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!

The BlackBerry Developer Relations team has paired up with Skillsmatter to offer training on BlackBerry 10 development. To kick off the partnership, we are running a BlackBerry Jam event on March 7th in London.

Our dynamic duo of Developer Evangelists from the UK, Luca Sale and Don Turner, will run the bulk of the program which will cover everything you need to know about development for BlackBerry 10.

Attendees will gain insight on building applications for the new BlackBerry 10 platform. Beginner and master mobile application developers will be able to attend in-depth sessions focused on HTML5 development with BlackBerry WebWorks and Native C/C++ development for the BlackBerry platform with our BlackBerry 10 Native SDK. Developers will be able to interact with development experts who can provide guidance, tips and tricks, and other information to help get started building apps for BlackBerry 10.

After a fully packed day of sessions, we’ll head to the local pub!

To find out more and register, please visit Skillsmatter.

Our SDKs (both API and tooling) remain gold as of the previous release and we have not introduced any new API or tooling changes in this release.  However, that being said, we continue to build new versions of the BlackBerry 10 device software that contain various bug fixes and stability improvements.  Our BlackBerry 10 software is being tested by over 150 carriers around the world and as they provide feedback we continue to release software incorporating this feedback.

What this means is that even though our API signatures and tooling are not changing; the underlying device software will go through a continuous improvement cycle. As an app developer you will want to upgrade to the latest software on your BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha testing device in order to get the latest fixes as well as perform some sanity testing with your app to make sure there are no unexpected issues.  If you are trying to debug your app on the latest and greatest device release, you will likely want to pick up the latest Native SDK target OS so that you can get the right libraries and symbols for debugging on the latest version of device software that you are working with.

The good news is that you can download the the latest Native SDK target OS via the Update Manager that we provide as part of our Momentics IDE suite. If you click on Help in the menu bar, you will see an item that says ‘Update Native SDK’.

Once you click on Update Native SDK, you will see a dialog pop up that provides a list of Native SDK targets OS releases you can download. The latest Native SDK target OS as of the time of writing of this blog article is BlackBerry 10 Native SDK 10.0.9.2318. You should see this in the list.  Select it via the checkbox, click Next and follow the steps to download the latest Native SDK target OS.

As we get closer to the launch date of our device and the gold release of our BlackBerry 10 device software we want to make sure that you have the latest BlackBerry 10 Native SDK target to test and debug with on your BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha testing devices.  As we build new iterations of our OS software, we will continue to release these to you via our Update Manager so you can keep up with the most recent versions.

Update – Brian Scheirer pointed out that there have been some awesome community samples too! -Ed.

For me, 2012 has definitely been a year of helping developers learn about our native and Cascades development tools. If you’re like me, you’re probably spending the holiday nights doing some coding – so I’ve put together this list of “The Best of Native Development for 2012″.

Cascades Webcasts
Thousands of developers from across the globe joined us for four webcasts to learn beginner to advanced Cascades concepts.  We were able to interact with developers directly, answer questions, and get immediate feedback as samples and code were displayed.  The format proved so successful that we’ve hosted many more webcasts on topics such as the BBM social platform, augmented reality apps, and OpenGL integration.

The live web casts were recorded and are available for viewing here.

Porting Guides
If you have existing content for another platform, we are making it easy to bring that content to the BlackBerry 10 platform.  Being able to re-use code across platforms reduces development and maintenance costs.  Distributing your application to multiple platforms opens you up to whole new market segments and increases your potential user base.  There a number of informative porting guides available to help you build for BlackBerry 10.

• iOS to BlackBerry 10 - http://devblog.blackberry.com/2012/12/porting-ios-apps-to-blackberry-10/
• Android to BlackBerry 10 - http://devblog.blackberry.com/2012/11/porting-android-game-to-blackberry-10/
• Qt to BlackBerry 10 - http://devblog.blackberry.com/2012/11/porting-qt-apps-to-blackberry-10/

Samples
The best and easiest way to learn to program is to look at sample code.  For every feature that BlackBerry 10 offers there is a sample project showing you how to put it into action.  Whether it’s integrating with BBM, using the Invocation Framework, getting sensor information, or communicating via Bluetooth, we’ve got you covered.

