We’ll be posting videos as part of this series leading up to BlackBerry Jam Americas in Orlando in order to give some more background surrounding the topics that we’ll be discussing in detail during the conference.

This particular video will give you some information about the upcoming roadmap items that we’re looking at for the Cascades UI Framework. In this video we’re joined by Markus Landin, all the way from Malmo Sweden, to talk to us about Cascades and the evolution of the framework on BlackBerry 10!

Qt developers often ask the following questions: Is there a porting guide to help me port my Qt apps to BlackBerry 10? What about porting Qt Quick to BlackBerry 10? How do I configure Qt Creator for BlackBerry 10?

The good news has arrived: you now have a porting guide covering the most commonly-encountered use cases. This guide provides the necessary information to developers of native mobile apps who fall in one of the following categories:

• Developers who have Qt apps written in C/C++/ QML/JavaScript and intend to have their apps running on the BlackBerry 10 platform;
• Developers who want to write new Qt C++, QML and/or JavaScript code for the BlackBerry 10 platform;
• And finally, developers who want to take advantage of the Cascades UI framework and change their existing UI to the Cascades framework.

BlackBerry supports developers in all of the above described scenarios, and so this guide provides developers with best practices for each category. It also explains why a particular practice is considered the best one.

Please check the full Qt porting guide at:

http://developer.blackberry.com/native/documentation/bb10/porting_qt_apps.html

Related Posts:

YouTube: BlackBerry Jam Session (JAM12): Porting Qt Applications to BlackBerry 10
Porting Qt Applications to BlackBerry 10 is Easier than Ever!
Writing Qt apps for the BlackBerry 10 platform
YouTube: QtDD12 – How Qt Helped RIM Build BlackBerry 10
YouTube: QtDD12 – Developing with Qt for the BlackBerry 10

We’ve been working the last few months with the team at Sencha to bring the support for BlackBerry 10 out of beta and ready to be used by developers.  We’re glad to announce with Sencha that the wait is over! Performance and a full BlackBerry 10 theme are here for BlackBerry 10.  Now, you can develop visually compelling applications using components in Sencha Touch 2.1.1 without worrying about the performance. The Webkit rendering optimization from the BlackBerry 10 Web platform combined with the Sencha’s performance optimization resulted in great venue for the developers who are developing this application for the first time. Additionally, these optimizations will also help developers who have already developed a Sencha Touch application and are looking to bring it to the BlackBerry 10 platform.

If that wasn’t enough by itself, we are very happy and excited to announce that the latest Sencha Touch release has the full support for BlackBerry 10 theme.  As mentioned at BlackBerry Jam 2012, Sencha is committed to supporting BlackBerry 10 and we’ve been working together with their team to bring these new visuals to their product. With this theme support you can start building BlackBerry 10 themed HTML5 applications using Sencha Touch to give your application the BlackBerry 10 native look and feel. Sencha and BlackBerry are committed to delivering the best platform for building BlackBerry 10 applications with open web standards. The latest Sencha Touch release delivers the BlackBerry 10 native look and feel to most of the UI components such as Forms, DataView, Carousel, List, TabPanel, NestedList and Navigation View. Let’s take a closer look at some of these UI components, styled for BlackBerry 10.

Form Elements

Form Elements are one of the most common mobile UI elements, and a building block for many applications, and Sencha has given that native BlackBerry 10 look and feel to them. So, if you want your application to look and feel like a BlackBerry 10 application, you should definitely take advantage of these form elements.  The input adapts to the virtual keyboard as well.  If you have an input type of password or email, keyboard changes configuration to match the input type using standard HTML5 integrated elements.

Action Bar

Sencha Touch also includes BlackBerry 10 specific components. The first one we’ll look at is the action bar at the bottom.  The action bar is a styled Sencha Tab Panel and it’s designed in a way that you can switch between pages very easily and this is the same type of design you see in the BlackBerry 10 native applications. You can see this same sort of design with other frameworks, and Sencha has brought the same design to be used for BlackBerry 10 developers.  As you can see, it adapts whether you are in portrait or landscape.

CrossCut Menu

In addition to above, the BlackBerry 10 CrossCut menu is also supported by the BlackBerry 10 theme as a new Sencha Touch component. As a developer, you can leverage the CrossCut menu component to create compelling BlackBerry 10 style application using just web technologies and give the native BlackBerry 10 look and feel to the app.  If you’re interested in using the component, it’s the new Ext.bb.CrossCut component (xtype: crosscut). Here is the code snippet, which shows how to use the CrossCut component with in the Sencha Touch framework. The complete reference for the CrossCut menu is available here.

