We recently added support for the HTML5 File system API in our web rendering engine and BlackBerry WebWorks.  With this release, you can now emulate the file system, both sandboxed and unsandboxed.  Ripple will create an area your application can write to, and mimics the file system layout of the device.

A really cool piece of Ripple is the emulation of geolocation.  We recently added the live map view that allows you to select a new location on a map, and inject the location into your app code.  With this release, we received a great community contribution that really takes geolocation emulation to the next level.  Mark Dineen provided a patch that allows you to specify a route to follow by providing a GPX file.  Ripple will read the file and inject location update events into your code based on the route provided! Now you can better emulate end-user navigation and movement.

To better reflect the relationship between Cordova and PhoneGap – and due to the fact their core is the same – they are now both under the same entry in the Platforms window, and are represented by version number.

Quite often an application will wish to know when the virtual keyboard is displayed and closed, so that it can react accordingly.  You can now fire the relevant keyboard events into your application to test out your logic.  In the Events panel when you are emulating the BlackBerry 10 platform, you should now see the blackberry.event.keyboard… events.

HTML5 being inherently cross-platform in nature, there are many applications built using web technologies that are designed to target multiple form factors.  Part of designing a cross-platform application is ensuring that your application appears and lays out in a useful way depending on the capabilities of the target platform.  CSS media queries are a powerful tool in this regard, and Ripple now emulates media queries based on the target platform you have currently chosen to emulate.  Try it out and have some fun with this one.

So, be sure to visit our HTML5 developer site to get all the most recent updates, and particularly the downloads page.  Get Ripple, and the latest WebWorks SDK, and start building!

Many great APIs and features have been delivered to our BlackBerry® WebWorks™ developer community with the recent updates to the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK. The Ripple Emulator is a key part of our tooling story for our web developers, and Ripple just got richer. Today we have released Ripple 0.9.8 with some excellent new features. If you already have our Ripple Emulator installed, then you should be updated automatically the next time you start Google Chrome. If you haven’t yet installed Ripple, then don’t hesitate — get on your (virtual) scooter and head over to the Ripple download page to get the latest version. Please pay careful attention to the install instructions, as with the latest versions of Chrome, you can only install the Extension by dragging it right into the chrome://extensions page.

In this update to Ripple, you will find a new area in the Chrome Extension panel for Ripple that will allow you to start and stop the build and deploy services from within the tool itself. You will no longer need to start and stop the services manually. You can even set the services to start and stop each time your start Chrome if you like. This should be welcome relief compared to previous versions where you needed to start the services from the command line.

Also in this release is emulation for a number of APIs delivered in recent BlackBerry WebWorks SDK releases:

• Blackberry.app.exit
• Software version and hardwareId
• Support for the swipedown event
• Support for the Invoke framework, both invoking other applications and being invoked

Further, enhanced support for Apache Cordova emulation is included. A bunch of work has been done here, including:

• Navigator.camera
• The media APIs
• The File APIs
• Events
• Navigator.contacts
• Partial support for the navigator.device.capture API

We are really excited about how Ripple is evolving, and look forward to hearing your feedback on the latest additions. Fire up Google Chrome if you already have Ripple installed and start playing with the new features. Otherwise, head over to the Ripple download page to get the latest version and get started!

When we released our first Betas of the BlackBerry® 10 WebWorks™ SDK and Ripple Emulator at the BlackBerry 10 Jam conference in May, we spoke about our desire to bring frequent updates of these tools to you, our dedicated developer community. We want to keep fueling your creativity and desire to build the best BlackBerry 10 applications leading up to the official release. So, here is your next BlackBerry WebWorks and Ripple fix.

This update brings a few new APIs (and emulation thereof in Ripple) along with a host of fixes and a slight change to how we handle whitelisting of events.

First up is the addition of the blackberry.ui.dialog APIs that will be very familiar to existing BlackBerry WebWorks developers. This API provides two methods that allow you to launch asynchronous dialogs requesting feedback from the user. These dialogs leverage the standard system level dialogs so you can get a consistent look and feel for your application with the rest of the system. standardAskAsync provides a predefined set of buttons for your dialog, whereas customAskAsync allows you to customize the dialog buttons.

We have also added an API that, in conjunction with the standard HTML5 onLine API, will let you know just how connected you really are. The standard navigator.onLine property and online/offline events are supported to let you know if your application has connectivity in general. If you would like to know what type of connection you have and when the type of connection changes, check out our blackberry.connection.type property, and listen for the connectionchange event. This will tell you if you are on VPN, BlackBerry® Bridge™, WiFi®, etc.

Speaking of events, we have adjusted how these work slightly from the first release. In the initial beta, all events were defined in the blackberry.event namespace. Without getting into gory details, this proved to be somewhat inefficient on the final code size, so we have moved the event definitions into the namespace that contains the functionality related to that event – i.e. the battery events are now defined in the blackberry.system namespace. Note that you no longer need to whitelist blackberry.event, since it only has the add and remove listener functions (these will always be available to call), but you will have to whitelist any namespace that has an event you are specifically interested in. Please check out the API reference.

In terms of bug fixes, there are a couple of key ones that I want to call out. If you use a module loader, you can now also use BlackBerry WebWorks, hooray! In the first release, the last one included into your app would work but break the first. Now webworks.js and module loaders play nicely together.

In the first release, you also could not sign your application at the same time as enabling remote web inspector. You can now do this so you can test your application on secure devices without needing to worry about debug tokens. That said, be sure to turn off web inspector before you submit your application to the BlackBerry App World™ storefront.

The team here at Research In Motion® (RIM®) is hard at work on the next Beta refresh, currently slated to land in early July. If you are really eager/curious/have lots of free time, feel free to check out our progress in GitHub, and let us know whether we are heading in the right direction on new features and APIs.

For BlackBerry WebWorks SDK work, check out:

https://github.com/blackberry/BB10-Webworks-Packager

https://github.com/blackberry-webworks/BB10-Webworks-API

Ripple? Check out:

https://github.com/blackberry/Ripple-UI

Looking forward to a great summer of BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry WebWorks coding!

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.

We’re happy to announce that shortly after joining Research In Motion® (RIM®), the tinyHippos crew have an update available for the Ripple emulator BETA program, which now includes support for most of the BlackBerry® WebWorks™ APIs. It also provides skins for the BlackBerry® Bold™ series of smartphones, the BlackBerry® Torch™ 9800 smartphone and the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet.

This BETA update will allow you to place your BlackBerry WebWorks app on a local web server, point the Ripple emulator at your website and test your BlackBerry WebWorks application without having to compile or load it onto a simulator during your development process. Of course, we recommend performing your final testing on a simulator – or even better, a live device – to ensure your application works the way you intend before making it available to your users.

This update is just one step forward towards how the Ripple emulator will evolve over the course of this year. Stay tuned for more updates on the direction of the Ripple tooling along with further steps towards bringing the smartphone and BlackBerry Tablet OS BlackBerry WebWorks SDKs together.

• Get Started with the Ripple BETA

We’re also excited to announce further steps towards a converged BlackBerry WebWorks platform between BlackBerry smartphones and BlackBerry PlayBook tablet OS. We have now released an updated version of the BlackBerry WebWorks API Reference that brings both the smartphone and tablet OS APIs together in one consolidated reference guide.

This reference guide also includes documentation for all the HTML5 and web application APIs that are available within BlackBerry WebWorks applications. New documentation features have been added including filters based on OS version, table of contents and object listing views, updated look and feel, and tabling tools showing which APIs are supported on which platform. This new API documentation is also available for community collaboration on github.com/blackberry along with the project’s roadmap.

• View the latest API documentation