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Winner – Best App
Awarded to: BB Rocks

University students: Felipe Bonezi, Vinícius Araújo, Marcos Vinícius Silva and Vinícius Dias decided to combine their wide range of mobile app development experience and participate in the BlackBerry Jam Session Hackathon in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It’s a good thing they did – the team’s submission, Beegoo, was named “Best App!”

On their winning app, Beegoo…

“Many people want the convenience of a car but don’t own one. As a way to help minimize the impact of the greenhouse effect, we developed Beegoo. Beegoo is a carpooling social network where people can either offer or solicit rides with others. The main goal of the app is to minimize the need for all members of the social network to own a car. The Beegoo app has the potential to do both social and environmental good.”

On developing with Cascades++…

The BB Rocks team has a lot of experience developing for other platforms and the Beegoo app was the team’s first time working with Research In Motion. “We studied Cascades++ a couple weeks before participating in the BlackBerry Jam Session Hackathon and it was really easy to learn. We were able to leverage our past experience with C++ and Qt. Cascades™++ really does a lot of the work for you. The interface builder is really easy to understand and we developed our user interface using C++ and the Qt Modeling Language.

On participating in the Hackathon and working with Research In Motion…

“The BlackBerry Jam Session Hackathon was a great venue to learn new solutions to meet our development needs, make friends and do some great networking. We learned a new programming language and won the challenge, so there isn’t anything better than that! RIM is a company devoted to developers. We feel that the future is very promising for the BlackBerry 10 platform.”

Winner – Best Red Bull App
Awarded to: Team Red Bull A-Z

Team Red Bull A-Z features talented students and developers with experience primarily focused on web development. Their Red Bull A-Z app is actually the first mobile application anyone on the team has ever developed!

On their winning app, “Red Bull A-Z”…

“The application is essentially a message aggregator that users can launch to follow a live event. For example, if the user is watching a mixed martial arts fight, they can follow all of the real-time messages that are coming in from a variety of social networks.”

On deciding to participate in the BlackBerry Jam Session Hackathon…

“Events like this are always great for developers. The Hackathon was particularly important for us because we had never developed a mobile application, and didn’t know very much about the BlackBerry 10 platform. If we had any questions, the Research In Motion team was more than happy to help. Their feedback was also very helpful.”

On choosing to develop with the BlackBerry 10 SDK for Adobe AIR…

“One of our team members had extensive experience in web development, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Adobe ActionScript 3, so he set the environment one day before the event. It was a real benefit to be able to choose between a broad range of work flows, editors, SDK versions and different ways to compile and deploy the project. We used FDT and the Flex SDK to edit and compile the project. Once we did all the configurations, it was very easy to configure the other computers in the same way. We loved being able to work with Adobe AIR, especially since one of our team members had so much experience with Adobe ActionScript 3. Research In Motion clearly did its homework!”

The next generation of Adobe® AIR® on the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet has arrived! With the availability of a new Adobe® AIR® 2.7 runtime, developers will have full support for Adobe® Flex and Adobe® ActionScript on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. The new Adobe AIR runtime is now available for free to BlackBerry PlayBook tablet owners, who can download it over Wi-Fi® using the “Check for Updates” option on the device.

Adobe AIR 2.7 is designed to let you leverage your work across multiple platforms, devices and form factors. According to Adobe (based on April 2011 Evans research data), over 3 million developers currently use Adobe AIR and Adobe® Flash products. The technology has been enthusiastically adopted by BlackBerry PlayBook tablet developers.

For developers using the latest 4.5 version of Adobe® Flash Builder®, several steps previously required for BlackBerry PlayBook tablet compatibility are no longer needed. Plus, Research In Motion® (RIM®) has updated the plug-in for Adobe Flash Builder and designed it to make it even easier to develop for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. Also, Adobe has integrated this plug-in into their Adobe Flash Builder 4.5.1 update, meaning that all Adobe Flash Builder 4.5 developers will now see the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet as a targetable device. Developers still need to download the BlackBerry® Tablet OS SDK for Adobe AIR from BlackBerry Developer Zone, and the new SDK requires developers to have Adobe AIR 2.6 or later.

Have you checked out these BlackBerry PlayBook tablet apps developed using Adobe AIR – Doodle Blast, Poynt™ and Blaq? It’s amazing what developers are doing with these tools, this device and its powerhouse OS. Download the new updates today and start working on your own amazing app!

What are you looking forward to doing with Adobe AIR 2.7? Check out our forum threads on Adobe AIR to help with any questions you might have – and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter® at @BlackBerryDev.