To enable the BlackBerry 10 theme, refer to the Sencha blog post for instructions.

If you are new to Sencha Touch, it is an impressive JavaScript® framework based entirely on HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, and designed to bring an incredibly powerful set of components to create rich mobile applications. Today’s Sencha Touch release not only brings support for BlackBerry 10, but continues Sencha’s support for the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet.  To get started, developers should download the framework and then check out the Sencha Touch Learning Center, where they will find code samples, videos and tutorials. To get an idea of what is possible using the framework, there are a variety of demo applications showcasing the breadth and power of the platform.

If you have a Sencha Touch application already and looking to bring it over to BlackBerry 10, stop worrying.  You can bring your Sencha Touch application to BlackBerry 10 in few steps.  Here is the complete porting guide and the developer video, which shows you step by step instructions to bring your Sencha Touch application to BlackBerry 10.

Cascades™ and Qt are two major frameworks available on the BlackBerry® 10 platform. Qt on BlackBerry 10 provides a complete set of standard Qt 4.8 APIs with the exception of the QtWebKit module. BlackBerry 10 provides a selected set of APIs from the QtMobility project as well. I will provide an overview of Qt 4.8 APIs coverage on BlackBerry 10, with a focus on APIs that are different or not available on BlackBerry 10, and will refer to alternative Cascades APIs in relevant cases. More details are provided here:
https://developer.blackberry.com/cascades/reference/qt_index.html

To start, I wanted to share two fundamental facts about the use of Qt within Cascades and Qt on BlackBerry 10 in general:

1. Cascades uses its own backend to render on the screen. This backend does not use Qt because Cascades needed several features, which Qt addresses only starting with Qt5. Developers have to decide upfront if an application will use Cascades or Qt to render on the screen, because it is not possible to mix Qt and Cascades APIs to access the screen in one application. Developers can write “pure” Qt Quick or QWidget apps and have the app directly deployed and run on the BlackBerry 10 platform with little or no platform adaptations. Cascades apps can use all Qt APIs which do not access the screen; e.g. the modules QtCore, QtNetwork, QtSql, QtXml.

2. QtMobility APIs have been developed, published and maintained in a separate project outside of the Qt 4.8 base line; therefore QtMobility does not belong to a standard Qt4 package. QtMobility should be separately built and integrated into mobile and embedded platforms based on Qt4. Since the work on QtMobility was focused on standards and services used by Nokia devices, the use of these APIs on modern platforms provided by other vendors requires changes. This applies to the BlackBerry 10 platform as well. The current release of BlackBerry 10 therefore provides a subset of QtMobility API implementation.

In addition to the Cascades UI framework, RIM® has created a rich set of middleware Qt-based APIs to access the key BlackBerry 10 features. Since these APIs do not render to the screen, they can be used in Cascades apps as well as in applications based on Qt widgets and Qt Quick.

Using Qt widgets with C++ on the BlackBerry 10 platform

Qt widgets are fully supported on the platform and included in the BlackBerry 10 NDK. Even though almost no changes in the code are needed to get a Qt widget-based application running on BlackBerry 10, this approach will rarely provide acceptable results. Qt widgets have been developed for desktop applications and only few of them are suitable for a mobile platform. For example, QButton, QCheckBox or QProgressBar can be effectively used, but using QMainWidow or QDialog in an app for a mobile device does not make much sense. Moreover, the implementation of animations and effects in widget based UIs requires considerable effort or can even be not possible in some cases. Cascades and Qt Quick provide much better solutions tailored to use cases on mobile devices.

Qt in the current Beta releases of the NDK and on Dev Alpha devices uses a default style for Qt widgets. The final version will contain a style tailored to the appearance of the BlackBerry 10 native UI elements.

Developing with Qt Quick

Qt Quick 1.1 is fully supported on the BlackBerry 10 platform as a part of Qt 4.8 package. Additional Qt Quick plugins provided in the QtMobility package are supported according to their general availability on BlackBerry 10.

