We’ve just updated our ‘Choosing a Target Device OS’ page on BlackBerry® Developer Zone. The latest stats containing February 2011 data will help you understand the different Operating Systems used by those users who have downloaded free and paid apps in the BlackBerry App World™ storefront. From there, you can get a sense of what the market is for the version of BlackBerry® Device Software you want to target.

Here are some highlights from these recent stats:

• 98% of users who downloaded free apps in BlackBerry App World were using devices running BlackBerry Device Software v4.5 or higher
• 100% of customers that purchased paid apps in App World were using devices running BlackBerry Device Software v4.5 or higher

Also to note, 81% and 90% of BlackBerry platform users who downloaded free and paid apps respectively in BlackBerry App World were using devices running BlackBerry Device Software v5.0 and v6.0. Those are huge numbers. If you haven’t yet considered implementing new features using the BlackBerry® Java® SDK 5.0 or 6.0 APIs, now might be a good time to start.

For more OS and BlackBerry App World information, check out Choosing a Target Device OS.

Let us know if you have any questions about targeting a specific OS in the comments!

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

BlackBerry® DEVCON Asia 2011 received huge positive responses from all participants and BlackBerry developers in Asia. To close off this amazing event, I tried to sum up DEVCON Asia in a few words – check out the video above.

One of the great parts of BlackBerry DEVCON Asia 2011 was getting to chat with various developers, and learning what they’re excited about and what they thought about the event. We did a series of brief one-on-ones with developers and representatives from the community and compiled them in this video:

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

For our registered developers, we have posted presentations and source code samples, as well as access to the latest developer news and resources on BlackBerry Developer Zone. Become a registered developer by clicking on the link – you’ll get access to further info about our development platforms, and there’s no cost.

Post a comment and let us know about your own BlackBerry DEVCON Asia 2011 experience, and what you thought of all the announcements.

However, we can help with a few common variables: supported smartphones and key features, and information about BlackBerry subscribers and downloads from BlackBerry App World™. It’s simple – you want to build the best possible app (a Super App!) and get the most bang for your development buck!

In August, we added a new page to the ‘Getting Started’ area on the BlackBerry® Developer Zone, and it has just been updated with information from November. Did you know that you can now reach 93% of BlackBerry smartphones by targeting BlackBerry® Device Software v4.5 and higher? This is up 10% from August. Also, you can reach almost half of BlackBerry smartphones by targeting BlackBerry® Device Software 5.0 and 6.

For more OS and BlackBerry App World information, check out Choosing a Target Device OS.

I wish you happy building and happy selling – and happy holidays too!

• BlackBerry UI hierarchy (ARTICLE)
• Manage UI interactions (ARTICLE)
• Introduction to Resource Bundles (VIDEO)

Tune in next week for more Developer Resource Friday fun, and don’t forget to post a comment about your favorite article and articles you would like to see!

It’s out, folks – the Streaming Player API has now been published with full source code!

During the BlackBerry Developer Conference in 2009, I hosted a session where we discussed the best practices for developing Media Streaming applications. I want to give a big round of thanks to all the participants for sharing their stories – you really helped me to come up with an open source API module for streaming audio and video that simply works out of the box! Sample code or API, whatever you’d like to call it – the central idea was to provide you with something that was as simple as saying “play this URL over HTTP” or “seek to 2:20.”

The StreamingPlayer class is the starting point of this API. It does all the heavy lifting related to implementing a DataSource and a SourceStream, managing a ring buffer, synchronizing playback, download and user action threads, and last but not least, handle OS and user-initiated seek calls in an efficient way by fully considering the limitations of HTTP streams.

On top of the features mentioned above, the API also has enough public methods and constants for all you adventurers out there. A StreamingPlayerListener interface can notify an application about every streaming event you will ever need, as well as a mechanism (my favorite) to preprocess each chunk of downloaded data before it’s sent to the underlying Player. This preprocessing should be useful for decrypting encrypted content, or if you would like to parse meta information from the raw stream.

I welcome everybody to join me in making this a success by providing your valuable feedback and comments. A Knowledge Base article, Streaming media – Start to finish, has already been published; you can read more about it and download the code there. If you have any questions, feel free to point and shoot at me but do not hesitate to submit any issues or feature requests in the BlackBerry® Issue Tracker. I will be following the issue tracker on a daily basis.

