[YouTube link for mobile viewing]

You might remember the interesting story of Greek developer Charilaos Kalogirou, who ported his iOS game Pop Corny to the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet and to the BlackBerry® 10 Dev Alpha device in just a few days. He blogged about how fast and easy the process was.

Now, after a few weeks, he’s back. Charilaos is participating to a competition organized by the Ludum Dare website, and I was happy to read that he decided to create a game exclusively for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. The competition is the following: finish a game, take it to market, earn $1. All in October.

Why did he decide to develop for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet only? Well, he explains the reasons in this blog post. In particular:

“…we are going to exclusively target the BlackBerry PlayBook and the BlackBerry App World store, as it is a platform I fell in love recently and it’s a platform where you can actually make a buck these days.”

I think that says it all. More proof that if you want to make money with your apps and games, BlackBerry App World is the store for you.

Here it is, game ready: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2012/10/29/flycraft-we-made-it/ You can get it from BlackBerry App World here.

I’m happy to announce a new offer that reinforces our commitment to gaming.  We are partnering with Marmalade to make it easy for developers to build new games for the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet and the upcoming BlackBerry 10 smartphones.

Qualified developers that register here will receive a free, time-limited Marmalade SDK license for the BlackBerry PlayBook platform and a BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. Once the developer has published their app to BlackBerry App World™, they will be able to unlock the cross-platform power of the Marmalade SDK and receive a free 6 month Marmalade Indie license.

Over the past few months we’ve shown the BlackBerry PlayBook to game developers at conferences and trade shows around the world.  Developers are excited and inspired after they see the power of the platform.  That’s reflected by the growth of the app catalogue on the BlackBerry PlayBook, with over 20,000 apps available and many new games like “Cut the Rope” which are made using the Marmalade SDK.

Game developers can leverage this offer to take advantage of the powerful gaming capabilities of the BlackBerry PlayBook and BlackBerry 10 and the first-to-market opportunity that the BlackBerry 10 platform provides.

Let’s play!

When Javier D’Accorso learned about the Desafío BlackBerry contest last March, the longtime developer decided to participate and develop an application for the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet. After partnering with graphic designer Damian Hadyi, D’Accorso leveraged Adobe AIR to develop an interactive children’s storybook application that has become popular in both his native Argentina as well as around the world.

D’Accorso talked about the benefits of receiving ongoing support from the RIM® team in Argentina, the speed and straightforward nature of developing for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, and the features he was able to easily integrate into the app.

Q: How important is the support you’ve received from the RIM team in Argentina?

Javier: BlackBerry smartphones are extremely popular in Argentina and as a result there is a great group of BlackBerry developers and forums in the country. It’s important in any community to have the opportunity to ask questions, learn from others and be recognized for what you do. RIM has done a wonderful job enabling that exchange of information.

I actually developed the Perico Pirata children’s storybook application for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet as part of the ‘Desafío BlackBerry’ challenge. A really important moment in the development process was my participation in the Buenos Aires Hackathon. I interacted with industry experts and formed ongoing relationships with a number of RIM gurus, who I continue to work with. Thanks to their experience and rapid responses, I’ve been able to incorporate lots of functionality into the application. This level of personal interaction is something you don’t find working with other platforms, where you need to look through dozens of forums to get any answers.

Q: Describe your experience developing for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet?

Javier: My partner and I combined storybook elements with the powerful technology of the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet and quickly saw how we could make something simple yet appealing. I analyzed the distinct programming languages and decided to develop using Adobe AIR, which was an excellent decision. It was amazing just how easy it was to implement all of our ideas. I barely had to do anything to make a compilation for the BlackBerry PlayBook and the animation ran smoothly and quickly. I was extremely impressed by the hardware on the BlackBerry PlayBook – the performance and graphics were incredible and it was very easy to incorporate the level of interaction that we wanted.

The Perico Pirata children’s storybook application took us about a month to develop. That’s including the last two weeks, which was time that we used to gather feedback from having the app tested by family and friends. I believe that anyone working with Flash on the web, or with another mobile platform, should try developing for the PlayBook because it’s so easy.