There are samples built right into the Momentics development environment, on the Cascades and Native microsites, and hosted on our github repo.  And if you find a feature that we missed, or an API without a clear example then let us know on Twitter @BlackBerryDev or in our developer forums and we’ll add what you need to get started!

• Cascades Samples - https://github.com/blackberry/Cascades-Samples
• Native SDK Samples - https://github.com/blackberry/NDK-Samples
• Cascades Microsite - https://developer.blackberry.com/cascades/sampleapps/

Stump the BlackBerry Devs
In August we launched a challenge to the BlackBerry Developer community to come up with a UI that would be difficult to implement in the Cascades UI framework.  The Cascades tools development team would try to implement the submissions in a flexible manner that could handle multiple screen resolutions and form factors.  They implemented three of the challenges and presented the solutions during the Unconference Day at BlackBerry Jam Americas.  We were able to show that Cascades is robust framework that is able to create stunning interfaces even when faced with challenging design requirements.  All the solutions are hosted on ourgithub repo.

If you have any Cascades or native dev questions – check out our forums and connect with me on Twitter.

In many ways, this release is rather uneventful since we had achieved most of what we set out to do from an SDK perspective for BlackBerry® 10 in the last release. But as they say, “no news is good news” and the reason for this release is primarily performance enhancements – we delivered all the key APIs you need in earlier releases.

Our main focus at this time is to stabilize the Native SDK and make sure to get rid of those nagging bugs and issues that can make the lives of our developers difficult. We also want to avoid feature creep and churn, especially with our BlackBerry 10 launch not that far away. That being said, there are still a few key features that I would like to talk about in this release.

At the core Native layer, we introduced a few new APIs and fixed a whole bunch of bugs. There are too many fixes to list, and you should refer to our release notes if you need a comprehensive overview. However, I thought I should point out a couple of important ones.

We added functions to support a Proxy auto config (PAC) and URL exclusion list to the BPS netstatus API. We also fixed the netstatus availability API, and added a last known location request to the BPS Geolocation API. Several fixes and minor enhancements were also made to our Scoreloop SDK.

For many of you these will likely not be a big deal, but for those of you who have been blocked waiting for some of these fixes and enhancements, I hope they help address your issues and concerns.

On the Cascades™ platform side of things, we added in an API to determine device orientation along with a camera specific API to query the preview frame orientation. Another API that might be of interest to our audio developers is the ability to provide an external audio manager handle into the AudioRecorder object.

Many app developers have also expressed the need for APIs that allow them to query the device for information, either for diagnostic purposes or for optimization and fine tuning based on what the system is capable of. With that in mind, we have added a device information API that provides the ability to query device-related information, as well as a memory info API that allows you to query memory related parameters such as total RAM and flash. We have also addressed a bug in our dialogs and toast API that will allow Cascades developers to access the finished signal in their qml code. Speaking of dialogs and toasts, we also enhanced our BPS dialog service to add support for recursive mutexes.

There are also some exciting developments to report on in the tooling front. We are releasing a new beta of the Visual Studio™ Plugin that addresses several of the bugs and issues with the earlier beta. One useful improvement that we addressed is support for variable expansion via the debugger. For performance reasons, we were only able to support up to five levels deep in our last release. We managed to optimize the way we perform variable evaluation so we can loosen this restriction. Developers who have significant nested structures in their games will now have no issues expanding their structures as deep down as possible, as you can see in this screenshot:

Another important usability issue that we addressed in this release is the ability to stop a build that is in progress. Many game developers have large projects that can take some time to build, and it was important to provide the ability to stop a build midway in case the developer decided to cancel it. There was no easy way to do this in our previous beta release, so you would have to wait until the build finished, which could be painful if you had a large project.

As always, please continue to provide your feedback on our forums as you use the Visual Studio plugin. All your feedback so far has been incredibly valuable in helping us understand the issues that cause you the biggest headaches.

Our BlackBerry 10 IDE has also not stood still, and we have a few important new developments to point out. We have added support for Apple’s OSX Mountain Lion so you should be able to develop with our IDE on OSX. Unfortunately, our installers are dependent on the Flexera Install Anywhere which does not fully support Mountain Lion as yet. In the meantime, you can still use the IDE on Mountain Lion but you will have to do a couple of simple workarounds after installation in order to create an icon and deploy the IDE — please see our release notes for details. We continue to be on top of this and once full support is provided in the Install Anywhere software, you will be able to install our IDE without the workarounds. We are also actively testing our Windows 8 version which is progressing to come out in the next release. In case you were not aware, you can view our roadmap information online on our developer site.