Until next time, happy streaming!

Below is a list of archived BlackBerry® Developer Webcasts. These links can also be found within previous editions of the BlackBerry Developer’s Newsletter.

• BlackBerry Push Service – Pratik Sapra / Joe Reda (April 13, 2010)
• Super Apps – Mike Kirkup (February 25th, 2010)
• User Interface Design – Brian Zubert (February 16, 2010)
• BlackBerry Themes – Mark Rathwell / Dale Ducharme / Mike Kirkup / Jason Laughlin ( January 12th, 2009)
• BlackBerry Technical Seminar – Various presenters from Research in Motion (December 3, 2009)
• Overview of BlackBerry Java® Development – Sarim Aziz / Mike Kirkup (October 20, 2009)
• Overview of BlackBerry Web Development – Adam Stanley / Prosanta Bhattacherjee / Mike Kirkup (September 10, 2009)

If you haven’t signed up for the BlackBerry Developer’s Newsletter yet, I’d highly recommend it. The newsletter is a monthly publication that shares articles on various BlackBerry development subjects, plus tips & tricks for improving your applications as well as announcements for upcoming events such as webinars. Subscribe today!

• Writing JavaScript® Extensions (Video Tutorial)
• Introduction to SQLite on BlackBerry Smartphones (Video Tutorial)

Tune in next week for more Developer Resource fun, and don’t forget to post a comment about your favorite article and articles you would like to see!

Version 5.0 of the BlackBerry® Development Platform introduces a number of improvements that make it even easier for you to develop compelling user interfaces. One of these improvements is the introduction of a new AutoCompleteField.

In this article, we will get our feet wet by looking at how the field makes it easier for users to quickly enter information. As a user types characters in the field the characters are compared to a data source, and matches are displayed in a list box below the field. The user can select one of the presented options or continue to type to further narrow the list.

The above screenshot shows an AutoCompleteField bound to a dataset comprised of an array of strings – the days of the week.

Here’s the source code for an application that displays the above field.

import net.rim.device.api.ui.UiApplication;
import net.rim.device.api.ui.container.MainScreen;
import net.rim.device.api.ui.component.AutoCompleteField;
import net.rim.device.api.collection.util.*;

public class AutoCompleteFieldApp extends UiApplication
{
  public static void main(String[] args)
  {
    AutoCompleteFieldApp app = new AutoCompleteFieldApp();
    app.enterEventDispatcher();
  }

  AutoCompleteFieldApp()
  {
    HomeScreen scr = new HomeScreen();
    this.pushScreen(scr);
  }
}

class HomeScreen extends MainScreen
{
  public HomeScreen()
  {
    BasicFilteredList filterList = new BasicFilteredList();
    String[] days = {"Monday","Tuesday","Wednesday",
                     "Thursday","Friday","Saturday","Sunday"};
    filterList.addDataSet(1,days,"days",BasicFilteredList.COMPARISON_IGNORE_CASE);
    AutoCompleteField autoCompleteField = new AutoCompleteField(filterList);
    add(autoCompleteField);
  }
}

Although you create an AutoCompleteField by constructing an AutoCompleteField object and adding it to a screen, the real work involved is in constructing the associated dataset to compare against – represented by a BasicFilteredList object. When you construct an AutoCompleteField, you pass in an instance of a BasicFilteredList that is bound to the data to be searched against.

There are a few different types of data you can bind to a BasicFilteredList. In the example above, we used the addDataSet() method to bind an array of strings. But the more interesting option is to use the addDataSource() method to bind data sources like contacts, pictures and tasks. The following code snippet demonstrates how to do that. Specifically, it demonstrates how to use Contacts as a data source and searches against and returns results from the email and name fields of the Contacts database.

