Since BlackBerry® 10 Jam, we’ve received lots of great feedback on the bbUI framework. Your collaborative effort is really helping to evolve the framework, so please keep the feedback flowing! We’ve been working hard to add in all the BlackBerry 10 goodness and now have a bunch of new functionality ready to go.

Be sure to check out the full change log for this release to know what kind of adjustments you may need to make to your markup in order to run v0.9.2, and check out the closed issues for bugs that have been fixed. The v0.9.2 markup changes are fairly minor and are meant to make your life easier as we move forward.

Notable Improvements

• BlackBerry 10 Grid List
• Now supports both square 1:1 and widescreen 16:9 image formats
• Added press-and-hold context menu support
• Only shows translucent overlay if either a title or sub-title is provided
• Supports both solid and gradient headers
• Header text justification added
• Image List
• Supports both solid and gradient headers for BlackBerry 10
• Image display effects for BlackBerry 10
• Added placeholder images for items without image content on all BlackBerry operating systems
• Supports a “text only” mode on all BlackBerry operating systems
• New touch and click highlighting to match BlackBerry 10 UX specifications
• Ellipsis added to the end of long text in arrow and image lists
• HTML5 input fields now supported in Label/Control containers
• Added slider styling for BlackBerry 10 with some funky animation
• Added progress indicators for all BlackBerry operating systems
• New title bar support with buttons for BlackBerry 10
• New radio button styling for BlackBerry 10 with some slip-and-slide animation

Changes to your code

I mentioned that there were a few changes that were made that will affect your application markup, so let’s talk about those.

• The bb.init() function no longer takes a bb10AccentColor. This color is now generated as a shade of the bb10HighlightColor.
• Header text alignment has been moved off of the individual headers on an image list and moved to an attribute of the image list itself. Make sure you check out the Image List documentation for the correct markup.
• Grid lists used to have header text left justified by default — they are now center justified by default.
• Back Buttons must be explicitly created in Action Bars for BB10 styling. Action bar will no longer be created “automagically” if the screen has a title bar with a back button specified.
• The toolkit file names have changed to bbui-0.9.2.js and bbui-0.9.2.css

More to Come

We’ve now created an additional BlackBerry 10 milestone for bbUI that contains some more BlackBerry 10 UI goodness. If you’re interested in following the bbUI.js changes as they go, feel free to follow me on Twitter.

Now that we’ve covered what’s new and what’s changed, I think it’s time for some eye candy

Square 1:1 Grid List and Slider

Radio Buttons and Progress Indicators

New Image List Headers and Placeholders

When you built the first version of your BlackBerry® platform application, you probably had a very clear idea of what you wanted to accomplish: the features and user experience that would mean success. Then you put your hard work out there on BlackBerry App World™ and you got downloads. Maybe you got a bunch of feedback and reviews and now you are gearing up for version 2. How do you know where to invest your time?

You can’t do every feature that you can think of, or that your users request – not if you want to actually release a version 2 in a reasonable time. Even if you tried to cram a bunch in there, imagine what that would do to your flow and user experience. While your own ideas and user feedback have an obvious place in your planning, what do you really know about how your app is used?

• How many users are on 5.0, 6.0 or 7.0?
• Do you have a predominant device or form factor?
• Have you tested on all the top user devices?
• Is there a device that you expected more users from and have you tested on that device?
• Where are your users from?
• How often and for how long is your app used?
• Does that feature you spent so much time on really being used?

Those are just some starter questions that could be answered with the simple inclusion of the BlackBerry® Analytics SDK. The SDK was released in beta last year and went Gold just before BlackBerry DevCon Americas. It was for Java® applications only at first, but I am pleased to announce there is a BlackBerry® WebWorks™ Extension for it now, which is available in our BlackBerry WebWorks Community APIs repository on github.

The extension is really a simplified JavaScript wrapper for the Java-based SDK, which does all the hard work. There is no perceptible performance impact, minimal additional data usage, queueing events out of coverage, and data is collected in aggregate with no user identifying information reported. Even if you just sign up for the service and copy the sample code into your application, I think you will be very pleased with the value of the data reported. This extension is BlackBerry smartphone-only right now, but an SDK for BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablets is in development.

Note that data is analyzed within 24 hours of being received so you will have to wait a bit when you first get started. Issues with the extension should be submitted at github.com, but if you have questions you can always post in our Analytics Service Forum.

So what are you waiting for? Visit github and get the extension today. Sign up for your Analytics account (it only takes a minute) and add the code to your app. Try it out in your next beta!

If you’re a registered BlackBerry® Developer Zone member, you may have recently received an invitation to participate in our developer survey. I am following up that email to encourage your participation, as this survey is a direct way to tell us what you need to be more successful with your BlackBerry platform development. Your answers will help guide our product planning and feature development!

With this survey, we are most interested in understanding which BlackBerry development tools you are using regularly, and on which host platforms (Windows®, Linux®, MacOS X). We are also interested in your language choices for application development both on and off the BlackBerry OS, and in which development phases you are spending your time. Most importantly, we really want to understand how we can improve your time to market, and we’ll use your answers to the types of questions you see above as a metric of our success.

This survey will become a regular occurrence – at least twice a year. We use this data to better understand your usage of developer tools and the areas that are challenging your success. There is a combination of multiple choice and open-ended questions, so you will have the ability to give us direct feedback for your personal needs.

The survey should take about 10-15 minutes but could end up saving you hours with improved development tools and solutions from Research In Motion this year. Not to mention your feedback is incredibly valuable to us in terms of letting us know what you like, dislike, what you’d like to see more of, and so on!

Take a moment and tell us what you think!