Developers who used Qt Quick on a desktop platform should note that the “qmlviewer” application is not available on BlackBerry 10. The security and deployment models on BlackBerry 10 require using own C++ code to load Qt Quick files. An example of this code in provided in Qt as well as in the template application which can be created in the category “BlackBerry Qt Quick Application” via the “New Project” wizard in QtCreator 2.6 and newer.

Qt Quick applications intensively using animations and transitions should use QGLWidget as a view port in QDeclarativeView. Using QGLWidget will enable hardware acceleration and therefore usually provides better rendering performance.

When it comes to the UI development, Qt Quick is a good choice when an application needs its own custom appearance with a custom set of UI elements, or when the application code should be ported from another platform to BlackBerry 10. Since Qt Quick 1.1 does not provide high-level UI components, developers have to provide an implementation of these UI elements. If an application needs an authentic BlackBerry 10 look-and-feel and a seamless integration with the platform, using Cascades UI framework is a much better approach.

QtMultimedia

This module is deprecated and not supported. Please use QtMultimediaKit from QtMobility instead.

QtOpenGL

QtOpenGL is fully included in the BlackBerry 10 NDK. However, QtOpenGL APIs cannot be used in a Cascades app. Please check the Cascades documentation to find how to use OpenGL in Cascades apps.

QtScriptTools

QtScriptTools is fully included in the BlackBerry 10 NDK. However, QtScriptTools APIs cannot be used in a Cascades app. Cascades apps use QScriptEngine as described in the BlackBerry 10 documentation.

QtSvg

QtSvg is fully included in the BlackBerry 10 NDK. However, QtSvg APIs cannot be used in Cascades apps.

QtWebKit

QtWebKit is not supported, but RIM is planning to include a solution in later releases of BlackBerry 10.

QtTest

QtTest is fully included in the BlackBerry 10 NDK. However, QtTest APIs cannot be used in Cascades apps.

Not supported

• Phonon
• Qt3Support
• QtDesigner
• QtUiTools
• QtHelp
• QAxContainer
• QAxServer
• QtDBus

APIs from the Qt Mobility 1.2 project:

QtNetwork

Most of these APIs have been included in the Qt 4.8 and are supported on BlackBerry 10.

QtLocation

A subset of QtLocation is supported by QtLocationSubset. Details about QtLocationSubset can be found at https://developer.blackberry.com/cascades/documentation/device_platform/location/

QtMultimediaKit

The QtMultimediaKit module is included in the BlackBerry 10 NDK except for QMediaRecorderControl (and so no QMediaRecorder) and Camera APIs. Development teams in RIM are working to provide support for these and other modules in the future. It is important to note that QtMultimedia APIs in Qt 4.8 have dependencies on the QtGui module and so they cannot be used in Cascades apps. Cascades app should use MediaPlayer APIs instead.

QtSensors

The QtSensors module is fully included in the BlackBerry 10 NDK. RIM has extended the default API set with new and useful features. Most QtSensors APIs can be used in Cascades apps. The exact list of supported APIs is available in
https://developer.blackberry.com/cascades/documentation/device_comm/sensors/index.html

QtConnectivity

RIM is currently working on adding support for NFC and Bluetooth®. BlackBerry 10 also provides the QtNfcSubset module which provides access to NFC on enabled BlackBerry 10 devices. More details will be provided in the BlackBerry 10 documentation.

Following modules are not supported:

• QtServiceFramework
• QtContacts
• QtMessaging
• QtSystemInfo
• QtPublishSubscribe
• QtOrganizer
• QtFeedback
• QtGallery
• QtVersit

Related Resources

We are planning to provide more detailed documentation about Qt applications on BlackBerry 10 in the next blog posts. In the meantime, please find below some selected links related to Qt on BlackBerry 10:

• Community Wiki for Qt on BlackBerry
• Building Qt4 for BlackBerry
• Building Qt5 for BlackBerry
• Qt Creator 2.6.0 released
• http://qt-project.org/wiki/BlackBerry

Related Posts:

• What’s up with Qt and the future of Cascades?
• Porting Qt Applications to BlackBerry 10 is Easier than Ever

Happy Qt development for BlackBerry 10! Please note that RIM is committed to Qt and is continuously working to expand the selection of own add-on modules as well as standard modules provided by Qt in the future.

Qt developers and BlackBerry® 10 developers often ask the following questions:

What is the relationship between Cascades™ and Qt, and how do they interact with each other?