BasicFilteredList filterList = new BasicFilteredList();
filterList.addDataSource(
1,                                                 //1st
BasicFilteredList.DATA_SOURCE_CONTACTS,            //2nd
BasicFilteredList.DATA_FIELD_CONTACTS_EMAIL,       //3rd
BasicFilteredList.DATA_FIELD_CONTACTS_EMAIL|       //4th
 BasicFilteredList.DATA_FIELD_CONTACTS_NAME_FULL,  //4th continued
BasicFilteredList.DATA_FIELD_CONTACTS_NAME_FULL,   //5th
BasicFilteredList.DATA_FIELD_CONTACTS_EMAIL,       //6th
"Contact email");

AutoCompleteField autoCompleteField = new AutoCompleteField(filterList);
add(autoCompleteField);

The addDataSource() method takes more parameters than you might expect. So, let’s walk through each of them and explain their purpose.

Replacing the body of the HomeScreen constructor in the original sample with the snippet above gives us a program that displays the following:

Notice that what we type is compared to the email addresses of our contacts – even though the full name of the contact is also returned. We specified the field to match against in the 3rd parameter of addDataSource() – namely BasicFilteredList.DATA_FIELD_CONTACTS_EMAIL.

As we’ve mentioned, you can control how the field displays results to the user. You do this by specifying style flags in the second parameter of the AutoCompleteField constructor. The screenshot above shows what the display looks like by default – the value of the primary field is displayed, followed by the value of the secondary field in parenthesis.

Here’s a snippet of code that demonstrates how to use an AutoCompleteField style flag.

AutoCompleteField autoCompleteField =
new AutoCompleteField(filterList,AutoCompleteField.LIST_SHOW_DATA_SET_NAME);

This style flag indicates that the displayed results should be prefixed by the name of the bound data set – “Contact email” in this case. Here’s what the result looks like:

You can find a list of the available style flags in the API reference for AutoCompleteField.

The AutoCompleteField and BasicFilteredList team provide a lot more functionality than we’ve explored here. For instance, two other types of data sources are supported. You can bind to any array of objects – in which case the string that is compared against is that returned by toString(). Or, you can bind to an array of strings and an associated array of objects. The arrays are associated one-to-one with each other by index. Searches take place against the string array and you specify the fields from the corresponding object to return as results. Oh, and you can create your own custom versions of the field or make creative use of the BasicFilteredList functionality on its own.

But that’s enough for this post. Please leave comments to let us know if you’d like to see more information about this functionality or other BlackBerry JDE 5.0 features.

I wanted to provide you with an update on our BlackBerry® Developer Certification program and outline the continued opportunities for you to showcase your skills on a BlackBerry® smartphone.

As Sanyu noted in her previous post, there are two streams available in the program to become a BlackBerry Certified Application Developer (see above image).

We first showcased the BCP-810 exam at our BlackBerry Developer Conference, and the BCP-811 exam in beta format. Both the BCP-810 and BCP-811 exams have now been finalized and are available to anyone looking to become a BlackBerry Certified Application Developer with a focus on Java®.

For our web development audience, we are currently hosting BCP-812 in beta format. As part of the beta, we are looking for 40 people who would like to volunteer to take the exam (we will waive our test registration fee) and provide feedback on the questions. If you are interested in volunteering to take the beta exam, please contact us at certification@blackberry.com and we will be happy to send you more information.

You can sign up and take any of the exams through our test partner at thousands of examination centers worldwide. The certifications are currently only available in English, and I would like to hear about additional languages that people are interested in – please leave a comment and let us know! Also, please drop us a comment – or send us an e-mail – if you have taken the BCP-810 or BCP-811 exams, as we would love to hear your feedback.

Thanks to everyone who attended our webcast presentation on “Super Apps” on February 25th. We had a fantastic turnout, which shows the BlackBerry® development community’s growing interest in understanding how developers can incorporate characteristics of BlackBerry ‘Super Apps’ into their apps. We set our own personal webinar record for the number of questions received! I stayed an extra thirty minutes just to try to cover as many questions as possible.

Although we ran out of time, I have posted as many answers as possible to the BlackBerry Super Apps Webinar thread in our Java Development Community Forum. I also encourage you to post any follow-up questions about the webcast in this forum. A recording of the presentation can be viewed for free from the webcast event site.

Stay tuned for announcements about future webcasts in our BlackBerry Developer’s Newsletter. If you haven’t done so already, be sure to register for the Developer Updates Newsletter to also receive updates about new development tools and developer tips & tricks. We hope you felt this presentation was valuable, and we look forward to seeing you online in future webcast presentations!