As the BlackBerry Live keynote news keeps flowing in I’m happy to introduce you to the youthful and fun BlackBerry Q5 smartphone, running BlackBerry 10. With a QWERTY keyboard and a confident design, this new BlackBerry smartphone has been built to provide a fast, effortless experience that helps you explore, create and share while on the go. Thorsten Heins just revealed the device onstage at BlackBerry Live, but we’ve got all the details ready to share with you below.

I’ve been using this device for a few days now and I’m already in love. It fits into my lifestyle perfectly offering the powerful experience I need and allowing me to flow seamlessly from task to task throughout my day.

Highlights and features of the BlackBerry Q5

• The evolution of the classic BlackBerry Keyboard:
  The BlackBerry Q5 features a classic BlackBerry Keyboard with discrete keys that has been re-engineered and elegantly designed to help you type fast, accurately and with the least amount of effort. Plus with Instant Action shortcuts you can type to perform tasks faster. The BlackBerry Q5 smartphone gives you the best of both worlds – a classic QWERTY keyboard for optimized communications and a 3.1” touchscreen for all the rest.
• Create the perfect shot with BlackBerry Time Shift mode and Story Maker
  Create the picture perfect shot with BlackBerry Time Shift mode, then create and share your story, weaving together your photos, videos and music into a movie with BlackBerry Story Maker.
• Share and be seen with BBM Video with Screen Share
  Instantly switch your BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) chat to a BBM Video conversation and catch up face-to-face. You can even share your screen, whether it’s a photo, a page in the browser, an idea, or a view from your camera.
• Stay close to what’s important to you with BlackBerry Hub
  With BlackBerry Hub, all of your messages and social conversations are only one swipe away. There’s no need to stop what you’re doing. Simply peek into the BlackBerry Hub from anywhere with a swipe to effortlessly flow in and out of your messages and conversations.
• BlackBerry World delivers a rich, thriving app and content ecosystem
  Discovering and sharing great apps and content is easier than ever with recommendations based on similar purchases, and access to more than 100,000 apps on the BlackBerry World storefront.

Here’s what Thorsten had to say in a recent press release on the new BlackBerry Q5 smartphone:

“BlackBerry is excited to bring the new BlackBerry Q5 smartphone to our customers in selected markets around world,” said Thorsten Heins, President and CEO of BlackBerry. “The BlackBerry Q5 gives you the best of everything with its cutting-edge BlackBerry 10 functionality and a physical QWERTY keyboard. It is for youthful fans that are passionate, confident and bold, and it makes it easy for them to have fun, create, share and stay connected.”

Pricing and Availability
The new BlackBerry Q5 smartphone will be available in selected markets in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia (including the Asia Pacific region), and Latin America, with availability beginning in July.

There you have it folks – if you live in the areas listed above, you can look forward to getting your hands on the new BlackBerry Q5 with BlackBerry 10. What do you think of this phone? Let us know your thoughts on this stunning new BlackBerry device in the comments below.

The Cascades Framework uses a modular approach to store, access, and display data in your apps.

There is a good chance you will need your app to interact with external data – the raw data for your app. The format of the external data can vary depending upon your needs and Cascades provides classes that help you manage three common data formats: XML, JSON, and SQL.

First, let’s look at a table comparing BBOS and BlackBerry 10 Data Storage:

USER File system

BlackBerry 10 introduces a file system (recall on BBOS there was no file system). So, what to know about the file system? Firstly, the working directory is where your app is started – it is also called current directory and the sandbox ($sandbox/app). Access to files and folders in the working directory is controlled through Unix-style groups and permissions. Key point: never hardcode absolute file paths – all should be relative to your sandbox.

Please review the following file system diagram:

And visit this page :

https://developer.blackberry.com/cascades/documentation/device_platform/filesystem/index.html

For more information on the file system.

Secondly, let’s look at working with XML, JSON, and SQL. The following provides some code snippets for all three along with links to more information.

