While these earlier betas offered significant improvements over previous editions, they were still a work in progress. We are finally at a stage where we can truly say that with Beta 3 of our Native SDK, our young child has finally come of age. Our APIs have evolved to a point where they are stable and functional enough to advertise backwards compatibility. We also support a full feature set of APIs in the Native SDK – from connectivity APIs such as email and calendar to APIs that support deeper integration such as invocation to social APIs such as BlackBerry® Messenger™ (BBM).

Beta 3 of the Native SDK contains numerous new and important APIs that many of you have been anxiously waiting for. Some of the highlights include:

Cards

If you attended some of our other conferences, the BlackBerry Jam 10 World Tour or BlackBerry Jam Sessions, you have probably heard us talk about the flow and deep integration that the BlackBerry 10 platform provides. The invocation framework provides a facility via cards through which you can incorporate some of this flow and integration in your app. With cards, you will be able to expose discrete functionality within your app to other apps as well as incorporate functionality provided by your other apps within your own. As an example, if you are developing a picture viewer app, you might expose a simple picture previewer card to the invocation framework. Any app that registers with the invocation framework can invoke your card to preview a picture. Likewise, your app can leverage existing cards on the platform to access various pieces of functionality, whether it is a simple preview of a video or other discrete functions like picking a contact or composing an email.

Visually, a card typically appears as a previewer that takes up most of the screen. However, it appears as part of the application on which it is stacked. Essentially, you can use a gesture to slide the card in, partially or fully into your app as seen in the picture below:

A Card is considered part of the application that invokes it and does not appear as a separate entity in the running applications grid. In addition, when the card’s function is complete, the user is automatically returned to its parent. In this way, a card “feels” like part of the application.

BBM Social Platform

BBM has always been core to the Blackberry platform and it still remains a critical piece of our BlackBerry 10 portfolio. The BBM Social Platform APIs allow you to leverage the social features and functionality of BlackBerry Messenger from within your app. For example, you can initiate a BBM chat and share files such as pictures, voice notes, and music between users who are running your app. You can also stream data between users of your app for real-time applications such as communication, gaming and location tracking. As part of the BBM social platform, you will be able to harness BBM features such as BBM user profile, contact list, messaging and application profile box.

Email, Calendar and Contacts

There is a significant amount of interest from our third party developers for Calendar, Email and Contact APIs, and we are excited to announce their availability in this beta. The Message Center is a signature feature of the BlackBerry experience, and we are adding support on the API side for it as well. The Message Center APIs provide the ability to launch the unified inbox, send emails and receive task notifications. You can use our calendar functionality to create new calendar events, edit existing events, delete existing events and view existing calendar events. We also have the ability to notify third parties when events are being created, modified and deleted. Finally, our contact API allows you to create, edit, delete and view contacts as well as add additional meta information to a contact.

Advertising

In this competitive world of app development, you likely care about creative ways in which you can make money off your apps and we want to help bring you the tools to do just this. After all, the success of our platform depends on your success. To facilitate that, we are adding an Advertising Service along with APIs that allow you to display banner and splash ads in your application or game. You can also create hot links to keyword advertising. Under the scenes, our Advertising service launches a Browser webview to display the advertisements. Along with our Payment and Scoreloop APIs that we introduced in earlier Betas, we believe that we have some powerful tools that can help you monetize your application.

Push

At RIM®, we are proud of our Push technology, and we are now making our powerful Push framework available through the NDK. Through the APIs we provide, your app will be able to register with the Push service and receive push data. When the Push service receives incoming Push messages, it will invoke the application registered for the message using the addressing information provided during the registration. Any app that needs to be responsive to incoming data streams should strongly consider taking a look at our Push framework and associated events.

…and many others

On the ‘Core Native’ front, we’ve introduced a Bluetooth® API which supports Bluetooth on/off, power status, and retrieving paired and found devices. It also provides several Bluetooth profiles such as Serial Port Profile (SPP), Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) and Generic Attribute Profile (GATT). Other core native APIs include APIs for Holster detection, retrieving application info and for querying Wi-Fi® and battery status.
Our spell check engine now exposes APIs at both the C and C++ layer to allow apps to perform spell check functionality in their own customized UI.

At the Cascades™ layer, we have introduced a WallPaper API that allows users to set an image as the wallpaper. We have also introduced APIs for sensors, including support for rotation, orientation, magnetometer, gyroscope and accelerometer. The geocoding API allows the user to perform geocoding and reverse geocoding while the radio info API includes the ability to query available radios, their status, ESN/IMSI, Sim card info, Mobile Country Code and Mobile Network code.