Q: What are some of the features that you’ve been able to incorporate into the application?

Javier: We heard from parents who tried the app and they agreed that it would be great to be able to interact with the microphone. I was able to tweak the functionality so the user could speak to the characters in the application and hear their voices as they responded. I checked online to learn how to make the appropriate changes in Adobe AIR and we had them done within a day or so. I was also impressed with how easy it was to integrate the camera. After referring to the available documentation, the app had full, camera functionality.

Q: Do you plan on developing games for the BlackBerry 10 platform?

Javier: Absolutely. There are a few children’s games I’ve worked on in conjunction with some big entertainment and production companies that I would love to bring onto the BlackBerry 10 platform. I’ve been researching the BlackBerry 10 SDK for Adobe AIR and I’m excited for the great functionality that the new platform will offer. My experience developing for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet has been so straightforward and the performance has been incredible. I think this next stage will be just as simple and powerful.

Here’s a guest post from Luca F. – Ed.

A few weeks ago we came across a blog post written by a game developer describing how he ported his iOS game, Pop Corny, to Android™. In a nutshell, it was not an easy process for him. We decided to send this developer a BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet and challenged him to port his game to our platform.

The result was documented in this blog post. Here’s an excerpt:

It turns out RIM has done an awesome job with Playbook and probably with its upcoming phones. The system is based on the QNX operating system and it has strong support for standards and open libraries. I found myself right at home with it! I am going to come back with more details about the process (probably with an altdevblogaday article), but by cutting the long story short, I was able to port the engine with only native code (no java glue code like on Android) with OpenGL, OpenAL (even ALUT), freetype, etc all coming bundled with the system.

The dev also showed how fast the game is on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet — you can watch it here.

All the above was implemented in just two days! Once again the openness of the BlackBerry® 10 platform demonstrates how easy is to port your code from other mobile platforms, without any additional pain or time lost.

The BlackBerry PlayBook tablet is a very powerful device for gamers, and tons of developers already successfully ported their games and published them to the BlackBerry App World™ storefront. Also, as we have pointed out many times, some game developers have shared their success stories with us and highlighted how much money they’ve made in BlackBerry App World.

Kudos to the dev, Charilaos, for the great job done — and beware, that game is really addictive! I bought it for my kids but I ended up playing with it all the time. You can get it from BlackBerry App World and let me know what you think.

Some of you may have been reading about Nokia’s decision surrounding their investments in Qt and wondering what exactly this may mean for BlackBerry® 10 and the Cascades™ application framework. As many of you know, RIM provides a port of Qt to run on the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ as well as BlackBerry 10 smartphones. Qt is also one of the foundational pieces for the Cascades application framework contributing both the UI declaration in QML as well as many C++ APIs.

We believe that Qt has many great qualities, which is why we have adopted it as part of the core Cascades app framework. The fact that Qt is an open source project has allowed us to both embed it as a core technology layered on top of the POSIX compliant QNX RTOS, as well as contribute changes back to the project. We want to make sure that everyone understands that the BlackBerry 10 platform, and our Cascades application framework, is not tied to the future of Qt in Nokia.

RIM continues to support the Qt community and we are committed to supporting Qt on the BlackBerry platform, including tight collaboration with the Qt community outside of Nokia and with Digia as new potential owner of Qt. We also welcome all Qt developers to bring both their talents and applications to the BlackBerry platform.

While the formal side of the future of Qt is a little foggy right now, we want our community to rest assured that Qt on BlackBerry is here to stay and that Cascades has a bright and long term future with QML.

Cascades, Qt and open source links:

• Introduction to Cascades
• Community Wiki for Qt on BlackBerry
• Open Source Components for the BlackBerry Native SDK
• Building Qt4 for BlackBerry
• Building Qt5 for BlackBerry

Every once in a while, a feel good story comes around that rallies the troops in the BlackBerry® Developer Relations team. Such was the case with this story. It all started with a developer named Laurence Muller taking advantage of the RIM® offer to submit his Android™ app (fIRC) to the BlackBerry App World™ storefront to qualify for a free BlackBerry® PlayBook™tablet. After Laurence received his BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, he instantly recognized how powerful the device was – especially the BlackBerry® Tablet OS built on QNX – and thought that it might be possible to port the NodeBeat application to BlackBerry PlayBook tablet as a native app.

