Today is the launch of the Gold version of the BlackBerry 10.1 SDK for Adobe AIR. Thank you to everyone that has been helping us test it so far! For a full list of API updates and fixes, please head over to the release notes.

Port your AIR apps

Re-compile your existing BlackBerry PlayBook AIR applications to BlackBerry 10. If you’re already using the fuse component set that debuted with the BlackBerry PlayBook SDK for Adobe AIR, the port should be quick and easy. You can get more details from this blog post.

For more details on what’s coming after Gold for the BlackBerry 10 SDK for Adobe AIR, please visit our Adobe AIR roadmap.

“Money” by PTMoney/CC/flickr

Most people like to be rewarded for hard work. There are of course many ways in which people derive reward. Fame. Adoration. Legions of followers on Twitter. Free cookies. But perhaps the most prevalent and obvious is cold, hard cash.

With BlackBerry World, there are a number of ways to get money out of your investment in your BlackBerry 10 application. Today’s refresh of the BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK brings support for ourPayment Service. The Payment Service allows you to implement in-app purchases, either one-time purchases or subscription-based services. Now you can choose your monetization strategy for your BlackBerry 10 WebWorks application: paid download, freemium, in-app purchases, digital goods, etc.

Check out the API reference to get started.  You will immediately notice that there are a few new additions to the API compared to previous implementations in BlackBerry WebWorks, such as cancel subscription.

While payment should be enough to get your excited on its own, we also were able to sneak in some of the final bits of the BBM Social Platform – namely support for the Profile Box.  The Profile Box is a customizable box for your app that appears in the current user’s BBM profile. You can use it to broadcast achievements or provide updates. The box contains a list of items, each composed of text and an optional icon. The Profile Box API allows you to manage the items in your app’s profile box. The API reference for this new API is here.

One final item that you should be aware of is how popup windows are handled. With this release, the popup blocker is disabled by default.  This means that popups will display in the Child Browser window.  If you wish to enable the popup blocker functionality there is a new parameter that you can pass in config.xml to the “blackberry.app” feature.  For information, see the <param> element.

<feature id="blackberry.app">
  <param name="popupBlocker" value="enable" />
</feature>

Be sure to download the latest SDK, and check out the Payment service to see how you can develop a richer monetization strategy for your application.

Car Polish / JMR_Photography / CC BY 2.0

Last month we delivered the Gold release of the BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK to our development community. This was a huge milestone on the road to launch for BlackBerry 10, allowing our developers to confidently develop, test, and submit their WebWorks applications to BlackBerry World, and to take part in the Built for BlackBerry program. I am sure all of you have already submitted your apps and are now relaxing by the pool.

Today we are launching a refresh to the WebWorks SDK that brings a number of fixes that, while not required for your application to run on BlackBerry 10, bring a few tweaks and stability improvements. There are two very specific updates addressing some underlying platform changes that COULD mean you will want to repackage an existing application. Let’s look at those first.

The concept of Cards in BlackBerry 10 is what really enables the Peek and Flow experience. There are many built-in cards that developers are able to leverage to complete common tasks or integrate with system services, and WebWorks has provided built-in APIs for some of these system cards. One of them is the File picker (blackberry.invoke.card.invokeFilePicker). In the gold release, you could provide a list of directories in the FilePickerOptions object, and the standard UI would present a selection list of those folders. This ability was removed from the standard UI. The API has not changed, but we only now look at and use the first entry in the array to seed the UI. So as long as you were not relying on this multi-directory functionality, or if you don’t mind that only the first is considered, then you have no need to repackage your application.

Another update relates to how Contacts are created, or more specifically, what happens when you save a newly created contact using the blackberry.pim.contacts API. In the Gold SDK, when you save a contact that you create using blackberry.pim.contacts.create(), it will always create a new entry in the device address book. The underlying native implementation changed slightly and will now attempt to merge it with an existing relevant contact entry if it finds one. If you are fine with this behavior, or if it is desirable, then you need to do nothing if you have already packaged with the Gold SDK. Otherwise, in order to preserve the behavior of creating a new contact, you will need to repackage with this latest WebWorks SDK refresh.

That’s it for compatibility concerns – not so bad. There is one other thing though that you will notice with the latest Dev Alpha update. If you are using the blackberry.invoke.card.invokeEmailComposer API, clicking the Send button actually does nothing. This has already been fixed on the native platform and will work at launch. You have no need to repackage your app, either now or later, as the fix is entirely on the device, but just something to be aware of if you use this API and are testing it on the latest Dev Alpha build.