We hope you find enough content in this release to satisfy your needs. As we continue to evolve our platform, we intend to be as open and transparent with you about what’s coming down the pipe. I want to point you to our really cool-looking Native & Cascades flight boards where you can get an up-to-date status on our roadmap items. We have also added a section to our site that highlights the key features of our Core Native and Cascades frameworks. It should be useful for those of you who are trying to decide whether Core Native or Cascades is the right framework to use for developing your app.

As always, we want to continue to hear from you about your needs and receive feedback on our Native SDK.

At the C API layer, we have introduced some important new functionality such as the Invocation Framework API, NFC, Geocoding, Cryptography, Audio Manager, Slogger2 and Notifications Manager. As you can tell, the teams have been working hard since the release of Beta 1 to bring all this functionality to you.

Invocation

The invocation framework enables the delivery of invocations between end points. It describes how end points can be addressed, and provides a mechanism for registering and brokering event handlers such that invocation sources may be loosely coupled to the handler. The invocation framework provides an advanced brokering scheme that allows it to address many different service scenarios, and also to easily be extended to cover new cases.

Your app can register as either a source or a handler. A good example of a source app is an app that supports nested URI’s, and requires a URI handler to handle the URI request. Your app can leverage the invocation framework to broker and determine the best handler for this URI – the assumption here is that there are handlers registered for this on the system. Alternatively you can develop an app that registers as an invocation target – for example, an NFC handler that registers interest in certain NDEF tags. When the NFC service reads a tag, it will leverage the invocation framework to find the best fit handler for that tag and invoke your app. We also support the Invoke API at the Qt layer, so if you are developing a Cascades™-based app, you may want to use the Qt-based invoke API as opposed to the C-based API. We also have built-in support for invoking the Cascades Action Bar and Context Menu. This support is now integrated in our Cascades UI Framework. Please refer to the following Knowledge Base article for details on some known issues which will be addressed in an upcoming patch

NFC

NFC (Near Field Communications) is a short range protocol that is used for contactless communication between devices and tags. Our NFC API will support multiple NFC use cases such as Bluetooth®/Wi-Fi® pairing, NFC contact exchange, reading and writing tags, contactless payment and so on. The possibilities here are endless and I look forward to some really innovative NFC apps for BlackBerry 10 smartphones.

Cryptography

If you care about cryptography, you are in luck as we now expose our Certicom APIs for encryption and decryption of data streams. Those of you who have worked on our Java-based BlackBerry platforms might have some familiarity with what these APIs are capable of. They provide a whole slew of symmetric and asymmetric encryption algorithms such as AES, DES, RSA, ECIES and many more. Along with this, we provide various algorithms for key agreement and transport such as DH, ECDH, ECMQV, RSA, a variety of digital signatures, numerous SHA, MD and HMAC hash functions and random number generation.

Audio Manager

For developers working on apps with audio content, we have introduced a new audio manager API that provides audio concurrency services. The audio manager allows you to choose which microphone and speaker to use. It also provides APIs to get information about different microphones and speakers so if you need that degree of control this API should provide what you need.

Native SDK Logging with slogger2

With slogger2, the most important thing that you gain as a developer is speed. Slogger2 will have minimal system overhead and will be several times faster than the original slogger. Slogger2 will also log when interrupts are disabled, which might be of use to those hardcore low-level developers who require this type of capability. If you have code that uses the slogger APIs, don’t worry — we will continue to support it. Our slogger2 APIs will happily co-exist alongside the legacy slogger.

Notifications Manager

Some apps may want to send notifications to the user – for example, say an app that communicates with the cloud wants to inform the user when new data has been uploaded. The app can register with the notification service to send such a notification. We support simple LED notifications, sound and vibration, toast messages, dialogs, and Inbox notifications. Apps that want to leverage this service need to indicate this by specifying the post_notification action in their bar descriptor. The user will have the ability to customize the notification through the notification settings dialog.

Cascades Platform (C++) APIs

I’ve already used up so many words and haven’t even touched upon the C++ APIs yet! On the C++/Qt side of things, we’ve introduced a whole set of new APIs such as invocation API, Barcode processing, vibration control, copy and paste, and video capture (plus I already described the invoke API earlier). The C++ invoke API is similar in scope to the C layer API and is geared towards folks writing Cascades apps who would naturally be working with the Qt paradigm and would benefit from a Qt API.