Laurence had worked on porting the NodeBeat application to the Android platform in collaboration with Affinity Blue (owned by Seth Sandler). NodeBeat is built using an open source application framework called openFrameworks. Therefore, the first task at hand was porting the framework. Laurence started reading the NDK documentation and began the process of porting the API under the ofxQNX repository he setup on GitHub. One by one, each API set and sample was ported and running.

Laurence eventually hit a roadblock with audio. He built a native app to test some audio code but it wasn’t running properly. He finally decided to post a question to the BlackBerry Developer Support Forum to explain his project and ask for help. I was assigned this question to answer. I reviewed the question and sample code provided, checked the blogs that Laurence previously posted (Laurence’s blog is available at http://www.multigesture.net/) and, after checking the NDK documentation myself, ascertained that Laurence was running into a buffer underflow issue and that his current test approach was not running consistently enough without a separate thread.

I answered the post and provided some suggestions to try to correct the problem. Laurence tried the suggestions and it did get better, but not quite good enough. After someone else on my team suggested that OpenAL might help and I passed that suggestion on to Laurence, further investigation by Laurence’s partner Seth Sandler led to switching over to SDL for injecting the audio — and suddenly the audio was performing much better. At this point, the ofxQNX port was complete, and Laurence contributed it to the BlackBerry GitHub repo. To see some of the samples in action, check out the video below:

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

The next task was porting the NodeBeat app, which took just a few days once RIM supplied another BlackBerry PlayBook tablet to Seth. Laurence and Seth were pleased that the native BlackBerry PlayBook tablet port easily outperformed their Android port. This was primarily due to the low input and audio latency for the native implementation (whereas the Android build runs slower since native code is running in a different layer and communication between GUI and the native thread is slow over JNI) and its performance was on par with their iOS version. NodeBeat was quickly submitted to BlackBerry App World for approval.

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

What’s in the cards for NodeBeat? Well, Laurence has already started porting it to BlackBerry® 10 using the simulator, and they’re looking forward to getting their hands on a BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha testing device. In the meantime, if you like composing music and want to try a new app for doing so, give their app a whirl.

What makes this story so special is this project was not sponsored by RIM. It was totally driven by developers in the open source community and it was almost completed without any help from RIM. This clearly demonstrates that RIM’s open source strategy is working, facilitating the port of apps from other platforms to BlackBerry PlayBook tablet and BlackBerry 10. Our developer community is engaged, resulting in even more improvements to the platform for all developers. We strongly encourage our developer community to follow their desires and port what they need to the platform. However, know that we’re here and ready to help if you run into any issues. In the end, by working together, the platform will get even better and everyone wins.

If you are working on an open source project for the BlackBerry platform utilizing the NDK, let us know. We’ll be glad to write a blog post about it.

For more information about OpenFrameworks, Laurence’s port, and Laurence himself, check out the links below:

• The openFrameworks repository that where ofxQNX is currently hosted: https://github.com/falcon4ever/openFrameworks/tree/developPlayBook
• Some additional video material (most links are on Laurence’s Twitter stream): https://www.youtube.com/user/falcon4ever?feature=mhee
• The official openFrameworks website/ support forums: http://www.openframeworks.cc/
• Some more information about the project on Laurence’s blog: http://www.multigesture.net/2012/04/27/playbook-add-on-ofxqnx/ and http://www.multigesture.net/projects/ofxqnx/

Before we talk about what’s new in BlackBerry 10, let us recap what is available for the BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps for BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.1. There were three major enhancements added to the Android Runtime in 2.1:

• Each Android app will now run in its own window. This greatly improves the user experience and consistency among the other application runtimes.
• Access to the cameras is now supported for Android apps, allowing many more application types to work on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.
• In-App Payments are now supported through the BlackBerry App World™ storefront, so Android applications can include virtual items for sale in their applications.

