We’ve updated our flight arrival boards to provide statuses on all of the feature functionality delivered with the September BlackBerry® 10 development tools update. Along with this, we’ve updated some milestones leading up to the Gold SDK releases.

In my previous blog post, I mentioned that we were still considering whether or not to do another set of SDK updates after our September release and before the final Gold SDK build. Based on feedback from our developer community, we’ve decided to add another SDK release on the road to Gold. We’ve updated the SDK release schedule to reflect these needs while ensuring that there’s no impact to the first BlackBerry 10 smartphone being delivered on-time in Q1 2013. The updated SDK schedule is as follows:

November: SDK Gold Candidate

• Updates to all SDKs
• Mainly bug fixes

December: SDK Gold

• Updates to all SDKs
• Mainly bug fixes

December: Keyboard device SDK Beta

• Updates to necessary SDKs targeted at compatibility testing for QWERTY devices
• User Experience tweaks to Cascades/Adobe AIR controls to account for screen resolution changes

The November release will be a gold candidate release which will contain mainly bug fixes and further stabilized SDKs for you to continue testing. This will be the SDK candidate that RIM® will continue to test and be finalized in December as the Gold SDK. Be sure to check-out the updated flight arrival boards for the details associated to the SDK of your choice.

Wait a second, you show a Keyboard device SDK Beta. What the heck is that?

In December 2012, we’ll also be releasing the necessary Beta SDKs to allow you to perform compatibility testing of your application for the first BlackBerry 10 QWERTY device. Since this new device will be a different screen resolution (720×720 vs 1280×768) than the first all-touch BlackBerry 10 device, we want to make sure you have simulators and updated SDKs to test your applications.

This SDK release will also include any UI tweaks for the Cascades™ and Adobe® AIR® controls to match the new Keyboard device screen resolution. The controls mainly affected are Action Bars, which are adjusted take up less screen real estate.

Why do I see some new items appearing in the upcoming November release?

With this current September release, we do consider the Native SDK, Adobe AIR and Android™ Runtime API complete. However, there are a few small additional items that will be coming into the November release. These are mainly small additions that will not affect the main APIs, which are now considered complete. BlackBerry® WebWorks™ is one of the exceptions that will be continuing to deliver new APIs both in the Gold Candidate and Gold release.

Where do I find these Flight Arrival Boards?

You can check out each of the Flight Arrival Boards by clicking on the “Roadmap” links on each of the websites or check out the links below:

Native SDK
Cascades Application Framework Roadmap
Core lower level API Roadmap
HTML5/BlackBerry WebWorks SDK Roadmap
Adobe AIR SDK Roadmap
Android Runtime Roadmap

With the help of our web design wizards at The Astonishing Tribe (TAT), we’re happy to announce that our BlackBerry® 10 Roadmap flight arrival boards are now available. Unlike the image posted above, the BlackBerry 10 Roadmap flight arrival boards have real roadmap data instead of yummy Bacon Ipsum dummy data.

These roadmap arrival boards will continue to be updated as we move through each beta phase both for the launch of BlackBerry 10 as well as for betas that go beyond the first release of the BlackBerry 10 operating system. We want to make these a standard communication tool for our development community to know what’s coming and when it will arrive.

There are also some updates to share surrounding the BlackBerry 10 SDK release schedule. In our previous post, we talked about the SDK release cadence leading up to gold. This included a release in September, October and November.

We’re happy to announce that we have been able to pull in the October release and merge it with September release in order to make sure that we can add some of the core BlackBerry applications to the simulator and BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha testing device in order for you to test your integrated apps in September. The updated SDK release schedule looks like the following:

Why isn’t BlackBerry WebWorks listed as API Freeze in Beta 3?

Since BlackBerry® WebWorks™ is an Open Source project which only has operating system dependencies, its release schedule is slightly different than those runtimes that are only released with an OS update. This is also why there have been releases of the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK in June and August when the other SDKs were not updated. The BlackBerry WebWorks SDK gold release is currently scheduled for December.

What does “API Freeze” mean anyway?

The target for the Beta 3 Native/Adobe® AIR®/Android™ runtimes is to be API feature complete. This means that the signatures are frozen in order to help with gold compatibility and provide a stable base for building your applications.

There may be a few additional APIs that sneak into the Gold SDK release, but they will be considered additions and carefully scrutinized in order to not modify existing API signatures. Be sure to follow the flight arrival boards for any updates around additional Gold SDK functionality.

Will there be an SDK release between Beta 3 and Gold?

At the moment we don’t have any concrete plans to release an SDK update between Beta 3 and the Gold SDK. We will continue to evaluate the need and will reflect any updates through the SDK roadmap arrival boards.

Where do I find these Roadmaps?

You can check out each of the roadmaps by clicking on the Roadmap links on each of the websites or check out the links below:

• Native SDK
  • Cascades™ Application Framework Roadmap
  • Core lower level API Roadmap
• HTML5/BlackBerry WebWorks SDK Roadmap
• Adobe AIR SDK Roadmap
• Android Runtime Roadmap