Finally, let’s turn to a couple of the polish items that we have in this refresh. As most of you are probably aware, BlackBerry Balance allows the user to segment their device into multiple perimeters to separate work and personal. The enterprise perimeter can be locked if a password is enabled, and when locked, apps are “locked” as well. In order for you as the developer to know what the current state is, we have introduced events that you can listen for that will tell you when the perimeter locks while your application is open. Check out blackberry.system.perimeterlocked/perimeterunlocked.

We have also expanded the Contacts API to include the Accounts information for that contact. Check out the new field blackberry.pim.contacts.contact.sourceAccounts.

We recently added the ChildBrowser concept to WebWorks that allows you to support target=”_blank” and window.open in your web content. We also allowed you to disable it. With this release, if you disable the ChildBrowser and use target=”_blank” or window.open to display non-whitelisted content, the result will be opened in the system browser, rather than the user being presented with an access denied dialog.

Context menus and custom contexts have also seen a couple of improvements. When you add your own menu item to the context menu, the callback that is invoked when the menu item is clicked will be passed the id of the content element that the user long-pressed on. You can also now override existing menu items through the blackberry.ui.contextmenu.additem method. Just provide the platform action id in the additem call and you can provide your own text, image, and functionality for things like Copy, paste, and so on.

As you can see, unless you use one or two specific items, applications you have already packaged and built are still good to go. But if you do use the contacts API and wish to always create new items as oppose to merge, or if you used the file picker in a specific mode, you will want to repackage and resubmit your applications to BlackBerry World. And be sure to get your applications approved for sale prior to January 21st, and take advantage of the Built for BlackBerry program. Download the gold refresh of WebWorks today to polish up your applications before launch of BlackBerry 10!

Today is the launch of the Gold version of the BlackBerry 10 SDK for Adobe AIR. Thank you to everyone that has been helping us test it so far! For a full list of API updates and fixes, please head over to the release notes. Below are some of the benefits of using the gold release of the BlackBerry 10 SDK for Adobe AIR.

BlackBerry UI / Same components as native

The BlackBerry 10 SDK for Adobe AIR has been rebuilt from the ground up to allow developers to create applications that adhere to the BlackBerry UI branding guidelines. Basically all of the components you would get if you were a native developer, you also get in the BlackBerry 10 SDK for Adobe AIR.

Performance

Developing Adobe AIR applications that perform well on mobile is a challenge, and is also one of the main reasons why so many Flash developers shy away from mobile development. The BlackBerry 10 SDK for Adobe AIR was built specifically for BlackBerry 10 and mobile development. If you use the components of the SDK, you can be assured that they are the best performing components for BlackBerry 10.

Multi-screen development

With the BlackBerry 10 SDK for Adobe AIR, developers can use the Container API to organize the application’s UI controls. By using a layout, a Container manages the positioning and size of any UI component that it contains. This allows developers to target multiple aspect ratios and orientations easily without having to specify set dimensions for their application.

Native capabilities

The BlackBerry 10 SDK for Adobe AIR has native capabilities baked right in. You can easily take advantage of things such as invocation, sensors, push, notifications, payment and more.

Port your AIR apps

Re-compile your existing BlackBerry PlayBook AIR applications to BlackBerry 10. If you’re already using the fuse component set that debuted with the BlackBerry PlayBook SDK for Adobe AIR, the port should be quick and easy. You can get more details from this blog post.

For more details on what’s coming after Gold for the BlackBerry 10 SDK for Adobe AIR, please visit our Adobe AIR roadmap.

DSC04801 / mat79 / CC BY 2.0

Months of planning. More months of development. Re-planning. Long hours. Trips around the world. Meeting with you, our BlackBerry WebWorks development community. It all culminates with this: the gold release of the BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK. The team here could not be more stoked to deliver this final developer milestone on the road to the launch of BlackBerry 10. I apologize for the use of the word “stoked” in the preceding sentence, but I could not help myself. We are REALLY excited.

We recently delivered the final Beta of the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK in conjunction with our recent BlackBerry Jam Asia conference. With that release we began guaranteeing compatibility of your applications, which was a major milestone. Hopefully you have already started submitting your apps to BlackBerry World for approval and preparing your application to the Built for BlackBerry program.

Of course, the team has continued to work days – and many nights – to ensure this gold release is rock solid. Of course, we also snuck a few new things in.

We now have a full house of cards that you can directly invoke from webworks. From the blackberry.invoke.card namespace, you can leverage the following new cards on top of the camera and file picker cards we already delivered: calendar picker, calendar composer, email composer, media player, contact picker, and ICS viewer card.

We have also now provided to you the means to leverage the built in invocation selection UI. If you choose to do your own invocation target queries and provide the user with the ability to select the target, you can use the API to present native look and feel selection UI.