Building on this fantastic set of features, there is now support for telephony APIs for the Android Runtime in the BlackBerry 10 Beta. This includes support for cell location, and access to information about the network services on the device. For additional information, head on over to our API support page. We have completely revamped our Documentation and API Support page to make it easier to find the information you need! Let us know what you think.

All these features are now available for the Android Runtime on the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha device and simulator. How do you start using these great new features? Jump to the newly updated Runtime for Android Apps microsite. There is an updated 1.2 Beta release for the BlackBerry Eclipse™ Plug-in for Android Development Tools and Command-line tools to get starting using all these new Android Runtime features for the BlackBerry 10 Beta. For the Eclipse users, point your update site to https://bdsc.webapps.blackberry.com/android/downloads/eclipseplugin/beta/

BlackBerry® 10 Jam World Tour – Montreal – July 11, 2012

A recent report by Baird Equity Research is getting some pick up today on the interwebs. The report shows that developer intent for BlackBerry 10 is on the decline. Needless to say, I was pretty shocked by the findings. I was shocked because the numbers in the report do not gel with what we’re seeing in the real world. The report contradicts much of what we are seeing and hearing in our developer community.

In the past year our BlackBerry App World ™ vendor base has grown 157 percent. We have developers submitting amazing apps for BlackBerry® PlayBook™ users. In fact, the BlackBerry PlayBook app catalog has grown by more than 15,000 apps since January 1 of this year. We just announced that more than three billion applications have been downloaded from BlackBerry App World since launch.

But much more importantly, the BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour we are currently hosting in 23 cities across the globe has seen over capacity registration in almost every city, including New York, Santa Clara, Toronto, Jakarta, Singapore, Delhi, and Montreal. We have already spoken to almost 5,000 developers and the feedback has been phenomenal (don’t take my word for it, search Twitter for the hashtag #bb10jam).

I have been receiving a lot of feedback from developers personally and I can tell you that I am hearing again and again that developers are amazed by how easy it is to work with the BlackBerry 10 tools. They appreciate the open nature of our platform, which allows developers to bring their work and their skills and find a toolset that will work for them. The other thing I hear consistently is that RIM simply treats developers better than anyone else in the mobile industry. That is music to my ears! I want to once again thank our developer community. You see what we are doing to increase our support for you. You see what RIM is building with BlackBerry 10 and the amazing opportunity to be part of our new platform and you have shared your enthusiasm and excitement with us.

To all new developers coming on board, we are building something amazing and we know you will be impressed by the open nature of our platform and our commitment to you. Welcome!

The numbers we have provided speak for themselves. Developers around the world are seeing that BlackBerry is here to help them build a successful business.

Have you ever used that cool button on your BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet Browser that looks like a book? It’s the icon in the top left that enables Reader Mode. This is a neat feature which takes away all the advertisements and extraneous features from the page and shows you a clean summary of the content. Today I wanted to tell you about how this feature came to be, how we optimized its performance, and how it would not have been possible without BlackBerry® Web Inspector.

Using some clever JavaScript®, we created a mechanism that extracted the page contents and stripped out unwanted HTML. The problem was that it took a really long time to parse a page and display the content — or so we thought. We knew that this would not be a good user experience and the page load time needed to be optimized, especially when compared to the better performance we observed for the same content running in a desktop browser.

As I started my investigation, I wanted to look at the JavaScript to see how it worked so I could start to tweak it, and I thought to myself, “I should use Web Inspector to profile this.” I didn’t know it yet but this idea would save me lots of time and effort to get the feature working.

After adding some profiling information to the script, I discovered that most of the code was already relatively fast. However, after it had reloaded the page in a new WebView, it was doing its removal of the unwanted tags on the live DOM. This incurred a whole page request with sub-resources and content that we were going to be stripped out as soon as the page loaded.

