Hot on the heels of the release of the BlackBerry® 10 WebWorks™ SDK, we have posted a new Ripple Emulator with support for BlackBerry® 10. All the power of Ripple can now be put to use developing and testing your BlackBerry 10 applications over the summer to get into the BlackBerry App World™ storefront right out of the gates!

Inside Ripple, you can now select the BlackBerry 10 Platform and target the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha device for emulation. The tool will configure the API emulation interface to reflect the current available APIs delivered in the BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK Beta. And once you install and configure the BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK with Ripple, you can build you application, sign it, and even deploy it to the simulator or, if you were a lucky attendee of BlackBerry 10 Jam, to your shiny new BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha developer device.

With this release, you will find two different versions of the Ripple Emulator on our developer site. The reason for this is that Ripple is moving back to the future. Starting with this release, Ripple is returning to its roots as a Chrome Browser Extension. While we believe this gives us the best path forward, there are still a few things to clean up, coming in new beta refreshes through the summer. Until that time, the current version of Ripple will remain the primary tool for supporting all platforms.

For this first beta release, after you complete the install process, you will need to manually install the extension .crx file into Google Chrome by dragging and dropping it onto the browser. After that you just need to click on the Ripple icon to the right of the URL bar and enable Ripple, and you are good to go.

If you would like to leverage the BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK build/sign/deploy functionality within Ripple, you will also need to manually start the Build and Deploy Node.js-based services. Closing the command prompt window will stop the services. For more information on this and the install process, please review our Getting Started guide.

An additional feature that we have added in this release is the addition of dynamic mapping for the emulation of geolocation features. You can now click-drag, and zoom in and out of the map in the geolocation panel and the latitude/longitude information will dynamically update. Give it a try for testing your location based service applications.

No need to fret though – we are hard at work abstracting the manual setup so that this is all seamless as soon as possible. We are aiming to deliver Beta refreshes to both Ripple and the BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK on a monthly basis, in order to get the latest and greatest into our community’s hands as frequently as possible.

Check our BlackBerry WebWorks development site frequently through the summer in order to ensure you always have the latest tools to develop the best BlackBerry 10 WebWorks applications.