Barcode Processing

Barcode Processing is a new API that was developed for encoding and decoding QR codes. While we’ve made the basic encoding and decoding functionality available to non -Cascades apps, the real interesting use cases would occur in conjunction with Cascades apps. The barcode-extended APIs in the Cascades namespace that will allow apps to create and display a barcode scanning control, which will in turn trigger the camera API to show a viewfinder surface as a Cascades foreign window. The app can then scan the QR code and use the provided APIs to encode it as a string and display it on screen.

In addition to this, you will also have APIs that allow your app to customize properties of the Viewfinder surface such as size and location.

Video and Camera

Speaking of camera, we now provide APIs to control camera settings and capture pictures within an application. This allows you to develop apps that interact with the camera, as well as ones that programmatically request a still image from the camera and start a video stream recording.

Location

For developers creating location-based apps, we have added a subset of the QtMobility location APIs. We have introduced APIs for querying current location such as latitude, longitude and altitude. We expect to continue to evolve this API in subsequent releases and plan to provide APIs for geocoding shortly. However, I should mention that we will likely not end up supporting the entire QtLocation API – certain functionality such as maps will be covered by Cascades-specific APIs in upcoming releases.

Vibration Control and Clipboard

Last but not least, we provide a C++ API for vibration control and a clipboard API, both of which are similar in scope to the C layer APIs we already provide. There have also been a myriad number of bug fixes, enhancements to existing APIs and optimizations, which are too many to list in this blog. The best way to explore all these changes is by downloading the NDK and taking a look at the headers, documentation and samples.

Tooling

On the tooling front, we’ve introduced some neat features such as invocation framework tooling, an option for faster bar deployment time, and pretty printing of objects in the debugger. More importantly, we also allow you to specify multiple icons and splash screens in your bar file. This is important for when we start releasing new devices based on the BlackBerry 10 platform, such as the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet. To make it as easy as possible for you, Beta 2 of our IDE will allow you to package multiple icons and splash screens in your bar so that the bar can be deployed on multiple targets.

One of the challenges in writing a blog post like this is that there is a lot of content to present, and unfortunately I can’t do justice in describing all the functionality being released. My colleagues on the Developer Relations side and I are hoping to deep-dive into some of these technologies in dedicated blog posts that we plan to publish in the near future. Meanwhile, I hope this blog post provides at the very least a map of what’s available in Beta 2.

For more information, you should download our NDK on our website and take a look at the new headers. You can also navigate to our NDK documentation and API reference to get more information on each of the APIs. If you still aren’t satisfied, please do not hesitate to consult our developer forums if you have questions or need support. API requests and feedback about our APIs are also very much welcomed — if there is an API you need on our platform, we want to hear about it so we can help unblock you. Happy coding!

“Patrick: ‘I’ve asked you about porting to other platforms, have you had this kind of success on other platforms?’

Danny: ‘I can say in complete honesty definitely not. We’ve never been able to get going on a brand new platform with zero lines of code as quickly as we were on BB10.’”

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

Some of the new APIs being introduced include:

Scoreloop™ SDK 2.0: Our Scoreloop social gaming SDK provides APIs to set up user profiles and global leaderboards, award achievements, and challenge other players. Game developers in particular can enhance their games by adding cool new functionality for social gaming.

Payment APIs: Our payment APIs will help facilitate the integration of in-app payment processing mechanisms in apps.

Battery Monitoring and LED Control: These APIs will give apps access to hardware components on the device. Battery monitoring in particular will allow our applications to read the battery level, so they can inform their users about potential loss of data if the battery level is too low to complete an activity. It also allows an app to register for battery level notifications so that it can receive low battery warnings and handle them accordingly.

On the tooling side, we are introducing a limited beta version of the new BlackBerry® Plug-in for Microsoft® Visual Studio. We’ve been listening to our game developers who develop their titles using the Visual Studio IDE, and this plug-in will now make it easier for these developers to adapt their games for our platform. The Visual Studio plug-in provides options to register for code signing keys, create developer certificates, create and upload debug tokens as well as to build and run applications on the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ OS 2.0 and BlackBerry 10 platforms. The plug-in can be installed with either Visual Studio 10 Standard or Professional edition, though it is still in Beta and lacks support for features such as debugging. We are interested in getting your feedback as you start it to build your apps, and would like you to report any issues or concerns through our BlackBerry developer support forums, which are monitored regularly.

This new BlackBerry 10 Native SDK is just the start of the journey. We will be bringing additional APIs along with associated tooling improvements, and we are continuing to work with our third party partners and developers to ensure that their needs and requirements are being taken into account as we continue to release new functionality. This will not only help our developers build and monetize their apps for BlackBerry, but also enrich our BlackBerry App World™ with new and exciting content.