Hey #TeamBlackBerry, if you were up at the wee hours of the morning today, you may have noticed a change to the BlackBerry App World web store. It is now simply called BlackBerry World. The naming change reflects a shift in the type of things you can purchase from the store as we transition to BlackBerry 10 and beyond.

As we mentioned back at BlackBerry Jam Americas, BlackBerry World will have much more than just apps – it will now be home to Videos and Music as well. BlackBerry World is going to be the one-stop shop for all of your mobile entertainment needs.

With BlackBerry World, there are various ways to browse, download, buy, and manage apps using a BlackBerry smartphone, BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, or desktop or laptop computer,— inspiration is at your fingertips. And if you find something you love and want to tell the world, you can easily share it with your friends over BBM, Facebook and Twitter. Also, you can simply tap smartphones together and invite your friends to download it — just like that.

The change will happen on the web storefront first and will be rolled out to the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet and BlackBerry smartphones in the coming weeks. If you’re asking, “what about the BlackBerry World conference?” – we’ll have more details on that for you soon!

NOTE: Please be aware it may take up to 24 hours for the changes to appear.

It may have been the warm weather, the great food or the inspiring scenery but the developers of South Africa couldn’t have a picked a better time or place for the first BlackBerry® Jam Session Super Hackathon in Africa!

It was truly a remarkable event with people flying from Botswana, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and different parts of South Africa. To make the event even more challenging we decided to hold a multi-city hackathon: with the help of our two BlackBerry Apps Lab Managers in Pretoria and Cape Town we established a video call session so that attendees and technical resources could interact and share experiences.

The event kicked off early in the morning when, after some caffeine and calories, everyone had enough energy to function and start the brainstorming.

There were 11 teams with one team, @NegatronDev, working on two apps at the same time!

And at the end of the day, only three teams could put their hands on the prize. I had the opportunity to spend some time with all the teams and got to know them better

Best App – ReserveMe – Flying Solo (Leon Van Dyk)

Since joining our BlackBerry Jam World Tour back in July, Leon’s involvement with the BlackBerry platform has grown and he has actively participated with the activities in the BlackBerry Apps Lab in Pretoria.

“I registered for the hackathon to support the local community of developers, not only within Cape Town but also Southern Africa. The opportunity to meet local developers and network was a huge bonus with a few friendships being made before I left. I also wanted to test my BlackBerry skills and to partake in the first Jam Session Super Hackathon in Africa!” says Leon who has become quite familiar now with BlackBerry development -  “I have developed one app that involves managing events and is heavily integrated into the BlackBerry 10 experience. I intend on continuing to develop ReserveMe and refine it a bit more until it reaches my personal quality requirements as well as BlackBerry’s . I plan to have both apps in the store before launch”.

Best Design – SnapMenu – Backspace (Ndivhuwo Nthambeleni, Vutlhari Rikhotso, Eugene Masinga)

Backspace is a team based in Pretoria who decided to create a menu app for students who have a tight budget and want a wide choice of fast food.  Vutlhari told me “I get all my app ideas from problems that I face, so the idea came from a constant irritation of having to look at the display menus in restaurants.”

Coding is their passion, “I love coding, I love designing, I love apps and I love people. I subscribe to the school of thought that believes software should be free unless it makes the receiving party money. I joined because I want to aid in enhancing the experience of using a BlackBerry 10 device”.

Vutlhari is currently working on a BlackBerry 10 application that will be released soon and he’s finding the BlackBerry Apps Lab in Pretoria to be extremely useful “Yes, the lab for one has been one of the greatest things about developing for BlackBerry, along with the people, the access to tools and internet. They all have been a major help in learning BlackBerry development”

Best e-commerce – BizFinder – BrightLabs (Kehiloe Sereo, Dintle Sealetsa)
BrightLabs came all the way from Botswana to represent their development studio. They are already familiar to the BlackBerry platform having developed an app for BlackBerry OS devices called ‘ekse!’.  They decided to attend the hackathon as that was “…an unmissable opportunity to have our first ‘live’ BlackBerry event experience and join in on the fun” says Dintle.

So how do they feel about being one of the winners?

“Winning app? We still can’t get used to the sound of that! We were more than happy to just submit anything really. We brainstormed some ideas – some crazy, some colorful – until we settled on the idea we thought was easy and quick to hack, usable and of value to the user”

And it’s a pleasure to hear that they think “the BlackBerry developer community is what makes the platform fun to develop on. And BlackBerry has done great in offering these developers top-notch support and development, and a robust set of tools to work with. Happy developers are a result of a happy and fun platform and ecosystem – KUDOS!”

And when the sun was down it was time to pack everything up and head home.  The adrenaline was still high but some devs had a long way to go before being able to reach their bed.