XML

The following is a code snippet on how to load XML using a GroupDataModel

// Create the data model, specifying sorting keys of "firstName" and "lastName" 
GroupDataModel *model = new GroupDataModel(QStringList() << "firstName"
                                           << "lastName"); 

// Create an XmlDataAccess object and load the .xml file. The QDir::currentPath() 
// function returns the current working directory for the app. 
XmlDataAccess xda; 
QVariant list = xda.load(QDir::currentPath() + 
                         "/app/native/assets/employees.xml", 
                         "/employees/employee");

For more on XML data, please click “Working with XML”

http://developer.blackberry.com/cascades/documentation/device_platform/data_access/working_with_xml.html

JSON

The following is a code snippet on how to create a JSON Data Access Object and load the JSON file

// Create a JsonDataAccess object and load the .json file. The  
// QDir::currentPath() function returns the current working  
// directory for the app. 
JsonDataAccess jda; 
QVariant list = jda.load(QDir::currentPath() + 
                         "/app/native/assets/employees.json");

For more on JSON, please click “Working with JSON data”

http://developer.blackberry.com/cascades/documentation/device_platform/data_access/working_with_json.html

SQL

The following is a code snippet on how to create SQL

 // Create an SqlDataAccess object 
    SqlDataAccess sda(home.absoluteFilePath("mySQLFile.db")); 

    // Create a table called Employee in the database file 
    sda.execute("CREATE TABLE Employee( firstName VARCHAR(50), 
                 lastName VARCHAR(50), salary INT);"); 

    // Insert employee records into the table 
    sda.execute("INSERT INTO Employee (firstName, lastName, salary) 
                 VALUES ("Mike", "Smith", 42000);"); 
    sda.execute("INSERT INTO Employee (firstName, lastName, salary) 
                 VALUES ("Joe", "Brown", 55000);");

For more on SQL data, please click “Working with SQL”

http://developer.blackberry.com/cascades/documentation/device_platform/data_access/working_with_sql.html

In conclusion, the data files that you work with in your apps are stored in the file system on the device. Different file system locations have different permissions; in some areas, you can create new files to store your app data, while in others, you can only load data from existing files. If you want to access your data files using the method that works best for you, you need to understand where your data files are located in the file system. Please follow this link “File system access for app” for more information.

Data files that you package with your app (when you compile the app) are located in the assets folder in the file system. Your app has read-only access to this folder, which means that you can load data from files in this location, but you can’t save new data in these files. When you create new data files dynamically while your app is running, they are stored in the data folder. Your app has full read-write access to this folder, so you can load and save data using files in this location.

Now on to Part 9!!

So, we thought we’d try a little bit of BlackBerry 10 Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) magic to help us. This  follows on nicely from my previous Blog post on the Internet of Things and the model is more widely applicable than just finding lost keys. In fact, if you haven’t already done so, this is probably a good time to have a read of that blog post and article since it covers the basic concepts needed in this blog post.

Go on … I’ll wait and have a cup of tea.

Ah, ok, you’re back … right, let’s continue.

The first thing we did was to do a little bit of research to see if the Bluetooth SIG had set any standards in this area; no point in re-inventing the wheel and the existence of a standard would mean that a vendor may have already implemented the technology in a product.

Whenever you have a requirement that may be solvable using Bluetooth LE the first place to look is here: http://developer.bluetooth.org/gatt/Pages/default.aspx.

Browsing through the GATT Profiles we came upon this one: Find Me … this sounded promising!

To quote the Abstract for the Find Me profile, “The Find Me profile defines the behavior when a button is pressed on one device to cause an alerting signal on a peer device”. An image formed in our minds immediately!

A closer look shows that this profile implemented a GATT Service called Immediate Alert which used a GATT Characteristic called Alert Level … this looked a perfect match.

Here’s the description of the Alert Level Characteristic.

Alert Level Characteristic

It’s an 8-bit unsigned integer that can take on three values signifying:

• No Alert
• Mild Alert
• High Alert

The interpretation of these Alert Levels is the responsibility of the device that implements this characteristic.