If you are actively using our Native SDK to develop BlackBerry 10 applications, I hope you are finding the development experience to be easy and seamless. If you still haven’t gotten your feet wet, I encourage you to do so. You can download our Native SDK and tooling from our developer website. Best of all, it’s free – you do not even need a device to test out your apps. You can just download our device simulator that you can use for developing and testing your apps just as you would on an actual device.

Now I’m here to talk about how you can integrate your BlackBerry® WebWorks™ application with the BBM SP. Most of what will be covered is available to both BlackBerry® OS 5-7 and BlackBerry® 10 applications. However, at the time of writing some of the BBM SP APIs discussed here are available only for BlackBerry OS 5-7 applications — I’ve noted where this is the case. We are planning on adding these to the BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK as well.

Testing a BBM SP application for BlackBerry 10 currently requires a real device. We’re working on adding BBM SP support in the BlackBerry 10 simulator and this should be available before the end of 2012. Support for testing BlackBerry OS 5-7 applications that use BBM SP is supported in many BlackBerry smartphone simulators we have available today, so ensure you download one that lists support for BBM.

Configure Your Project

The BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK includes everything you need to get started. If you have a BlackBerry OS 5-7 application, you’ll need to download the BBM SDK v1.1 for BlackBerry WebWorks in addition to the regular BlackBerry WebWorks SDK for Smartphones. Instructions for connecting these two SDK for targeting BlackBerry OS 5-7 can be found in Getting Started: BlackBerry WebWorks Development for Smartphones and the BBM Social Platform.

In order for your application to access to the BBM SP APIs, you’ll need to request the appropriate permissions in your application’s config.xml file. There are two elements you’ll need to add: bbm_connect for rim:permissions and blackberry.bbm.platform for feature. Here is what it looks like:

<rim:permissions>
	<rim:permit>bbm_connect</rim:permit>
</rim:permissions>
<feature id="blackberry.bbm.platform" />

Register with the BBM Social Platform

Registration is the first step in connecting to the BBM Social Platform, which involves an application registering itself with the RIM-hosted BBM infrastructure. A BBM sample is available on the BlackBerry github site that demonstrates BBM SP registration along with the invite to download feature. Have a look at it once you’ve finished reading this section for the complete version of the code snippets used here.

When using BlackBerry WebWorks, the first thing to do is to register for the onaccesschanged event. If you try to register before registering for this, an IllegalStateException is thrown. Here is how you can register for this event:

blackberry.event.addEventListener("onaccesschanged", function (accessible, status) {
	if (status === 'allowed') {
		/* Access allowed. */
	} 
});

This code sample only catches the allowed status. Your application would need to handle disallowed status that could be caused by the user being out of coverage or if the user disallowed access to BBM. The BBM sample demonstrates how to catch the other statuses.

Each application must define its own Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) so that it can uniquely identify itself. This UUID is used to register with the BBM SP servers during testing and development. Applications in the BlackBerry App World™ storefront are assigned their own UUID automatically. You can generate a UUID using various web sites, such as the one here. In BlackBerry WebWorks, the UUID is stored in the options parameter used in registration.

options = {
	uuid: "33490f91-ad95-4ba9-82c4-33f6ad69fbbc"
};

Now we’re ready for the final step in the registration process, which is to call the register method using the options parameter we defined above. This will trigger the onaccesschanged event.

blackberry.bbm.platform.register(options);

Invite to Download

The invite to download feature allows users of your application to invite their BBM contacts to download your application from BlackBerry App World. The recipient receives the invitation through a BBM Chat session, which includes a message provided by the application and user sending the invitation. This is one of the easiest features to implement. After you’ve registered, you can do this with just one method call.

blackberry.bbm.platform.users.inviteToDownload();

Note that for this to work between BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry OS 5-7 users, the SKU in BlackBerry App World for the two releases of the application (BAR and COD) must be the same.

