• Making a context menu look like a pop-up menu in BlackBerry 6 (ARTICLE)
• How to integrate with the Unified Search Framework (ARTICLE)
• Sample Code – How to interact with touch gestures and the trackpad (ARTICLE)
• BlackBerry 6 Features: MapFactory (ARTICLE)
• Introduction to Touch Gestures (ARTICLE)
• What is – new in 6.0 Network API (ARTICLE)
• Integrating the BlackBerry 6 pop-up menu in your application and best practices (ARTICLE)
• BlackBerry 6 User Interface APIs (ARTICLE)
• Supporting Gears using HTML5 in BlackBerry Widget applications (ARTICLE)
• Supporting BlackBerry Widget applications on BlackBerry 6 (ARTICLE)

Tune in next week for more Developer Resource Friday fun, and don’t forget to post a comment about your favorite article and articles you would like to see!

• How To – Use App World to target your application (ARTICLE)
• BlackBerry features and their impact on battery life (ARTICLE)
• Display Thumbnails and create a Photo Picker (ARTICLE)
• Understanding BlackBerry MDS push process flow and its best practices (ARTICLE)
• Notifications Made Easy (ARTICLE)
• javac – target parameter used by the rapc.exe tool (ARTICLE)

BlackBerry® Developer Zone BlackBerry Smartphone Simulators (BlackBerry® Device Software v5.0.0):

Tune in next week for more Developer Resource Friday fun, and don’t forget to post a comment about your favorite article and articles you would like to see!

While the recently launched BlackBerry® Developer Resource Center and BlackBerry® Developer Zone are great online resources for new and experienced BlackBerry® developers alike, sometimes nothing beats the feel of paper in the hand. With that in mind, I want to draw your attention to some new development resource books that I’ve recently had the pleasure of reading, and would recommend that all BlackBerry developers out there consider taking a look at.

BlackBerry Development Fundamentals by John Wargo

For the beginner developer, there’s John Wargo’s BlackBerry Development Fundamentals. This book is designed to help both new and experienced mobile developers learn how to build mobile applications for the BlackBerry platform. The target audience for this book is developers who are unsure where to get started with BlackBerry development, or developers who have dabbled a bit in BlackBerry development and want to learn more.

To learn more about the book and to order, visit http://bbdevfundamentals.com

Beginning BlackBerry Development by Anthony Rizk

Written for the beginner BlackBerry Java® developer, Anthony Rizk’s Beginning BlackBerry Development is a great resource. The book’s dust jacket promo sums it up pretty well:

“Are you a Java programmer looking for a new challenge and money-making opportunity? If so, Beginning BlackBerry Development may just be the book for you. This book will teach you everything you need to know to start developing apps that run on the BlackBerry family of devices and smartphones.”

To learn more about the book and to order, visit http://apress.com/book/view/9781430272250

Advanced BlackBerry Development by Chris King

This book by Chris King is designed to take your BlackBerry development skills to the next level. A great choice for those who have read Beginning BlackBerry Development and want to continue their learning! Here’s more info from the dust jacket promo:

“With Advanced BlackBerry Development, you’ll learn you how to take advantage of BlackBerry media capabilities, including the camera and video playback. The book also shows you how to send and receive text and multimedia messages, use powerful cryptography libraries, and connect with the user’s personal and business contacts and calendar.”

To learn more about the book and to order, visit http://apress.com/book/view/1430226560

Learn BlackBerry Games Development by Carol Hamer and Andrew Davison

If, like me, you’re passionate about games and would like to translate your skill and knowledge to BlackBerry game development, Learn BlackBerry Games Development by Carol Hamer and Andrew Davison is a great place to start. In this book, Hamer and Davison provide professional techniques that you can use for music, 2D and 3D graphics, maps, and game design patterns to build peer-to-peer games, role playing games, and more for BlackBerry. The book also gives coverage of JSR 239 (OpenGL ES) and includes code samples!

To learn more about the book and to order, visit http://apress.com/book/view/1430227184

That about covers my recommendations for now. If you know of any valuable BlackBerry development books, please let me know in the comments!

• BrowserField Sample Code – Create your first BrowserField2 application
• BrowserField Sample Code – Using the BrowserFieldConfig class
• BlackBerry® Developer Zone BlackBerry Smartphone Simulators:

BlackBerry Device Software v5.0.0:

BlackBerry Device Software v4.7.0:

BlackBerry Device Software v4.6.1:

BlackBerry Device Software v4.5.0:

It’s out, folks – the Streaming Player API has now been published with full source code!

During the BlackBerry Developer Conference in 2009, I hosted a session where we discussed the best practices for developing Media Streaming applications. I want to give a big round of thanks to all the participants for sharing their stories – you really helped me to come up with an open source API module for streaming audio and video that simply works out of the box! Sample code or API, whatever you’d like to call it – the central idea was to provide you with something that was as simple as saying “play this URL over HTTP” or “seek to 2:20.”