Having found the Bluetooth LE Profile that matched our requirements the next step was to find a simple device that implemented it.

We found this one (see Figure 2) from Texas Instruments[1].  As well as supporting the Find Me profile it also allows re-programming with other Bluetooth services.

Texas Instruments CC2540/41 Mini Development Kit

Out of interest, I used one of the tools ( BTool ) that came with the key-fob to examine the GATT services that this device supported. Here’s a screen shot:

GATT Services present on the key-fob

So, you can see the highlighted red box clearly shows the Immediate Alert Service which has UUID 0×1802 (integers are represented in little-endian order so 0×1802 is represented as 02:18) and the Alert Level Characteristic which has UUID 0x2A06. Notice that the value field of the Alert Level characteristic has been assigned a handle of 0×0028 – handles are discovered by and used by applications to access fields in the GATT Service list and they’ve been covered in a previous blog post and article.

The application that we developed based on this is actually very similar in structure to the Heart Rate Monitor application that was described in a previous blog and article. The basic logic is the same:

1. Pair the Bluetooth LE device with the BlackBerry 10 handset before using the application.
2. Launch the application which:
   1. Discovers devices that support the Immediate Alert Service
   2. Connects to a discovered device selected by the user
   3. Offers the user the choice of Alert Levels ( Off, Mild and High) to be sent to the device

Here are some screenshots showing what the application looks like:

Screens from the application

You can see that the buttons at the top of the screen become enabled only once the application has connected to the Immediate Alert Service on the key-fob. If you select the “High” option this device will emit a loud buzzing sound and flash a green LED.

Application Sending an Alert to key-fob

This is the application in action. If you use your imagination you can hear the buzzing and I can find my keys!

The key part of the application is where the Alert Level is sent to the device. Here’s the section of code that does this:

void FindMeService::sendAlertRequest() {

       uint8_t level[] = {0};

      switch (_alertLevel) {
            case FindMeService::Off:
                  level[0] = 0;
                  break;
            case FindMeService::Mild:
                  level[0] = 1;
                  break;
            case FindMeService::High:
                  level[0] = 2;
                  break;
            default:
                  level[0] = 0;
                  break;
      }

      errno = 0;

      if (bt_gatt_write_value_noresp(
                    _serviceInstance,
                    _alertLevelValueHandle, 0, 
                    level,
                    sizeof(level)
          ) != EOK) {

             qDebug() << "errno=(" << errno << ") :" << strerror(errno);
      }
}

You can see that we’ve already connected to the Immediate Alert Service and have a reference to this in the variable _serviceInstance; we also have a handle to the Alert Level characteristic value _alertLevelValueHandle. The API used is bt_gatt_write_value_noresp()which means that the Alert Level (level) is written to the device and no acknowledgement is expected in return.

Wait, I hear you say! How did you know that you had to use a Write without Response to write the Alert Level value to the device? Well, it’s part of the definition of the Immediate Alert Service. Here (Figure 6) is the definition of the Alert Level characteristic from the definition of the Immediate Alert Service. It says that this characteristic can be accessed only though the Write without Response request.

Immediate Alert Service Alert Level Characteristic Properties

And, just to confirm that the device understands and enforces this as well, Figure 7 shows this value in the GATT‘s entry for the Alert Level characteristic – the value 0×04 in the green box is the encoding of this property.

Characteristic Properties of the Alert Level

We made a video which has Martin (@mdwrim) showing the application in action and explaining the code. Here it is:

http://youtu.be/UXEt5tfUEdc

If you want to know more then check out the following resources:

• The complete source code for this application on Git Hub;
  • https://github.com/blackberry/Cascades-Community-Samples
• A Bluetooth Primer level Blog Post is available here to get you started:
  • http://devblog.blackberry.com/2013/04/bluetooth-low-energy-and-the-internet-of-things/

I hope you’ve enjoyed this short note and hope it has piqued your interest to find out more about Bluetooth Low Energy and how it can be integrated into your BlackBerry 10 applications.