Profile Integration

BBM SP allows for both read and write access to the user’s BBM profile. This allows your application access to their profile message, status text, availability and avatar image. Here are a few examples of how to use these APIs:

This first code sample shows how to access the image the user has set for their BBM profile.

blackberry.bbm.platform.self.getDisplayPicture(function (image) {
    // do something with the image here
});
Now let’s look at how your application could update the user’s BBM profile picture.
blackberry.bbm.platform.self.setDisplayPicture("local:///smiley.jpg", function (accepted) {
    if(accepted) {
        // User allowed the change
    } else {
        // User denied the change
    }
});

If an update to a personal message was made from an application other than the BBM Client, a tag is shown under the update stating the name of the application that performed the update. Users can click on that tag to download the application from BlackBerry App World. This requires the sender to have installed the application from BlackBerry App World, so that tag won’t take you to BlackBerry App World if you side loaded your application for testing. Let’s take a look at how to update the personal message and status.

blackberry.bbm.platform.self.setStatus("busy", "Getting a new high score", function (accepted) {
    if(accepted) {
        // User allowed the change
    } else {
        // User denied the change
    }
});
blackberry.bbm.platform.self. setPersonalMessage ("I’m loving this app!", function (accepted) {
    if(accepted) {
        // User allowed the change
    } else {
        // User denied the change
    }
});

Profile Boxes

Profile Boxes provide yet another way for an application to promote itself to a user’s BBM contacts. They appear within the Apps area of a user’s profile and are ideal for sharing what a user is doing within an application. Every application that is connected to BBM SP appears in the list. Applications can create profile box items that appear under their application header. You can supply a custom image and string, which is used to create the profile box item.

The ability to add a profile box item using BlackBerry WebWorks is not yet supported on BlackBerry 10, but you can do it on BlackBerry OS 5-7. There are C and C++ APIs for populating the profile box on BlackBerry 10, so you could accomplish this by building a custom BlackBerry WebWorks extension.

When creating a profile box item, use of the image is optional. If you don’t wish to include an image, you can omit it from the options variable.

var options = {text:"No one’s ever beat me at solitare!", icon:"local:///cardshark.jpg", cookie:"unbeatable"};
blackberry.bbm.platform.self.profilebox.addItem(options);

Contacts

An application can retrieve a list of BBM Contacts who have the same application installed. This list can be used as selection criteria for connecting for a multi-user experience. Events are also fired for changes to this contact list, allowing your application to keep track of both the addition and deletion of contacts in the contact list itself and/or changes to individual contacts.

Currently, working with BBM contacts is not supported using BlackBerry WebWorks for BlackBerry 10, but there are APIs for WebWorks for BlackBerry OS 5-7 as well as C and C++ APIs for BlackBerry 10. Further support for this in BlackBerry WebWorks for BlackBerry 10 is planned for a December release. Watch the BlackBerry WebWorks roadmap for updates.

Wrapping It Up

That wraps up my intro post for getting started with the BlackBerry Messenger Social Platform using BlackBerry WebWorks. Now it’s up to you to make use of these APIs in your next hit application, which could be featured on the Connected App Showcase.

In this next blog post, we’ll cover the technical aspects of how you can use the BBM SP within your application. I’m going to assume that you are using the BlackBerry Native SDK to create a Cascades™ application using the Qt style BBM SP APIs. The same functionality is available at the c level in the style of the BlackBerry Platform Services library. If you are already using BPS within your application, you could use it for BBM SP as well, but in general I recommend using the Cascades BBM SP APIs instead because they’re easier to use.

Testing an application BBM SP application for BlackBerry® 10 currently requires a real device. We’re working on adding BBM SP support in the BlackBerry 10 Simulator and this should be available before the end of 2012.

Configure Your Project

The first step is to configure your project in the BlackBerry Native SDK, adding the BBM SP libraries and permissions.

Open bar-descriptor.xml and click on the General tab. Within bar-descriptor.xml click on the Application tab and check off BlackBerry Messenger in the Permissions box.

Now it’s time to add the BBM SP library. Right click on your project and choose Configure -> Add Library. Click Next and filter for BBM. Add the libbbplatformbbm library. Follow the steps in the wizard and add the line below to your .pro file.

LIBS += -lbbplatformbbm
LIBS += -lbbsystem

Register with the BBM Social Platform

Registration is the first step in connecting to the BBM Social Platform, which involves an application registering itself with the RIM®-hosted BBM infrastructure. A sample called BBMRegistration is available on the BlackBerry github site. It demonstrates BBM SP registration, so have a look at it once you’ve finished reading this section for the complete version of the code snippets used here.