Wallpaper: an interior decoration technique that has happily fallen out of favour (opinions my own and do not reflect those of my employer). But smartphone users love setting the wallpaper of their device. Allow the user to set the wallpaper from your BlackBerry WebWorks app:

blackberry.system.setWallpaper(pathToImage);

You can now also specify custom contexts in your applications that can be used as a target type for invocation request, and to put custom actions into the context menu.

<div align="left" data-webworks-context="myContext">>

   <h4>Local image link: with customContext</h4>
   <a href="http://www.blackberry.com">
      <img src="../../img/secretdeviceimage.jpg" width="150" height="350"/>
   </a>

</div>

If the user triggers an invocation – say, as a long-press on any element within the div in the code example above – the system will pass the “myContext” custom context in the invocation request rather than an image context.

In addition, you will often want the ability to know when your context has been the target of a user-triggered invocation, and do something before the system completes the invocation. In the example above, you might want to add to the invocation request additional relevant information for the “super secret device”. All you need to do is assign a function to the blackberry.invoke.interrupter property. This function will be given the invocation request object, and you can return a modified version of the object that will actually be sent on in the invocation request. You may also just want to allow the user to confirm they wish to take this action.

blackberry.invoke.interrupter = function (request) {          
	if(confirm("System would like to invoke: " + request + " would you like to continue?")) {
              return request;
        } else {
              alert("User canceled invocation");
        }
};

One of the key user experience items for BlackBerry 10 is the concept of Active Frames. When your application is no longer in the foreground but still running, it gets a placeholder window that by default displays a snapshot of the application when the user put it into the background. With this API, you can customize what is displayed. You can set a different image, as well as specify custom text that will be overlaid onto the image. If you wish, you can also periodically update the cover, or reset it to the snapshot originally taken by the system. Check out the documentation for more info.

function onEnterCover() {
    blackberry.ui.cover.setContent( blackberry.ui.TYPE_IMAGE,
        {path: "/path/to/an/image/windowCover.png"} );
    blackberry.ui.cover.labels.push({label: "Label 1",
                                 size: 15,
                                 wrap: false});
    blackberry.ui.cover.setTransition(blackberry.ui.cover.TRANSITION_FADE);
    blackberry.ui.cover.updateCover();
}

blackberry.event.addEventListener("entercover", onEnterCover);

Even though this is the gold release, we know there are a few things still missing that we are working hard to deliver. The nice thing about BlackBerry WebWorks is that we can expose existing native platform functionality outside of device OS and native SDK updates. Keep an eye on the flight boards as we are actively planning maintenance releases to deliver a few more things.

But the gold release is your cue to finish your BlackBerry WebWorks application so that you can leverage the first-mover advantage. Get out in front of the wave and be one of the first applications in BlackBerry World. And be sure to get your applications approved for sale prior to January 21st, and take advantage of the Built for BlackBerry program. Download the gold release of BlackBerry WebWorks and put that final luster on your applications!

We’ve reached many key dates for developers building for BlackBerry® 10, and we want everyone to mark December 11th, 2012 in their calendars. On that date, we will release the gold version of the BlackBerry 10 SDKs. When the Gold SDK is released on December 11th, you can complete your final testing and tweaking and submit your app knowing it will run on the commercial release of BlackBerry 10 smartphone OS.

There will be one other important date before the tools come out of beta – November 29th, 2012. We will release a beta update on November 29th that includes bug fixes, but also an important update for Web developers as our BlackBerry® WebWorks™ HTML5 tools will be updated to offer more functionality and to draw closer to parity with our Native tools. We encourage developers to get their apps ready using this beta SDK release.

A quick recap on calendar:

November 29 – BlackBerry 10 SDK update
November 29-30 – BlackBerry® Jam Asia (in Bangkok, Thailand)
December 11 – BlackBerry 10 Gold SDK launch
January 21 – Deadline to have apps submitted to the BlackBerry App World™ storefront for the 10k Developer Commitment where we guarantee $10,000 USD revenue in the first year (1,2).
January 30 – BlackBerry 10 launch events
February 5-6 – BlackBerry Jam Europe (in Amsterdam)

1) “Earns” refers to the amount that consumers pay for both paid downloads and in-app payments using BlackBerry Payment Service less any refunds and less applicable taxes included in the amount consumers pay, multiplied by the proportion of sales owing to the Vendor as defined by the Vendor Agreement. “Earns” does not include any advertising revenue. See Terms and Conditions for complete details.
2) A maximum of $10,000,000USD will be distributed under this Offer. Limit one (1) payout per Vendor. Twelve month period to be determined by RIM.