Continuing the last UCOSP posting, where we talked about the release of the Barcode Scanning Extension for BlackBerry 10 WebWorks, we have some thoughts from another student regarding development of BlackBerry 10 WebWorks Extensions. Developing extensions in C++ that can be called from JavaScript involves some challenges, so if you’ve been thinking about diving in, these hints will be quite useful. Here’s what Alex has to say about his experience this term:

“I had the fortune of joining a number of great software development students as we embarked onto BlackBerry’s new platform, BlackBerry 10. During this term, we explored bbUI.js, BlackBerry Webworks, and the Native Development Kit. I had worked specifically on creating new Webworks community plugins. Two plugins that I had worked on were a vibration feature to allow for additional parameters accessible only through the native development kit and a barcode reading feature with Michael Delong and Tim Windsor. In the end, I had done a great deal of research and developed various approaches to tackle the barcode reading feature.

The vibration community plugin was an effective introduction into developing between Javascript and C++. The feature was originally recommended to be completed when another colleague had required additional granularity in the vibration settings. While I had looked into this issue and was able to flesh it out, we found the APIs themselves were somewhat limiting with how the colleague had envisioned the outcome. Overall this situation was a positive experience in understanding the BlackBerry 10 Webworks architecture and the BlackBerry Platform Services.When developing this plugin I ran into a number of issues due to my own lack of patience which lead to some rather confusing errors.

• JNext does method invocation through string matching

Somehow through development I was using a certain keyword for indicating my command I wanted to invoke from Javascript. On the C++ side, I seemed to have switched around the naming and thus was expecting to read an event from a keyword that did not exist. Since these constants are being used in two different languages and there is not much common ground between this two language process, nothing was telling me that I was passing in the wrong keyword. Copy and paste can be your friend.

• Vibration falls under the BlackBerry Platform Services

While creating the vibration code, I was confused why it was not working at all. I had the keywords matching in both Javascript and C++ and it had all compiled from what I could see. Since vibration falls underneath the BPS family, you need to initialize the BPS before it can be used.

bps_initialize();

After completing this feature, I went on to work with Mike on the barcode scanning feature. Barcode scanning is a relatively interesting concept as it would combine a fairly wide knowledge base of media with my current understanding of Javascript and C++. When working with this feature, initially we tried to piece together what we could from other examples in cascades and the NDK github samples. Requiring a rather large knowledge base was something we had not expected from a feature like barcode scanning. Having to take advantage of input from the camera on the C++ layer introduced us to a number of concepts such as image formats and subsampling. In addition to worrying about these fundamental multimedia concepts we were trying to understand how to take a raw frame from the camera and extract a barcode with the ZXing library. While another of methods were taken in attempting to complete this feature I had participated in two approaches of development to get barcode reading to where it is now on WebWorks.

1. Displaying the images from a base64 representation from C++ to Javascript layer

• Attempted to use card invocation to support video feedback for barcode scanning

Prior to this project, I knew of base64 encoding but I had not ever used it in my own development. The ability to encode the bytes of the image in a string was an interesting idea to take advantage of the JNext bridge to carry the image from the native layer to the web layer. Unfortunately during the actual process, the encoding and decoding process can take a fairly long time and actual rendering on the canvas was not fast enough to capture a snappy mobile experience. it was an interesting usage of base64 but this was not quite the answer for the barcode scanner in its current state.

The second attempt that I had looked into was utilizing card invocation to skip the barcode reading altogether and take advantage of a cascades application to do the barcode reading for us. Card invocation is a great idea that can also be seen on other platforms such as Android. Specific functionality that another application may be able to accomplish very well, can be used as a “card”. These cards are invoked from an application which will run that portion of another application. When the card action is complete, that application is closed and the user is returned to the original invoking application. The advantage to this option was visual feedback the user would feel as if it had been built into the Webworks framework and created a fluid native feel to this highly user requested feature, as I was switching into a cascades barcode scanning application. Unfortunately with the card invocation, an application which did the barcode reading would have to exist on the device prior to launching this Webworks application. In addition to this pitfall, Webworks in its current state allows for the ability to query potential cards to handle jobs and the ability to invocate these actions, but was unable to return values. This is an issue if the developer wants to capture a QR code and use this value in their own application. I however did not look into copying the barcode into the clipboard or providing the option to do this however this extra step could be potentially approached by other developers that are fine with running a utility application and a Webworks application.