Each application must define its own Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) so that it can uniquely identify itself. This UUID is used to register with the BBM SP servers during testing and development. Applications in the BlackBerry App World™ storefront are assigned their own UUID automatically.

// Attempt to register the application with the following UUID.
//Define your own UUID.  You can generate one here: http://www.guidgenerator.com/
m_uuid = QString::fromUtf8("c0fef20e-5f94-4eb1-be1e-e055f2c2391c");

Next, create a new instance of the BBM platform context.

m_context = new bb::platform::bbm::Context(QUuid(m_uuid));

Now connect the registrationStatusUpdate signal with a slot in your application. In this example, I created slot called registrationStatus.

QObject::connect(m_context, SIGNAL(registrationStateUpdated(bb::platform::bbm::RegistrationState::Type)),
  			this, SLOT(registrationStatus(bb::platform::bbm::RegistrationState::Type)));

Now we’re ready to kick off the BBM SP registration process by calling requestRegisterApplication.

m_context->requestRegisterApplication();

Refer to the BBMRegistrationfor implementation details for the registrationsStatus. Once it receives a status of

case bb::platform::bbm::RegistrationState::Allowed:

our application will be ready to use the rest of the BBM SP APIs described below. Also note m_context used above — it’ll be used throughout the rest of the examples.

Invite to Download

The invite to download feature allows users of your application to invite their BBM contacts to download your application from BlackBerry App World. The recipient receives the invitation through a BBM Chat session, which includes a message provided by the application and the user sending the invitation. This is one of the easiest features to implement. After you’ve registered, you can do this with just two lines of code.

The first line instantiates the MessageService object and the second kicks off the invite to download process. The user would then be prompted to select the BBM contacts they want to send the invitation to.

m_messageService = new bb::platform::bbm::MessageService(
				m_context, this);
m_messageService->sendDownloadInvitation();

We have a complete sample for this feature as well called BBMInviteToDownload.

Note that for this to work between BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry® OS 5-7 users, the SKU in BlackBerry App World for the two releases of the application (BAR and COD) must be the same.

Profile Integration

BBM SP allows for both read and write access to the user’s BBM profile. This allows your application access to their profile message, status text, availability and avatar image. To see more, have a look at the BBMProfile sample. Let’s learn how to update the user’s personal and status messages in BBM.

If an update to a personal message was made from an application other than the BBM Client, a tag is shown under the update stating the name of the application that performed the update. Users can click on that tag to download the application from BlackBerry App World. This requires the sender to have installed the application from BlackBerry App World, so that tag won’t take you to BlackBerry App World if you side-loaded your application for testing. Let’s take a look at how to update the personal message and status.

The first step is to get an instance of the user’s BBM profile:

m_userProfile = new bb::platform::bbm::UserProfile(m_context, this);

With that, we can update the user’s BBM personal message or status. Here’s how we can do both with just three lines of code:

QString personalMessageString = "Best app ever!";
m_userProfile->requestUpdatePersonalMessage(personalMessageString);
m_userProfile->requestUpdateStatus(false, statusMessageString);

The boolean false being passed into requestUpdateStatus is the flag to set the free/busy indicator shown beside their BBM status. If we had updated their status to something like “Don’t bug me I’m busy playing Slingshot 5000” we’d likely set that to true.

Contacts

An application can retrieve a list of BBM Contacts who have the same application installed. This list can be used as selection criteria for connecting for a multi-user experience. Events are also fired for changes to this contact list, allowing your application to keep track of both the addition and deletion of contacts in the contact list itself and/or changes to individual contacts.

Step one is to get an instance of the ContactService.

m_ContactService = new bb::platform::bbm::ContactService(m_context, this);

Once we have that, we can retrieve the BBM contacts that also have the same application installed. The sample code below prints out the display name of all contacts retrieved to the BlackBerry Native SDK console.

if (m_ContactService->contactCount() > 0)
{
	foreach (const Contact &contact, m_ContactService->contacts())
	{
		qDebug() << contact.displayName();
	}
}

To listen for updates to a user’s contact list and/or the contacts themselves, we can connect a slot to the contactListUpdated and/or contactUpdated signals. Here’s an example of connecting them to handleUpdateContactList and handleUpdateContact slots.