Cascades and Qt frameworks are two major frameworks available in BlackBerry 10 application development. From a high-level architectural point of view, you can say that Cascades sits on top of Qt modules as it is built, using the Qt application framework leveraging Qt object model, event model and threading model. This also uses QtCore, QtXML, QtSql, QtNetwork and QDeclarativeEngine for QML components. Both frameworks use standard C++, signals and slots in Qt for inter-object communication. However, Cascades uses own UI rendering engine and does NOT use any QtGui functionality, while Qt uses raster and the OpenGL graphics engine.

BlackBerry 10 supports BOTH Cascades and Qt

The key point here is that BlackBerry 10 supports BOTH Cascades and Qt frameworks. If you have developed an application using Qt framework for other platforms, you can deploy and run the application on BlackBerry 10 with the minimum effort of fixing a few compile and runtime issues. The downside of this approach is that your application may not have consistent look and feel with the BlackBerry 10 platform, nor have the best integration with the platform itself.

Cascades includes a set of core UI components and platform APIs to create interactive applications accessing the underlying features of the BlackBerry 10 platform. Cascades UI components are designed to have a consistent look and feel, and are optimized for BlackBerry 10 integration such as touch screen interactions. You can use Cascades Builder, the main development tool, for creating BlackBerry Native applications, which is built into the QNX Momentics IDE. The UI preview and the components view are specific features of Cascades Builder when editing QML. Cascades Builder is also integrated to access the BlackBerry platform features and services like audio/video, camera, Ad Service, app integration, BBM™ Social Platform, external data storage access, file system access, internationalization, location, payment service, PIM (Personal Information Management), push services, networking, notifications and sensors. To learn more about the Cascades framework, see Introduction to Cascades.

When porting a Qt application to BlackBerry 10, you can access the same subset of Qt APIs directly without using wrappers for BlackBerry 10. This is powerful and convenient for Qt developers and Qt applications. If you have any Qt applications using Qt APIs such as QGeoCoordinate or QSensor, the same APIs are available and accessible on BlackBerry 10. Currently, the subset of QtCore, QtNetwork, QtLocation, QtSensors, QtSql and QtXML modules are supported. You can check out our sample applications to learn more about these APIs.

Which Framework to Choose to Port your Qt Application?

We recommend that you choose Cascades framework if you are developing a native look-and-feel application on BlackBerry 10 and want to maximize the platform integration. If you are planning to develop an application with specific and customized GUIs, you can choose Qt framework. The decision has to be made before you start writing your application, however, since you can’t mix the UI components between Cascades and Qt. We will walk you through the porting tips based on the framework in the following section.

Basic Step-by-Step for porting a Qt application to BlackBerry 10

1. Set up the tool chains:

• Download BlackBerry 10 SDK/NDK and Set up
• If you choose to use Qt Creator, download and configure Qt Creator 2.6 for BlackBerry 10 development. This version is recommended since it has the full support for BlackBerry 10 development including BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet and QNX. In order to deploy an existing Qt application project in Qt Creator, you need to add the kit which you defined for BlackBerry 10 to your project. Read the configuration instructions.

2. Build the application. You will have to fix some make, compile, and linking issues.
3. Set up Package and Deployment by adding the application icon and/or splash screen.
4. Fix look and feel issues by adjusting resolutions, icons, windows or font sizes. You can use Cascades components, make your own customized QML components, or use Qt Quick or QWidgets.
5. Address platform specific runtime issues. If necessary, add BlackBerry Platform Services. Often, different platforms handle inputs differently. Test rotating and adjust orientation issues.
6. Add unique features to the BlackBerry 10 platform to add competiveness. You can apply device integrations like QtMobility Sensors, Native BlackBerry Platform Services and PPS APIs.
7. Submit to the BlackBerry App World™ storefront.
8. Start collecting your money!

If you’d like to learn more about porting Qt applications to BlackBerry 10, stay tuned. We are planning to dig deeper into this topic over the next blog post series.

Here are some Cascades, Qt and open-source related links:

• Introduction to Cascades
• Qt for BlackBerry
• Open Source Components for the BlackBerry Native SDK
• Building Qt4 for BlackBerry
• Building Qt5 for BlackBerry
• Qt Creator 2.6.0 released

Related Posts:

YouTube: BlackBerry Jam Session (JAM12): Porting Qt Applications to BlackBerry 10
Developing in Cascades
What’s up with Qt and the future of Cascades?

Guest post from Nukul – Ed.