And to sum this up “One can see huge amounts of effort was put into the event and I would like to thank everyone who participated into making it a reality and I hope to see them soon”

Not our words but we could say exactly the same!  Big thanks to the BlackBerry Apps Lab Manager of Pretoria, Jacques Du Toit, and Cape Town, Glenn Stein, for supporting us throughout the event.

And last but not least, Lany Sommers, Senior Business Development Manager, whose mastermind is responsible for building the state-of-the-art BlackBerry Apps Lab facilities across the region says ‘The talent in South Africa is overwhelming.  A HUGE thank you to all who made the event happen and for all those who participated.  What a way to inaugurate the launch of our lab in Cape Town!’

Next African stop: Nairobi, Kenya (Nov 17)
See you there!

Luca (@BlackBerryLuca) & Michael (@mweitzel)

• http://developer.blackberry.com/android
• http://developer.blackberry.com/html5

Read on for an overview of what’s included in the BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 Developer Beta build.

BlackBerry® Runtime for Android™ Apps

A beta version of the BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps is included in the developer build, which allows ported Android apps to run on the BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 platform. A toolset, including an Eclipse® plugin for modifying existing Android applications, will be available along with a PlayBook simulator for testing. To simplify the process even further, you may also use the BlackBerry Packager for Android Apps, which provides a guide for converting existing apps and ensures compliance for signing and uploading to BlackBerry App World™. The BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps supports Android v2.3.3 apps. Some apps may require slight modifications to be supported. Head over to the Android microsite to check out the available toolsets!

BlackBerry® WebWorks™

The BlackBerry WebWorks platform has received another round of significant improvements, with the WebWorks SDK v2.2 for the BlackBerry PlayBook now available for developer use. Version 2.2 of the SDK includes features such as full system level file manipulation with read/write access, updated BlackBerry PlayBook tablet simulators, support for WebGL on BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0, signing improvements, ability to play audio when the screen dims and various bug fixes. For more information on the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK v2.2, check out the new WebWorks microsite.

Adobe® AIR®

The recently released Adobe AIR 3.0 Runtime is included in BlackBerry® PlayBook OS SDK for Adobe® AIR®, allowing developers to take full advantage of the new features. Developers can now take advantage of features such as Enhanced Native Extension Support to integrate native libraries and code bases into apps, Secure Sockets and Flash Access DRM for media rich content, Encrypted Local Storage to keep files secured and encrypted while storing sensitive information within the application and more! To learn more about the new Adobe AIR 3.0 Runtime, check out our BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK for Adobe AIR microsite.

We hope that you’re excited to try out the Developer Beta build, as well as the new tools and platform updates it supports. BlackBerry DevCon Americas attendees: don’t forget to check out the App Express stations at the conference to quickly port your existing Android apps to the BlackBerry PlayBook!

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

Here’s a guest post from our friend Anders at RIM TAT! – Ed.

Cascades is the user interface (“UI”) framework that TAT has been using for many years to create numerous advanced UIs and applications, such as Scrapbook for BlackBerry PlayBook. I’m happy to announce that it will soon be part of the BlackBerry Native SDK.

Here’s a short list of Cascades features:

• Great performance, including amazing transitions and animations
• Flexible UI layouts including free form lists.
• 3D support
• Support for mixing pre-packaged UI components with custom components
• Core UI feature support

Cascades was originally developed to enable development of really innovative and unique applications. This put hard requirements on the flexibility and extendibility of the UI framework. The need for designer/developer collaboration was also one of stronger driving factors when developing the framework. Let’s dig deeper into how Cascades will aid the development of rich and compelling UI.

The flexibility of Cascades enables UI innovation

Cascades has a unique level of UI building blocks. In other UI frameworks, when stepping beyond the set of standard UI components, developers must often resort to low level OpenGLES-commands. Cascades provides higher level building blocks for many of the tricky but application-defining UI scenarios. Features like Flexible List layouts, 2D/3D transformations, mixing of 2D UI and 3D objects are all made accessible to developers.

The Cascades workflow helps designers and developers collaborate

In Cascades, UI elements are exposed both programmatically and through mark-up. The mark-up also provides scripting support making it a suitable environment for more design-oriented developers to work with, allowing for quick turnaround times and prototyping to find best possible UI design.

The markup also enables strong tool support including a Photoshop plugin making it easy to take and .psd sketch to a working layout in an application.

Cascades has beautiful pre-packaged components

Not every developer is a designer, full of ideas around 3D layouts and crazy infographics. For developers who prefer pre-designed and pre-packaged components, Cascades provides a strong set of Core UI components with great look and feel. They come with a number of built in effects and interaction design that will risk making your app look prettier than you can take credit for.