QObject::connect(m_ContactService, SIGNAL(contactListUpdated()), this, SLOT(handleUpdatedContactList()));
QObject::connect(m_ContactService, SIGNAL(contactUpdated(const QString)), this, SLOT(handleUpdatedContact()));

The handlers would take care of updated any in application resources that reference the users BBM Contacts.

Wrapping It Up

I hope this helped you get started in implementing some features of the BBM Social Platform into your application, or at least convinced you how easy it is to do. I look forward to seeing your innovative uses of the BBM SP. Your application could be the next one featured on the Connected App Showcase.

Come back next week if you are a BlackBerry® WebWorks™ developer — we’ll have a post similar to this one, but demonstrate these features using the BlackBerry WebWorks APIs.

We have to start with a huge shout-out to the BlackBerry WebWorks dev team for some truly remarkable work preparing for this blockbuster. I have been with RIM® for just over 10 years — been there, done that, thought I had seen it all. But I can honestly say that the energy, passion, and dedication to make BlackBerry 10 truly astonishing is unmatched by anything that has come before.

And the passion is company-wide. Don’t take my word for it — this from one of the devs on the BlackBerry WebWorks team:

But back to what you came here for: the low-down on what this release of BlackBerry WebWorks has to offer. Hope you already have your coffee ready (or perhaps adult beverage of choice).

It would be remiss not to lead with the news that the first portion of PIM integration is now supported! With this release, you can create, find, modify, and delete Contacts in your address book. Just like the native application, you can get information on news related to your contact, as well as what instant messaging and social networks you are connected with them on. It’s everything you need to interact with the user’s social graph. Of course, be sure to add the new permissions to your config.xml so the user can opt in, and ensure you elegantly handle it if the user does not allow you access to their PIM data.

var name = new blackberry.pim.contacts.ContactName(); 

name.familyName = “Wallis”;
name.givenName = “Ken”;

var contact = blackberry.pim.contacts.create({
 	“displayName”: “Ken Wallis”,
 	“name”: name });

contact.save(onSaveSuccess, onSaveError);

Drafted a close second (certainly a case could be made for this being selected number 1) is the first stage of support for the BBM Social Platform. In this release, you can register your application with BBM, interact with the user’s profile, be notified of changes to user or friend’s profiles (that also have your app installed), and allow the user to invite friends to download your application. Again, there is a new permission that you will need to include to allow your app to connect:

blackberry.bbm.platform.self.setStatus("busy",
"Building BlackBerry 10, DND!", 
function (accepted) {
    		if(accepted) {
        			// User allowed the change
    		} else {
// User denied the change
    		}
});

BlackBerry Flow is all about leveraging existing functionality – both system and third-party provided – to accomplish tasks in a consistent way, but without having to jump between applications. You can embed what you need from others inside your own application experience, and cards are what drive this experience. Think of a card as a screen that gets layered on top of your application that provides some common functionality to the user. When the user is finished interacting with the card, it animates off the stack of screens and returns any relevant data back to you. The Invocation Framework (which we introduced in a previous release of BlackBerry WebWorks) orchestrates all of this underneath the covers, so you can launch cards using invoke. With this release of BlackBerry WebWorks, you can leverage system and third-party developed cards inside your BlackBerry WebWorks application. You can also implement a card inside your BlackBerry WebWorks application and provide it for use by others! Check out the Invoked namespace in the API Reference for more details on creating your own card.

As indicated, raw invoke functionality can be used to launch cards. However, cards can be accessed in a number of other ways as well:

• A couple of cards provided by the system are the File picker and Camera cards. File picker allows you to provide the user with UI to select a file from the filesystem, and you will get the path back. The Camera Card allows the user to capture pictures or video, and again you get the path back. We felt that these cards might get a lot of use, and are a little more complex to interact with directly using invoke, so we have wrapped an API around them. Check out the blackberry.invoke.card namespace.
• You can also leverage the File picker and Camera cards using the new support for Media Capture in the browser – just include the capture attribute on an field. If you specify “camera” or “camcorder”, you will get the Camera card; otherwise specifying anything else will invoke the File picker. Note that an input field with capture type “microphone” is currently not supported.

<input type=”file” accept=”image/*” capture=”camera”>

In the last major release, we provided the built-in Context Menu with standard system options. This context menu is displayed when the user long presses on an item in your application. In this release, you now have the ability to customize the menu for different contexts in your application. You can remove items from the list, and even provide your own menu items for a given context (such as Image, link, and so on). In future releases, we are looking at ways to allow you to define your own custom context in your application content.

