Hot on the heels of the release of the BlackBerry® 10 WebWorks™ SDK, we have posted a new Ripple Emulator with support for BlackBerry® 10. All the power of Ripple can now be put to use developing and testing your BlackBerry 10 applications over the summer to get into the BlackBerry App World™ storefront right out of the gates!

Inside Ripple, you can now select the BlackBerry 10 Platform and target the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha device for emulation. The tool will configure the API emulation interface to reflect the current available APIs delivered in the BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK Beta. And once you install and configure the BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK with Ripple, you can build you application, sign it, and even deploy it to the simulator or, if you were a lucky attendee of BlackBerry 10 Jam, to your shiny new BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha developer device.

With this release, you will find two different versions of the Ripple Emulator on our developer site. The reason for this is that Ripple is moving back to the future. Starting with this release, Ripple is returning to its roots as a Chrome Browser Extension. While we believe this gives us the best path forward, there are still a few things to clean up, coming in new beta refreshes through the summer. Until that time, the current version of Ripple will remain the primary tool for supporting all platforms.

For this first beta release, after you complete the install process, you will need to manually install the extension .crx file into Google Chrome by dragging and dropping it onto the browser. After that you just need to click on the Ripple icon to the right of the URL bar and enable Ripple, and you are good to go.

If you would like to leverage the BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK build/sign/deploy functionality within Ripple, you will also need to manually start the Build and Deploy Node.js-based services. Closing the command prompt window will stop the services. For more information on this and the install process, please review our Getting Started guide.

An additional feature that we have added in this release is the addition of dynamic mapping for the emulation of geolocation features. You can now click-drag, and zoom in and out of the map in the geolocation panel and the latitude/longitude information will dynamically update. Give it a try for testing your location based service applications.

No need to fret though – we are hard at work abstracting the manual setup so that this is all seamless as soon as possible. We are aiming to deliver Beta refreshes to both Ripple and the BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK on a monthly basis, in order to get the latest and greatest into our community’s hands as frequently as possible.

Check our BlackBerry WebWorks development site frequently through the summer in order to ensure you always have the latest tools to develop the best BlackBerry 10 WebWorks applications.

Did you know that your NFC-enabled BlackBerry® smartphone may be able to process NFC transactions, such as payments, even when it has a completely dead battery? Smartphones which support NFC will continue to be able to provide NFC card emulation functionality when in “low battery mode” or, in some circumstances, even when the battery is completely dead.

Let’s explore what the difference between “low battery” versus “dead battery” is before we move on.

Low battery mode starts when the smartphone OS turns off the user interface due to the battery being deemed “low”. The smartphone appears to be off to the user, but internally, the Power Management Integrated Circuit (PMIC) is still on. Dead battery mode, by way of contrast, starts when there is no longer enough power in the battery to keep even the PMIC powered on.

How long low battery mode will last before moving into the dead battery state varies from smartphone to smartphone, but is typically at least four or five hours.

In low battery mode, all BlackBerry smartphones will continue to be able to provide NFC card emulation functionality. But when it comes to dead battery mode, whether NFC card emulation will continue to work or not depends on the smartphone model; for instance, the BlackBerry® Curve™ 9380 smartphone and BlackBerry® Bold™ 9790 smartphone do support dead battery mode. This mode is not supported on the BlackBerry® Bold™ 9900 smartphone and BlackBerry® Curve™ 9360 smartphone.

The user has no way of knowing just from looking at their smartphone if they are in low battery mode or have a completely dead battery. Because of this, they have no way of knowing whether or not NFC transactions in card emulation mode will work or not in a given instance.

Developers have an API function called
SecureElementManager.setCardEmulationWhenPoweredOff(true|false) which they can call to control whether or not card emulation will work or not when the battery is dead or has been removed.

You may also have noticed that the Near Field Communication options screen has a setting in the section entitled “Allow NFC Card Transactions” labelled “When Powered Off”. This setting will also affect the behaviour of a device when in low battery or dead battery mode.

To learn more about NFC, check out our online developer documentation.

Today we are pleased to announce that tinyHippos has joined Research In Motion (RIM). We’re excited that the tinyHippos team is joining the BlackBerry Developer team and bringing their expertise in cross-platform emulation environments to the BlackBerry platform.

tinyHippos are the makers of a mobile environment emulator called Ripple and have extensive experience in web and mobile widget/web development. If you are not already familiar with them you can find out more about tinyHippos at http://tinyhippos.com/.

We have been integrating support for web technologies like HTML5 and BlackBerry WebWorks into our developer platform, and working to continually deliver enhanced tools and frameworks to our developer community. We look forward to working with the team at tinyHippos to further provide a simplified and streamlined experience to our developers.

- Tyler Lessard, VP Global Alliances & Developer Relation at RIM