The StreamingPlayer class is the starting point of this API. It does all the heavy lifting related to implementing a DataSource and a SourceStream, managing a ring buffer, synchronizing playback, download and user action threads, and last but not least, handle OS and user-initiated seek calls in an efficient way by fully considering the limitations of HTTP streams.

On top of the features mentioned above, the API also has enough public methods and constants for all you adventurers out there. A StreamingPlayerListener interface can notify an application about every streaming event you will ever need, as well as a mechanism (my favorite) to preprocess each chunk of downloaded data before it’s sent to the underlying Player. This preprocessing should be useful for decrypting encrypted content, or if you would like to parse meta information from the raw stream.

I welcome everybody to join me in making this a success by providing your valuable feedback and comments. A Knowledge Base article, Streaming media – Start to finish, has already been published; you can read more about it and download the code there. If you have any questions, feel free to point and shoot at me but do not hesitate to submit any issues or feature requests in the BlackBerry® Issue Tracker. I will be following the issue tracker on a daily basis.

Until next time, happy streaming!

Below is a list of archived BlackBerry® Developer Webcasts. These links can also be found within previous editions of the BlackBerry Developer’s Newsletter.

• BlackBerry Push Service – Pratik Sapra / Joe Reda (April 13, 2010)
• Super Apps – Mike Kirkup (February 25th, 2010)
• User Interface Design – Brian Zubert (February 16, 2010)
• BlackBerry Themes – Mark Rathwell / Dale Ducharme / Mike Kirkup / Jason Laughlin ( January 12th, 2009)
• BlackBerry Technical Seminar – Various presenters from Research in Motion (December 3, 2009)
• Overview of BlackBerry Java® Development – Sarim Aziz / Mike Kirkup (October 20, 2009)
• Overview of BlackBerry Web Development – Adam Stanley / Prosanta Bhattacherjee / Mike Kirkup (September 10, 2009)

If you haven’t signed up for the BlackBerry Developer’s Newsletter yet, I’d highly recommend it. The newsletter is a monthly publication that shares articles on various BlackBerry development subjects, plus tips & tricks for improving your applications as well as announcements for upcoming events such as webinars. Subscribe today!

Have you heard of BlackBerry® Widget navigation mode yet?  It is a configuration option that allows Widget developers to set their own focus-based navigation scheme.  Instead of using the default mode, choosing this type of navigation mode allows you to provide your users with more granular control over how they interact with page elements in their Widget applications.

What is the default navigation mode for BlackBerry Widget applications?

When a BlackBerry Widget application is created, its default navigation mode is pointer mode.  This means that a cursor, similar to a mouse pointer, moves around the screen when you scroll the trackpad or trackball.  It is very similar to how the native BlackBerry® Browser application is used where different regions of the page can be interacted with, such as hyperlinks and input fields.  The reason for this similarity is because of a browser field object that is embedded within a compiled BlackBerry Widget – one that is used to render embedded (and remote) web content.

However, the BlackBerry Browser input mechanism isn’t always the best fit for BlackBerry Widget applications.

Figure 1: Default navigation.  Pointer moves around page when you scroll trackpad/trackball.

Ideal for some applications, but not all.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a different type of navigation scheme?

Yes, it would be great, and guess what – there is!

We call it “navigation mode,” and it’s a focus-based navigation scheme that is used in the other native BlackBerry applications.  Developers define interactive regions of page content as being “focusable” (e.g. tab headers, input fields, buttons, etc.) that automatically gain focus when the user scrolls the trackpad/trackball towards them.  This provides a similar user experience to how native BlackBerry applications are used, such as the Messages or Contacts application.  When scrolling up and down within these applications, focus moves between each email or contact.

Another example is the home screen on your BlackBerry® smartphone.  You scroll from icon to icon, rather than moving a pointer around the screen.  Depending on the design/layout of your Widget application, “navigation mode” may be more intuitive, and help make it easier and quicker to navigate between interactive application elements.

Figure 2: Focus based navigation.  Scrolling Up/Down changes focus between
page elements that have been marked as focusable.  Ideal for an application like this,
where the screen is composed entirely of buttons.

That’s awesome. How do I use it?

1. Using either the BlackBerry® Web Plug-in for Microsoft® Visual Studio® or the BlackBerry® Web Plug-in for Eclipse®, open the configuration document (Config.xml), within your BlackBerry Widget project, and select the “Enable trackball/trackpad navigation” checkbox.