Overall the experience on BlackBerry 10 with the Webworks framework has been an enjoyable opportunity into the world of mobile web applications. With the ability to utilize open source community driven libraries, BlackBerry has helped build an environment to utilize rich web applications with the raw power of the BlackBerry 10 platform. I look forward to seeing what new applications and innovations can arise from this new way of hybrid mobile/native development.”

You can check out the growing list of BlackBerry 10 WebWorks extensions on our Github repository. The university term is wrapping up now, so our next UCOSP update will have the final thoughts from our last two students and an overview of what the students were able to do this term. If you’re interested in doing some open source coding yourself, I’m putting together some projects for the summer. Contact me through email or twitter.

The Port-A-Thons are now closed and it’s time for you to be rewarded.

Some of the Port-A-Thon rewards required draws. We needed to wait until the app approval deadline (April 9, 2013) to draw the names of the winners.

We are pleased to announce that the draws have taken place for trips to BlackBerry Live 2013 and BlackBerry Dev Alpha B devices.

Notifications are being sent out this week to the developers that have won and all winners will be contacted via email by the end of next week. Please check your spam folder for any messages from blackberrydeveloperprogram@blackberry.com that might have snuck in.

Again, thank you for your incredible dedication and support. More importantly thank you for your patience. We were humbled by the turnout at these events and worked as quickly as possible to work through the unexpectedly large number of applications that were submitted.

If you have any more questions please contact us at blackberrydeveloperprogram@blackberry.com. Let us know in the comments what you thought about the Port-A-Thons and if you think we should do them again.

BlackBerry developers that rely on a simulator for app development, listen up, because you need to read this! The latest simulator release for BlackBerry 10 brings a heap of new improvements, features and core apps, taking development one step closer to using a physical device.

In the latest BlackBerry 10.1 simulator release we now offer the ability to select which form factor you want to launch the simulator with. In this release, we support the layout for both the Z10 and Q10 devices. No more need to download multiple simulators! You’ll see these boot options listed as follows:

1. BlackBerry 10 All-Touch [1280x768]
2. BlackBerry 10 Keyboard [720x720]

Once the boot option is selected, you’ll notice some handy tool tip information during the simulator boot up screen. These tips will highlight new features as well as suggestions for maximizing simulator performance. Additionally, the simulator adds support for multi-touch input where developers can simulate up to 10 individual touch paths. For example, you can simulate using a two finger pinch and zoom. For more details, check out the documentation for simulator gestures.

The simulator controller joins the new feature party with added support for automatic simulator connection, incoming and outgoing phone call simulation, and mouse mode selection for controlling touch events. If your application supports incoming phone calls, you can test this by sending a call from the simulator controller. The incoming number will be detected by your application. For all the details on what is available in the simulator controller, check out the documentation.

Now let’s talk about what applications come with the simulator out of box. Previously, we supported a basic set of core applications including:

• BlackBerry Hub
• Contacts
• Calendar
• Browser
• BBM
• BlackBerry World
• Phone
• Settings

Today, we have added a whole bunch more; including support for social connect accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Evernote and LinkedIn. These new apps include, but are not limited to:

• Calculator
• Facebook
• File Manager
• Games
• Help
• Maps
• Pictures
• Remember
• Smart Tags
• YouTube
• Weather

So, what are you waiting for? Grab the latest simulator download and get started using all these great new features today! For additional information, please see the release notes.

