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!

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.

LBS nation, we have good news! The Wi-Fi® geolocation service officially launched on September 9th, 2011. This in-house technology at Research In Motion® (RIM®) uses Wi-Fi Access Point data that’s been collected anonymously by your BlackBerry® smartphone to provide a quick and accurate location fix to location-aware applications globally. This service is a further enhancement to our Cell-site geolocation service, which has been in service globally for more than a year.

Unlike GPS-based location fixes, this service offers a faster and more convenient way for developers to get location fixes via a secure connection with minimum bandwidth usage. Although the accuracy of this service is lower than GPS, it’s higher than Cell-site geolocation, and the speed is expected to be much faster than GPS. One advantage to Wi-Fi geolocation service is that it typically works even when GPS is not available. For example, when a user is indoors or when a user prefers not to turn their GPS on in order to preserve battery life, Wi-Fi geolocation service is still an option.

The APIs needed to acquire Wi-Fi geolocation fixes have been available since the BlackBerry® 6 OS release; therefore, all devices running the BlackBerry 6 OS and higher are able to leverage this service via existing APIs upon provisioning of this service. Please note that service provisioning may take up to a month from the launch date, so we’re asking for your patience and understanding if it doesn’t start working immediately. For APIs and other relevant technical details, please refer to the KB article Location APIs – Start to finish. You can also leverage Simple Location API if you want to get a head-start by skipping the full details.

I am really excited about this service as it opens up a lot of possibilities for innovation and great apps. Let us know when you integrate your app with this service, and let us know how it goes!

I have recently written an abstraction to the Location API that simplifies getting location fixes in different modes, as well as optimizes battery usage. Developers intending to quickly incorporate location technology to their apps can now use the Simple Location API to leverage both GPS and Geolocation-based location services in virtually no time.

Besides pure GPS or Geolocation mode, the Simple Location API comes equipped with an OPTIMAL mode that dynamically chooses between the Research In Motion® (RIM®) Locate Services and on-device GPS, depending on availability. Also, since location-based services can be battery intensive if not handled properly, this API optimizes power consumption by adding increasing breathing intervals between retries when location fixes are not available.

The Simple Location API is designed to include the following features:

• Simplified API with a focus on real world use cases.
• An API that leverages on-device GPS and RIM’s Locate Services.
• Dynamically detects available and supported location modes on the device before trying any of them.
• Has the ability to choose the best location mode based on the modes available on the smartphone.
• Built-in retry mechanism with dynamic delay (to save battery) based on a retry factor set by the API user.
• Performs both single and tracking location fixes.
• Simplified events via SimpleLocationListener interface.
• Capable of starting, stopping and restarting tracking sessions in a reliable thread-safe way.
• Designed to eliminate/reduce misuse of the API

There’s definitely room for improvement to the Simple Location API so, keeping that in mind, the source is fully open and can be downloaded here along with a full demo app. Feel free to integrate this in to your app today, and if you are a passionate BlackBerry® app developer, you know the drill – improve and share!

Ever wondered how to query for location without being dependent on GPS? Well, look no more: we’ve introduced a brand-new feature that is capable of getting you a location fix in seconds using nearby cell tower information. The new Geolocation service is now part of the Locate Service. The best part? It’s free to developers!

Users can be indoors with no GPS coverage, but your app will still be able to guide them to restaurants or points of interest (POI) around them. Although the accuracy of the fixes obtained from the Geolocation service may not always be as high as with GPS, it has use cases for apps that require highly accurate GPS fixes as well as apps that do not. Apps that require high accuracy can use this service to quickly show the user an approximate location while it waits for a more accurate location fix using GPS. This can offer a huge user experience improvement. For applications that do not require high accuracy, this service can be leveraged as a simple yet effective mechanism to provide location information.

To take advantage of the Geolocation service, you simply need to ask for a location fix via your LocationProvider or BlackBerryLocationProvider using the appropriate Criteria, or BlackBerryCriteria for the Cellsite mode. It is important to note that this service requires BlackBerry® Application Platform v5.0 or higher and users must be signed up with a carrier that has enabled these capabilities.

You can also consider combining the Locate Service with the BlackBerry® Maps Service to offer a variety of features from navigation directions to POIs. The BlackBerry Maps Service complements the Locate Service by providing map displays that can be invoked or embedded to indicate a user’s location. Please refer to net.rim.device.api.lbs.MapField class and the net.rim.blackberry.api.invoke package for details on APIs related to Map Service.

In BlackBerry Device Software, we’ve also enhanced the existing Geocoding functionality provided by the Locate Service. Using the net.rim.device.api.lbs.Locator class, you can now ask for reverse geocoding in addition to the geocoding functionality we already offered. Reverse geocoding is capable of converting latitude and longitude to a meaningful address. One of my favorite features of the new reverse geocoding functionality is that you can ask for contextual location information at a variety of levels from the street address to the state depending on the granularity required by your application. As a developer, you are able to take advantage of this service with a single method call while we do all the heavy lifting behind the scene.

These new features and capabilities are a great extension of all the work we did within the last year on our location-based services environment. In BlackBerry Application Platform v5.0, we introduced an extension API to the standard Location API (JSR 179). This extension API is much easier to work with and creates new opportunities for all application developers to leverage location within their apps. Please refer to the net.rim.device.api.gps package in the API documentation.

In addition to the extension API, we introduced a set of flexible Location Picker UI components that integrate seamlessly with the BlackBerry Maps and Contacts applications as well as with the GPS capabilities of the device. Check out the net.rim.device.api.lbs.picker package in the API documentation for more information.

The combination of the Locate and Maps Services opens the door to contextualized and location-aware applications that go above and beyond what is available today. We are very excited to hear your feedback on these new capabilities and how you plan on using them within your application.