Availability of Cascades

Cascades will be released as a Beta during the Fall of 2011, with more and more advance features coming in future releases.

Today at the BlackBerry DevCon Americas 2011 conference, the Native SDK for the BlackBerry PlayBook (“NDK”) left beta and ‘went gold’ for general availability. The NDK allows developers take full advantage of the power of the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet when developing apps. The NDK includes support for C/C++ POSIX library and compliance, device events like gesture swipes and touch screen inputs, access to code management systems using industry standard Eclipse CDT (C/C++ Development Tools) and advanced debug and analysis tools. QNX® Momentics Tool Suite, an Eclipse-based integrated development environment, is also included. It provides memory profiling, application debugging, and memory usage statistics to help developers debug sophisticated programs.

For the v1.0 release, we’ve kept the NDK lean and mean. APIs have been provided for the sensors on the device, as well as OpenGL ES 2.0. For sound, we’ve brought OpenAL along. For performance, POSIX threading. For portability, POSIX compliant APIs are included as well.

Additionally, the simulator team has been able to provide an OpenGL ES 2.0 environment to test out your 3D games. This means that our simulator makes use of your development platform’s hardware acceleration for 3D. As the NDK simulators mature, more and more features will be included as we are committed to providing developers the best tools possible.

The NDK is here, and it’s the start of a new and exciting episode for BlackBerry PlayBook tablet application development. If anyone has feedback they’d like to share, our doors are always open – don’t hesitate to engage with us on social media channels or the BlackBerry Developer Zone.

Download the Native SDK for BlackBerry Tablet OS

How will you be using the new NDK in your application development?

Recently we introduced a new family of BlackBerry smartphones running the new BlackBerry 7 OS. To coincide, the BlackBerry 7 SDK went gold to support these new product launches. We’ve seen strong adoption of the new tools for BlackBerry 7 smartphones. We have also seen many existing applications ported over to these new BlackBerry 7 devices.

To enable developers to start testing and optimizing their BlackBerry applications for two upcoming smartphones, we are now releasing a beta of the new BlackBerry simulators, and encourage you to check out BlackBerry® Developer Zone for more information. In addition, we have opened up BlackBerry App World to enable vendors to start posting their applications for sale in time to be included for consideration in launch activities for both of these upcoming devices. To be fully prepared for launch, it is important for BlackBerry developers to note the following two key items and how you can get ready for launch:

1. Re-Posting Your Apps in BlackBerry App World for BlackBerry 7: BlackBerry App World vendors are encouraged to test their applications as soon as possible using the new BlackBerry 7 SDK, and then return to the BlackBerry App World vendor portal to post their applications for sale for the new BlackBerry smartphones.

2. Preparing Now for New Screen Sizes and Resolutions Supported by BlackBerry 7: BlackBerry 7 is designed to retain binary compatibility with our BlackBerry® 6 OS platform, and is also designed to support a variety of new screen resolutions and screen sizes that may require some developers to update and re-compile their existing applications. These new smartphones will also support new screen sizes and resolutions so we have posted new information on what screen characteristics will be supported by BlackBerry 7 along with these new smartphone simulators to emulate each of these different configurations.

New Screen Characteristics Supported by BlackBerry 7 and New Simulators for Testing

One new BlackBerry smartphone will feature a 360 x 480 all touch interface. Application developers will likely find that their BlackBerry® Torch™ 9800 smartphone builds will run on this new BlackBerry smartphone without change.

The second upcoming BlackBerry smartphone will feature a 480 x 360 touch + keyboard interface. Application developers will either need to add touch support to their existing BlackBerry® Bold™ 9700 smartphone apps, or modify their BlackBerry Torch 9800 smartphone builds to account for landscape being in a vertical orientation.

We have now posted the new BlackBerry 7 smartphone simulators to emulate each of these form factors and screen resolutions. The associated simulator model numbers for the two simulators are 9380 and 9790. With these new simulators, you can now start testing your BlackBerry 7 applications on these new smartphone form factors.

We thank you for your ongoing support and we trust that this new information will help you get your apps fully tested and posted to BlackBerry App World in time for the upcoming BlackBerry smartphone launches!

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

In this second post in our series of BlackBerry® developer stories (see our previous interview with Paul Haenel), we’re pleased to present an interview with Damian Keeghan, a front end developer for Deloitte in Australia who also builds apps in his spare time. His latest app for the BlackBerry platform is Hivemind, a tracking tool measuring sentiment of events/TV shows/speakers and so on, developed for the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet.