Perhaps the largest single contribution from UCOSP students was recently pushed to our WebWorks-Community-APIs repository: A Barcode Scanning extension for BlackBerry 10 WebWorks. Two students started working on this during the initial hackathon at Facebook. Before I talk any more about it, let’s hear from Mike, who did the first coding and bulk of the C++ investigation:

“My semester working with Blackberry under the umbrella of UCOSP has been a very rewarding and enjoyable experience. Not only have I learned a great deal and gained invaluable new skills and experience, but I have also built on my previous experiences with GitHub, C++, and mobile Blackberry WebWorks development. From the semester-opening code sprint at Facebook HQ, to finishing a native WebWorks extension, to developing and testing a Blackberry 10 mobile app, working on this project has been an enlightening and rewarding journey.

I have spent the bulk of these past four months contributing to the Barcode Reader native C++ extension for WebWorks with my colleague Alex Kwan and mentor Tim Windsor from Blackberry. The idea of creating native C++ libraries that can be invoked from a Javascript layer was intriguing to me right from the beginning, and I wasn’t disappointed in choosing this option. My contribution was mainly for the C++ portion of the extension, which involved writing code to access the BB10 native camera APIs and attempting to detect barcodes from the camera frames using the ZXing image processing library. Development of the extension initially proceeded quite smoothly. The native APIs for accessing the camera and processing frames from the viewfinder were simple enough and sufficiently documented, and the Zxing library was fairly straightforward to use. Within a month the basic functionality of the Barcode reader was implemented, and our extension was capable of scanning barcodes.

The majority of the challenges involved with this project resulted from attempting to pass the image frames captured by the camera viewfinder back to the WebWorks layer. My colleagues and I experimented with several options; although many initial solutions we tried ended up being infeasible due to various performance-related issues, we finally managed to come up with a solution that works well and the extension is now ready for release.

In addition to working on this exciting new extension, I’ve also had the good fortune of building on my
previous experience with mobile development and creating a new WebWorks app for Blackberry 10. For the remaining week of this term, I’m looking forward to completing and refining my application. The WebWorks SDK is straightforward to use and it’s easy for novice mobile developers to get started with it, and Tim’s Ant build script greatly simplifies the process of building and deploying apps to your BB10 mobile device.

Overall, working with both native extensions and the WebWorks SDK was a great learning
experience, and I would highly recommend developers to contribute extensions for providing any functionality they feel is currently lacking in the Blackberry WebWorks SDK.”

Once Mike had the initial C++ code working, another student worked on wiring in Javascript connections so that it could be called from an extension (I’ve saved that students thoughts for the next blog post in the series). Finally, I took the code at the end to finish integrating it together with some tweaks and testing on different devices. As Mike stated, the hardest challenge was with showing the user what they were aiming at. As the JNEXT interface between C++ and Javascript can only handle string data, we were unable to have the viewfinder paint video or even images directly. The solution in the end was to capture burst images from the camera, save them to the filesystem, and pass the file path to the Javascript layer. The resulting image stream isn’t as smooth as direct painting, but the actual scanning and interpretation of barcodes is unaffected, so users have the ability to aim, and the scanning is as fast as any pure native solution.

This is an outstanding example of what these Canadian university students are capable of, and it’s awesome to be able to work with them. If you’ve been looking for a Barcode Scanner API for your BlackBerry 10 WebWorks app, check it out on Github.

Last year we started sharing roadmaps for our tools and APIs with our community, and now we’re looking to give that information a bit more color. Sure, there’s a little bit of information on the roadmaps talking about what the features will entail, but we don’t usually get the chance to explain them in more detail.

Of course, we could create long blog articles to try and cover the “ins” and “outs” of the functionality, but that can be a little bit tedious. So we figured we could do something a little different and frankly just a little bit weird. We decided to give you some background on the features as part of a video blog series. Now you may ask, what’s weird about that… well, you’ll have to watch the videos to find out.

We’ll be running this video series leading up to BlackBerry Jam Americas in Orlando to give some more background of some of the topics that we’ll be discussing at length during the conference.