2. Add the property “x-blackberry-focusable=”true”” to whichever HTML elements within your web content you wish to mark as focusable.  When navigation scrolls towards these items, they will automatically gain focus.  For example:

<style type="text/css">
td { background-color: White; color: Black; }
td:hover { background-color: Gray; color: Red; }
.focusable { background-color: Blue; color: White; }
</style>
<table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td x-blackberry-focusable="true"> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td x-blackberry-focusable="true"> </td>
<td x-blackberry-focusable="true"> </td>
<td x-blackberry-focusable="true"> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td x-blackberry-focusable="true"> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
</table>

3. Customize the default behavior of navigation mode by using JavaScript® and HTML.  You can use the blackberry.focus JavaScript object and x-blackberry HTML properties to produce a more granular user experience:

blackberry.focus.setFocus(id) – sets focus to an element having the given ID.

x-blackberry-initialFocus=”true” – declares element to attain focus when page is loaded.

x-blackberry-onDown=”callbackFunction()” – calls JavaScript function when focus moves down from the current element.  There are also corresponding properties that allow you to capture onUp, onLeft and onRight events.

Conclusion

Implementing focus-based Widget navigation mode is only relevant on BlackBerry smartphones that have trackball/trackpad input.  On a touch screen device, users interact with elements on the screen simply by touching the screen, and do not have a cursor/pointer that they can navigate among elements within an application.  As a result, BlackBerry Widget developers should be aware that only touch input events are recognized on a touch screen device; regardless of whether a BlackBerry Widget application is configured to use focus-based navigation, users can only interact with elements in their Widget using touch events.

You can find more information, such as sample code and a tutorial about using navigation mode in your Blackberry Widget applications, on the BlackBerry Widget SDK page. Check it out, then come back to the BlackBerry Developer’s Blog and let us know how it worked for you.

Eclipse is a trademark of Eclipse Foundation, Inc. Microsoft and Visual Studio are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.  JavaScript is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

• Writing JavaScript® Extensions (Video Tutorial)
• Introduction to SQLite on BlackBerry Smartphones (Video Tutorial)

Tune in next week for more Developer Resource fun, and don’t forget to post a comment about your favorite article and articles you would like to see!

With the latest simulators and BlackBerry® Java Plug-in or BlackBerry® Web Plug-in, it’s possible to change your code and publish it to a running simulator without a reset. This new feature will greatly improve your development experience and is particularly valuable for those little UI tweaks when you’re working on getting something just perfect.

The hot swap feature is integrated right into the debugging process, so all you really need to change about your existing workflow is to stop closing the BlackBerry® Simulator. After you’ve launched the simulator and need to make a change to the code, just jump back to your code and make the change without closing your app or the simulator. When you’ve completed the change, run the debugging configuration that you ran before.

In the background, the tools will:

1. Rebuild your code.
2. Unload the modules from the running simulator.
3. Load the new version to the simulator.
4. Reconnect the debugger.
5. Return to the application that was in the foreground.

So if you left your application in the foreground, you’ll see your changes without even launching the application again, and all this takes only a few seconds. Watch the video above to see an example of hot swap in action.

Added to the improvements is the simulator startup time; it’s faster and easier than ever to get developing on the simulators, and you still benefit from the simulators running the same Java code as the BlackBerry® smartphone does for outstanding accuracy.

If you upgraded from the BlackBerry® Java Plug-in for Eclipse® v1.1.1, make sure you are using the new JRE by following these steps:

1. Manually select the upgraded BlackBerry JRE by navigating to Windows > Preferences > Java > Installed JREs.
2. Select the old BlackBerry 5.0.0 JRE and click Edit.
3. Change the Definition File by navigating to the new BlackBerry JRE (with the File button).
4. In the components folder, select the BlackBerry.ee file and click Finish
5. Your Definition File path should look like this:

Have you tried out the hot swap feature yet? Leave us a comment and let us know how it worked out for you!

Although the WES 2010 is just around the corner with a great lineup of developer sessions, we have already started planning for what will be the best BlackBerry® Developer Conference ever (September 27-30, 2010 in San Francisco, CA).

As part of the planning process, we are looking for feedback from the community on what topics and areas you would like to see covered at the conference this year. Last year we had over 100 sessions for our attendees, and we are planning on a similar number again for 2010. We want these sessions to cover the information you need to be successful on the BlackBerry® platform – from creating compelling user interfaces to integration with native applications and everything in between.

We are asking for your feedback on topics now for two main reasons:

1. We want to create a conference that contains the most valuable content that you, the developer community, would want to see at the event;
2. Our “Call for Papers” from the community will open up in the next four to six weeks, and your feedback will provide a great starting place for the many community members who want to speak at the conference.

To ensure we receive the most complete feedback, you can provide your ideas in the comments on this blog post or on this forum post in the Developer Forums. I look forward to hearing all of your great ideas!