Context Menu

User experience is a prime focus for BlackBerry 10. The user should feel at home no matter where they are, and be able to customize their device for accessibility reasons as well. For example, the user can set a language, as well as a region used for formatting of dates, and so on. Font size can also be adjusted for preference or for accessibility reasons. Applications should strive to adhere to these preferences as well, so with this release, we have provided APIs and events that will allow you to know what the language, region, font, and font size are as defined in the global settings. You can adjust your applications accordingly to have a seamless experience.

An oft-requested feature is to be able to lock your application in a specific orientation. Good news — you can do it now. Check out our documentation on the config.xml file to find out how.

In order to improve memory overhead and load times, the underlying web rendering engine no longer loads the Adobe® Flash® plug-in be default. If you need to support Flash rendering in your application, you can enable it by adding the following feature element to your config.xml (note that this will be application wide, and will be ignored if found inside an <access> element):

<feature id=”enable-flash”>

If you are building a multi-page application, and even on application initial load, you may notice flickers on page transitions if your pages have any background color other than white. We have introduced the ability to specify in config.xml what your page color is, and we will use this to display between page loads to hide the flicker. Give it a try.

<feature id="blackberry.app">
    <param name="backgroundColor" value="0xffffff" />
</feature>

Be sure to check out the API Reference to get the low down on everything our Web Platform can offer to build not just web applications, but integrated web apps showcasing everything that makes BlackBerry 10 unique and powerful. And if you haven’t already, download the tools and get started — there is no better time!

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.

We’ve updated our flight arrival boards to provide statuses on all of the feature functionality delivered with the September BlackBerry® 10 development tools update. Along with this, we’ve updated some milestones leading up to the Gold SDK releases.

In my previous blog post, I mentioned that we were still considering whether or not to do another set of SDK updates after our September release and before the final Gold SDK build. Based on feedback from our developer community, we’ve decided to add another SDK release on the road to Gold. We’ve updated the SDK release schedule to reflect these needs while ensuring that there’s no impact to the first BlackBerry 10 smartphone being delivered on-time in Q1 2013. The updated SDK schedule is as follows:

November: SDK Gold Candidate

• Updates to all SDKs
• Mainly bug fixes

December: SDK Gold

• Updates to all SDKs
• Mainly bug fixes

December: Keyboard device SDK Beta

• Updates to necessary SDKs targeted at compatibility testing for QWERTY devices
• User Experience tweaks to Cascades/Adobe AIR controls to account for screen resolution changes

The November release will be a gold candidate release which will contain mainly bug fixes and further stabilized SDKs for you to continue testing. This will be the SDK candidate that RIM® will continue to test and be finalized in December as the Gold SDK. Be sure to check-out the updated flight arrival boards for the details associated to the SDK of your choice.

Wait a second, you show a Keyboard device SDK Beta. What the heck is that?

In December 2012, we’ll also be releasing the necessary Beta SDKs to allow you to perform compatibility testing of your application for the first BlackBerry 10 QWERTY device. Since this new device will be a different screen resolution (720×720 vs 1280×768) than the first all-touch BlackBerry 10 device, we want to make sure you have simulators and updated SDKs to test your applications.

This SDK release will also include any UI tweaks for the Cascades™ and Adobe® AIR® controls to match the new Keyboard device screen resolution. The controls mainly affected are Action Bars, which are adjusted take up less screen real estate.

Why do I see some new items appearing in the upcoming November release?

With this current September release, we do consider the Native SDK, Adobe AIR and Android™ Runtime API complete. However, there are a few small additional items that will be coming into the November release. These are mainly small additions that will not affect the main APIs, which are now considered complete. BlackBerry® WebWorks™ is one of the exceptions that will be continuing to deliver new APIs both in the Gold Candidate and Gold release.

Where do I find these Flight Arrival Boards?

You can check out each of the Flight Arrival Boards by clicking on the “Roadmap” links on each of the websites or check out the links below:

Native SDK
Cascades Application Framework Roadmap
Core lower level API Roadmap
HTML5/BlackBerry WebWorks SDK Roadmap
Adobe AIR SDK Roadmap
Android Runtime Roadmap