We’ve received a lot of requests from developers to be able to build BlackBerry® 10 WebWorks™ directly from GitHub. Before I talk about how to take advantage of this, I would like to explain why it took us so long to get here and what it means for you.

The main issue was that the latest BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK features were dependent on features in the BlackBerry 10 OS. Therefore, if you built BlackBerry 10 WebWorks in open source, it potentially would not work with latest BlackBerry 10 OS beta.

This has changed as we get closer and closer to launch. We are now starting to work on features that are not dependent on the latest BlackBerry 10 OS beta. Imagine this: You hear about an awesome new feature or extension we are working on. You can now go to our GitHub repositories, look at pull requests, pull down the branch, and a few minutes later you have a BlackBerry 10 WebWorks build with the new extension or feature.

Build time can be less than two to three minutes from a clean build. From the time you see someone’s tweet about an awesome new feature, it could take you less than five minutes to get a build of BlackBerry 10 WebWorks that has that feature.

The advantages to a BlackBerry 10 WebWorks app developer are infinite here. You should never need to wait for new features. You can even build with Linux! It’s all there. There will still be some features that you will need the next OS release for, but that will happen less frequently as we get closer to launch of BlackBerry 10.

Here are the two repos you need to build to get ready to take advantage of this:

https://github.com/blackberry/BB10-WebWorks-Framework

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

The framework repo contains the Framework that is packaged with your app when you build a BlackBerry 10 WebWorks app. The Packager repo contains all the code for the packaging tool.

There are two main branches in each BlackBerry 10 WebWorks repo: master and next. The master branch will contain all the features that you can currently use with the current publicly-released OS — think of it as the features we wish we had time to get into the previous release. When a feature is completed, it’s merged into master if does not have any OS dependencies. The next branch will contain the new features that have OS dependencies.

To allow developers to easily build stable versions, each release is tagged using the version number of the release. This allows you to easily check out the source of a particular release. You can simply use the tags to check out the code from that release. For example, you can use “git checkout v1.0.2.9” to pull down the code for the last release. So, any pull request you see going into the master branch, you can grab and use right away. You will see none open today, but over the next couple of weeks you should start seeing many.

The README.md has been updated with all the updated instructions.
Run the unit tests, automated tests, all the developer tools we use are all available to you.

We are doing everything we can to enable developers to take advantage of our latest and greatest work. Just open an issue on our repo when you find an issue with our BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK. If you fix a bug or build an awesome extension, contribute it back and help us make BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK even better. For details on how to contribute, check out http://blackberry.github.com/howToContribute.html

We recently had Mark Robinson contribute changes to make SDK work on Linux — contributions like that go a long way. Be sure to see our growing list of contributors!

You can reach me any time on Twitter® @nukulb or send me a message through GitHub.

While these earlier betas offered significant improvements over previous editions, they were still a work in progress. We are finally at a stage where we can truly say that with Beta 3 of our Native SDK, our young child has finally come of age. Our APIs have evolved to a point where they are stable and functional enough to advertise backwards compatibility. We also support a full feature set of APIs in the Native SDK – from connectivity APIs such as email and calendar to APIs that support deeper integration such as invocation to social APIs such as BlackBerry® Messenger™ (BBM).

Beta 3 of the Native SDK contains numerous new and important APIs that many of you have been anxiously waiting for. Some of the highlights include:

Cards

If you attended some of our other conferences, the BlackBerry Jam 10 World Tour or BlackBerry Jam Sessions, you have probably heard us talk about the flow and deep integration that the BlackBerry 10 platform provides. The invocation framework provides a facility via cards through which you can incorporate some of this flow and integration in your app. With cards, you will be able to expose discrete functionality within your app to other apps as well as incorporate functionality provided by your other apps within your own. As an example, if you are developing a picture viewer app, you might expose a simple picture previewer card to the invocation framework. Any app that registers with the invocation framework can invoke your card to preview a picture. Likewise, your app can leverage existing cards on the platform to access various pieces of functionality, whether it is a simple preview of a video or other discrete functions like picking a contact or composing an email.

Visually, a card typically appears as a previewer that takes up most of the screen. However, it appears as part of the application on which it is stacked. Essentially, you can use a gesture to slide the card in, partially or fully into your app as seen in the picture below:

A Card is considered part of the application that invokes it and does not appear as a separate entity in the running applications grid. In addition, when the card’s function is complete, the user is automatically returned to its parent. In this way, a card “feels” like part of the application.

