar at the bottom.  The action bar is a styled Sencha Tab Panel and it’s designed in a way that you can switch between pages very easily and this is the same type of design you see in the BlackBerry 10 native applications. You can see this same sort of design with other frameworks, and Sencha has brought the same design to be used for BlackBerry 10 developers.  As you can see, it adapts whether you are in portrait or landscape.

CrossCut Menu

In addition to above, the BlackBerry 10 CrossCut menu is also supported by the BlackBerry 10 theme as a new Sencha Touch component. As a developer, you can leverage the CrossCut menu component to create compelling BlackBerry 10 style application using just web technologies and give the native BlackBerry 10 look and feel to the app.  If you’re interested in using the component, it’s the new Ext.bb.CrossCut component (xtype: crosscut). Here is the code snippet, which shows how to use the CrossCut component with in the Sencha Touch framework. The complete reference for the CrossCut menu is available here.

To enable the BlackBerry 10 theme, refer to the Sencha blog post for instructions.

If you are new to Sencha Touch, it is an impressive JavaScript® framework based entirely on HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, and designed to bring an incredibly powerful set of components to create rich mobile applications. Today’s Sencha Touch release not only brings support for BlackBerry 10, but continues Sencha’s support for the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet.  To get started, developers should download the framework and then check out the Sencha Touch Learning Center, where they will find code samples, videos and tutorials. To get an idea of what is possible using the framework, there are a variety of demo applications showcasing the breadth and power of the platform.

If you have a Sencha Touch application already and looking to bring it over to BlackBerry 10, stop worrying.  You can bring your Sencha Touch application to BlackBerry 10 in few steps.  Here is the complete porting guide and the developer video, which shows you step by step instructions to bring your Sencha Touch application to BlackBerry 10.

Check our Donny’s blogs from the launch event by clicking here.

Stay tuned for more announcements from BlackBerry Jam Europe by following the Dev Blog and @BlackBerryDev.

The news here at the BlackBerry 10 global launch event keeps coming. Just moments ago, Thorsten Heins introduced the new BlackBerry Z10, and now we’re having a look at the BlackBerry Q10. The iconic-looking device is built with high performance materials and premium finishes. Typing is fast, accurate and familiar on the larger ergonomic BlackBerry QWERTY keyboard.

Even though I love the keyboard, perhaps my favorite feature is the stunning touchscreen display – the largest ever on a BlackBerry QWERTY device. If you’re a fan of a physical QWERTY device experience, you’re going to love the BlackBerry Q10. All your information is displayed beautifully on the screen, and you can take action and respond to it as you choose thanks to the powerful and elegant BlackBerry 10 software.

To get a closer look at the BlackBerry Q10, we met with Vijai from the product management team to walk us through the device. Watch this video below to get up close and personal with this new BlackBerry device.

Read more at the Inside BlackBerry Blog »

This is the moment we’ve all been waiting for – the BlackBerry Z10 has taken the stage and we’re pleased to introduce it to you. It is a gorgeous device in black and white, and it’s designed to showcase the elegance of BlackBerry 10.

When introducing the BlackBerry Z10, Thorsten Heins said, “This is the most beautiful BlackBerry we have ever launched. I can’t wait for you to try it out. We knew a large beautiful display was important. This is the window into the BlackBerry 10 experience.”

I would definitely call this the best BlackBerry smartphone to date! The BlackBerry Z10 has a specially designed screen for precise touch input, so typing on the BlackBerry keyboard can be faster and more accurate. The BlackBerry Z10 screen uses the latest technology to ensure images are sharp, clear and incredibly vivid.

The device and BlackBerry 10 software were designed together. At the core of the BlackBerry Z10 is BlackBerry Flow (something we’ve been showing off for a while); what this means is that you don’t have to seek information on your device. Instead, it’s delivered to you within thumb reach, so you can take action quickly and easily.

“Whatever you’re doing, you’re only one swipe away from the heart of all your activity.”

Read more at the Inside BlackBerry Blog »