In the above video, Damian talks about using the BlackBerry® WebWorks™ API, which allows his skills to translate to the BlackBerry platform easily and smoothly. This is the same for most programming languages, including HTML, CSS and Adobe® Flash®, which means that any web developer can bring their skills to the BlackBerry platform without having to learn an entirely new code.

“Developing for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet is easy and gives you an opportunity to expand your skills by developing for a new device,” says Damian.

For more news from Australia, follow @BlackBerry_AU on Twitter.

On March 24th, we announced some upcoming opportunities for developers to bring their applications to the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet. With information on application players for BlackBerry® Java®-based and Android® apps, as well as additional details for the upcoming BlackBerry® Tablet OS Native SDK, there was a lot for developers to digest.

We have received quite a few questions and wanted to take the opportunity to share these frequently asked questions, along with their answers, with our community. We will do our best to answer your questions and provide additional details as they become available.

If you have additional questions, please let us know in the comments. We’ll continue to update and share the FAQs with you here on the Inside BlackBerry Developer’s Blog:

1. What was announced?
Research In Motion® Limited (RIM®) has announced that it will expand the platforms supported by the BlackBerry Tablet OS by adding two new application players for BlackBerry Java-based and Android apps. This will enable developers to leverage existing assets by allowing supported applications to be easily ported over to the BlackBerry Tablet OS via ‘application players’. RIM has also reinforced its commitment to provide the developer community with a powerful set of tools for native application development on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.

2. What is the timing or availability?
The application player for Android apps will be available sometime this summer, followed later in the year by the application player for BlackBerry Java-based apps. The BlackBerry Tablet OS Native SDK will enter into beta this summer. More details will be shared at BlackBerry World™ in May.

3. What are “application players”?
The application players are run-time environments that, once installed on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, allow supported BlackBerry Java-based and Android platform apps to be downloaded and run on the tablet. The players allow end users to run supported apps provided that those supported apps have been submitted and approved through the BlackBerry App World™ storefront.

4. How will users get the apps?
The application players, as well as the supported BlackBerry Java-based and Android apps, will only be available from BlackBerry App World on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.

5. Will the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet support the Android Marketplace?
No. Android applications supported by the BlackBerry Tablet OS can only be downloaded from BlackBerry App World. The application player for Android apps can only run supported Android applications that have been signed and submitted to BlackBerry App World.

6. Does the Android application player support Android apps that use native libraries?
The application player will not support any Android applications that use native libraries.

7. What version(s) of the Android apps does the Android application player support?
The application player for Android apps will support Android 2.3 apps at launch and we intend to update the player based on market needs.

8. What version(s) of BlackBerry Java-based apps does the BlackBerry Java-based application player support?
The application player for BlackBerry Java-based apps will allow developers to take their existing assets from BlackBerry 5.0 and BlackBerry 6 development and leverage them in the new player.

9. What do I have to do to port my BlackBerry Java-based and Android apps?
BlackBerry and Android developers of supported applications will be required to re-package and code sign those apps and can then submit them to BlackBerry App World. In some cases developers will have to recompile their apps.

10. Will the performance of my app suffer because it’s running inside a player?
We do not anticipate any performance issues from applications running on the application players.

11. Should I stop my current BlackBerry PlayBook development and wait until this is ready?
Developers should continue building with the existing BlackBerry PlayBook development options, including BlackBerry® WebWorks™ and Adobe® Flash® and Adobe® AIR® BlackBerry Tablet SDKs to take advantage of the richest set of APIs, background processing capabilities, and extended services via the BlackBerry tools.

12. What is the BlackBerry Tablet OS Native SDK? What does it allow?
The BlackBerry Tablet OS Native SDK will allow developers to build high-performance, multi-threaded, native C/C++ applications with industry standard GNU toolchains. The BlackBerry Tablet OS Native SDK also allows developers to:

• Create advanced 2D and 3D applications and special effects by leveraging programmable shaders available in hardware-accelerated OpenGL ES 2.0
• Take advantage of the QNX POSIX library support and C/C++ compliance for quick and easy porting of applications built in POSIX-based environments
• Integrate device events like gesture swipes and touch screen inputs
• Integrate the BlackBerry Tablet OS environment into existing code management and build systems using industry standard Eclipse CDT (C/C++ Development Tools)
• Leverage work done in standard C/C++ to make it easier to bring applications to the BlackBerry Tablet OS
• Find and fix bugs quickly with provided debug and analysis tools

We are very excited about the opportunities that are opening up for developers on our tablet and smartphone platforms. With millions of smartphone users and a remarkable level of excitement for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, from consumers and enterprise, we know developers are primed to bring innovative and exciting applications to the BlackBerry platform.

Please join RIM at the BlackBerry World conference in Orlando on May 3-5, 2011, where we will share more information on our evolving platform.