BBM Social Platform

BBM has always been core to the Blackberry platform and it still remains a critical piece of our BlackBerry 10 portfolio. The BBM Social Platform APIs allow you to leverage the social features and functionality of BlackBerry Messenger from within your app. For example, you can initiate a BBM chat and share files such as pictures, voice notes, and music between users who are running your app. You can also stream data between users of your app for real-time applications such as communication, gaming and location tracking. As part of the BBM social platform, you will be able to harness BBM features such as BBM user profile, contact list, messaging and application profile box.

Email, Calendar and Contacts

There is a significant amount of interest from our third party developers for Calendar, Email and Contact APIs, and we are excited to announce their availability in this beta. The Message Center is a signature feature of the BlackBerry experience, and we are adding support on the API side for it as well. The Message Center APIs provide the ability to launch the unified inbox, send emails and receive task notifications. You can use our calendar functionality to create new calendar events, edit existing events, delete existing events and view existing calendar events. We also have the ability to notify third parties when events are being created, modified and deleted. Finally, our contact API allows you to create, edit, delete and view contacts as well as add additional meta information to a contact.

Advertising

In this competitive world of app development, you likely care about creative ways in which you can make money off your apps and we want to help bring you the tools to do just this. After all, the success of our platform depends on your success. To facilitate that, we are adding an Advertising Service along with APIs that allow you to display banner and splash ads in your application or game. You can also create hot links to keyword advertising. Under the scenes, our Advertising service launches a Browser webview to display the advertisements. Along with our Payment and Scoreloop APIs that we introduced in earlier Betas, we believe that we have some powerful tools that can help you monetize your application.

Push

At RIM®, we are proud of our Push technology, and we are now making our powerful Push framework available through the NDK. Through the APIs we provide, your app will be able to register with the Push service and receive push data. When the Push service receives incoming Push messages, it will invoke the application registered for the message using the addressing information provided during the registration. Any app that needs to be responsive to incoming data streams should strongly consider taking a look at our Push framework and associated events.

…and many others

On the ‘Core Native’ front, we’ve introduced a Bluetooth® API which supports Bluetooth on/off, power status, and retrieving paired and found devices. It also provides several Bluetooth profiles such as Serial Port Profile (SPP), Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) and Generic Attribute Profile (GATT). Other core native APIs include APIs for Holster detection, retrieving application info and for querying Wi-Fi® and battery status.
Our spell check engine now exposes APIs at both the C and C++ layer to allow apps to perform spell check functionality in their own customized UI.

At the Cascades™ layer, we have introduced a WallPaper API that allows users to set an image as the wallpaper. We have also introduced APIs for sensors, including support for rotation, orientation, magnetometer, gyroscope and accelerometer. The geocoding API allows the user to perform geocoding and reverse geocoding while the radio info API includes the ability to query available radios, their status, ESN/IMSI, Sim card info, Mobile Country Code and Mobile Network code.

We hope you find enough content in this release to satisfy your needs. As we continue to evolve our platform, we intend to be as open and transparent with you about what’s coming down the pipe. I want to point you to our really cool-looking Native & Cascades flight boards where you can get an up-to-date status on our roadmap items. We have also added a section to our site that highlights the key features of our Core Native and Cascades frameworks. It should be useful for those of you who are trying to decide whether Core Native or Cascades is the right framework to use for developing your app.

As always, we want to continue to hear from you about your needs and receive feedback on our Native SDK.

Last week I told you about the Unconference we’re hosting on May 3, 2012 as part of BlackBerry® 10 Jam in Orlando May 1 to 3. The responses here on the Insider BlackBerry Developer’s Blog as well as on CrackBerry, BerryReview and N4BB (not to mention on Twitter® and Facebook®) have been amazing and I look forward to the polls later this week that will let you choose which sessions you like best. Keep an eye here and on our Facebook and Twitter pages for more information on the voting!

Our Developer Relations team is enlisting the help of some amazing designers for a great session: “Give Your App a Facelift,” which will take an existing app and use the Cascades UI framework to demonstrate how the app could look on the BlackBerry 10 platform. We want developers attending to leave with some great ideas for new UI or design elements.

To submit your app for consideration, please visit the BlackBerry Developer Forums. The Developer Relations team will look at all the apps and choose which ones will receive a facelift and reach out to developers in the coming weeks.