Last year we started sharing roadmaps for our tools and APIs with our community, and now we’re looking to give that information a bit more color. Sure, there’s a little bit of information on the roadmaps talking about what the features will entail, but we don’t usually get the chance to explain them in more detail.

Of course, we could create long blog articles to try and cover the “ins” and “outs” of the functionality, but that can be a little bit tedious. So we figured we could do something a little different and frankly just a little bit weird. We decided to give you some background on the features as part of a video blog series. Now you may ask, what’s weird about that… well, you’ll have to watch the videos to find out.

We’ll be running this video series leading up to BlackBerry Jam Americas in Orlando to give some more background of some of the topics that we’ll be discussing at length during the conference.

This first video will give you some information surrounding the different roadmap items that we’re looking at for improvements in our Momentics tooling.

I hope you enjoy the series and find the information both useful and entertaining!

Today at the BlackBerry DevCon Americas 2011 conference, the Native SDK for the BlackBerry PlayBook (“NDK”) left beta and ‘went gold’ for general availability. The NDK allows developers take full advantage of the power of the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet when developing apps. The NDK includes support for C/C++ POSIX library and compliance, device events like gesture swipes and touch screen inputs, access to code management systems using industry standard Eclipse CDT (C/C++ Development Tools) and advanced debug and analysis tools. QNX® Momentics Tool Suite, an Eclipse-based integrated development environment, is also included. It provides memory profiling, application debugging, and memory usage statistics to help developers debug sophisticated programs.

For the v1.0 release, we’ve kept the NDK lean and mean. APIs have been provided for the sensors on the device, as well as OpenGL ES 2.0. For sound, we’ve brought OpenAL along. For performance, POSIX threading. For portability, POSIX compliant APIs are included as well.

Additionally, the simulator team has been able to provide an OpenGL ES 2.0 environment to test out your 3D games. This means that our simulator makes use of your development platform’s hardware acceleration for 3D. As the NDK simulators mature, more and more features will be included as we are committed to providing developers the best tools possible.

The NDK is here, and it’s the start of a new and exciting episode for BlackBerry PlayBook tablet application development. If anyone has feedback they’d like to share, our doors are always open – don’t hesitate to engage with us on social media channels or the BlackBerry Developer Zone.

Download the Native SDK for BlackBerry Tablet OS

How will you be using the new NDK in your application development?