This first video will give you some information surrounding the different roadmap items that we’re looking at for improvements in our Momentics tooling.

I hope you enjoy the series and find the information both useful and entertaining!

BlackBerry Hub integration currently consists of the Notification API, which lets you add a notification to the Hub with a custom title, body, sound, and invoke target. The ability to customize the icon will be available in a future OS update.

The concept of Application Menu Items has been broadly replaced by the Invocation framework, specifically the “Share” menu. You cannot add arbitrary menu items to the built in applications, but you can set your application up to handle Share (and other actions). This will make them available from those apps.

Rather than building your own UI to let the user pick or enter PIM data, you may want to use the Cards and Pickers when available.

Our open source projects with university students from across Canada have been going superbly this term with many excellent contributions to the BlackBerry Open Source community. This is our second post this term, the first one being about the kickoff sprint at Facebook headquarters. First let’s hear what Amritpal has to say about what he’s been up to.

“Being a part of the Blackberry team through UCOSP has been a world of firsts: contributing to an open source project, bbUI.js, and developing my own mobile application.

In the first month of UCOSP, I was contributing to bbUI.js with bug fixes and features. About three weeks ago, I learned that BlackBerry extended their limited edition device upgrade. From that point, the race was on to create fully functional and entertaining application (who needs productivity!). I chose to create a 2D game in HTML5. Having not created a mobile application before, the entire process was a learning experience that encompassed the canvas element to using bbui.js in real life applications.

During the process, my go to resource was the BB10 Sample apps repository. With a variety of applications that make use of a diverse set of BB10 elements, it provided helpful launch pad and reference. I was able to use code to get my application set up (config.xml and index.html examples specifically), and see examples of API calls, and bbUI.js use cases.”

Here are some helpful tips for a new BlackBerry 10 WebWorks developer:

1. Set up your development environment such that you don’t have to recompile after every modification. (See http://devblog.blackberry.com/2009/12/update-your-blackberry-widget-without-recompiling)
2. Test your application on device frequently! Don’t assume Ripple is an exact replication of the BlackBerry 10 experience. From my own development experience, I had my biggest ‘oh-no’ moment when I tested my application on device after hours of development time and it was not functioning properly. After dreading the hours of reverts I would have to make, I was able solve the issue through a quick search on the WebWorks forum.
3. Finally, use the Web and WebWorks Development forum! Tips, helpful developers and an archive of other issues faced by developers

Since this posting is somewhat delayed from when Amritpal initially wrote it, his application has actually been approved so you can download it to your BlackBerry 10 device and check it out. Another student, Willie, had this to say about his work so far:

“Since the code sprint in mid-January, I mostly focused on getting myself acquainted with BlackBerry WebWorks and the bbUI.js components. Working on bbUI.js allowed me to get my feet wet with mobile web development, and the entire project is a great resource to get acquainted with Blackberry and developing web applications on the platform.

I’ve been mainly focusing on developing a mobile application using HTML5 and jQuery Mobile with PhoneGap to test and deploy on BlackBerry 10 (a health activity tracker). This has been my first experience with mobile development and in the past month it’s been extremely rewarding. Working with the various PhoneGap plugins that is provided allowed me to access the Blackberry camera functionality easily and the built-in Ant build and deploy scripts make it very easy to test on an actual device. The next step is to add bbUI.js elements to give any application a native look and feel, which is all easily accessible on GitHub.

As the technical lead at a mobile health technology startup, it’s been challenging to navigate through the mobile space and its fragmentation. BlackBerry 10 WebWorks has provided an easy and logical way to develop for the BlackBerry 10 platform while also giving the flexibility to use web frameworks that can work on a variety of platforms. BlackBerry has made the development process smooth and seamless for even people inexperienced with mobile development to jump in!

For the rest of the term, I’m looking forward to completing/refining my application and also continue contributing to bbUI.js”

As you can see, the students are doing some great work. In our next update we hope to showcase some achievements in WebWorks Extension development. Until then, maybe you’d like to get involved in Open Source at BlackBerry?