Instead of incurring a page load, I did a deep copy of the DOM using document.body.cloneNode(true), and then manipulated the HTML fragment off DOM. Finally I loaded the resulting HTML in a new WebView. The result of this change was an immediate gain in performance, reducing the amount of processing time from 45 seconds down to less than 5 seconds. But that wasn’t enough — no user should have to wait 5 seconds after hitting a button to see any results.

I then enlisted the help of a colleague, and we were able to optimize the script even further by making changes to our logging. If you log things in JavaScript inline via console.log(), they’re expensive. Instead, add your log message to a buffer and then print the results after the main processing is complete. The DOM was traversed several times during the algorithm’s run. We ended up using a TreeWalker instead of a for loop of document.getElementsByTagName(“*”) being used. With these simple changes and further optimizations to the script, we further reduced the page processing time from 5 seconds down to under 1.5, which in and of itself is still a gain of over 300%.

So in summary, we went from 45 seconds down to less than 1.5 seconds — an astonishing 3000% performance boost that we could not have done without Web Inspector running on device.

Lessons:

1. Add logs to your scripts for performance profiling, but buffer them and don’t print to console right away.
2. Don’t reload the page when you don’t need to. If you want to modify the DOM, use HTML fragments.
3. Profile individual methods and try different things. You’d be surprised how changing one line can make all the difference.

Last weekend, I ventured to my first hackathon — and I must admit, I didn’t know what to expect. The hackathon was called Angelhack, and was hosted simultaneously in New York, Seattle, Silicon Valley, and Boston. I attended the Boston event and arrived for the sponsor set-up at 8:00 to put my table together. So far, it felt like a regular trade show.

Then the attendees started to arrive. They were mostly young, college-age people with a smattering of older techies. As people walked by the BlackBerry® table, they would look at the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablets on display and nod politely. After a few minutes, I got the attention of a young man and started asking him what he knew about the BlackBerry and BlackBerry® 10. “Nothing,” he said. I began to talk to him about BlackBerry 10 and the benefits of the new QNX kernel. He was impressed to hear that he could “choose his road” to get to BlackBerry 10, whether his road is HTML5, C++, Adobe® AIR®, or even Android™. I also noticed a few glances from some of the people at the other tables. Interest was building.

At Angelhack, there is a period of about four hours where the attendees can mingle and start to get to know each other. They can talk to the sponsors and even make idea pitches to the other attendees. Then it is time for the sponsors to pitch their platforms. I was the last to pitch; it was the perfect position. I knew that everyone would have heard the other pitches and I could trump them all. I had three minutes and I was determined to make the most of it.

I started with the BlackBerry 10 Jam information showing the growth of BlackBerry applications. I talked about the 254% increase in BlackBerry App World™ storefront vendors and the 240% increase in BlackBerry PlayBook tablet apps in the last quarter. I talked about RIM’s commitment to the developer, how we have seeded over 20,000 BlackBerry PlayBook tablets and will seed 5,000 BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha prototype devices. I talked about the BlackBerry Developer Relations group and how they are here for the sole purpose of helping developers make fantastic apps for the BlackBerry 10 platform. I could tell interest was building, but my three minutes was almost up, so it was time for the closer – in Q2 2011, BlackBerry App World generated 43% more average daily downloads per app than iOS App Store and 48% more than the Android Market/Google Play.

That seemed to seal the deal. Returning to my sponsor’s table, I now had a full house. People were interested in BlackBerry 10 and how to write applications for the platform. I showed demos of BlackBerry® WebWorks™ apps running on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet to illustrate how quick and responsive it is. Web developers couldn’t believe it. One artist/developer wanted to see how his HTML5 canvas app ran on BlackBerry PlayBook tablet because he had been disappointed in the performance on other platforms. We loaded his app (http://whitchlight.com/sana) and he was awestruck by the speed in which the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet rendered his canvas application. It is just another example of the excellent HTML5 support in the browser on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet and BlackBerry 10.

As my first hackathon came to a close, I felt a little sad to be leaving. I had met some incredibly talented and creative people, and I had seen some great apps created — even some works of art. I told myself that although this was my first hackathon, it wouldn’t be my last.

Maybe I’ll see you at the next one?