As you will see below, there’s very little (usually just an icon change) required to transition you app from the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ to BlackBerry 10, or the other way around. So even if you haven’t submitted your Android app for distribution to BlackBerry App World™ yet, now is a great time to do so.

Icon size

The main difference to consider when you migrate your app from BlackBerry PlayBook to BlackBerry 10, is a change in the recommended icon size. Be sure to update your app’s icon to take advantage of the higher resolution and have your app stand out in the app grid. The suggested icon sizes are as follows:

BlackBerry PlayBook: 86x86px

BlackBerry 10 full touch devices: 114 x 114

BlackBerry 10 keyboard devices: 114 x 114

Fixed orientation

BlackBerry 10 smartphones are fixed to display content in the portrait position, unless your app uses the accelerometer to adjust the UI layout based on the portrait (vertical) or landscape (horizontal) positioning of the device.

API (sub) set

The good news on the API front is that once your app is functional on the BlackBerry PlayBook, than it will have no problems running on BlackBerry 10 smartphones. You can think of the supported APIs on BlackBerryPlayBook as a subset of the BlackBerry 10 APIs. Everything that is supported on PlayBook, will be supported on BlackBerry 10 and more. Feel free to reference our API support page, as well as our API roadmap.

Resolution Differences

If your application is drawing the UI directly, take note of the change in resolution for both the full touch and keyboard devices. Otherwise, the BlackBerry Runtime for Android apps will scale your app accordingly to fit on the screen.

BlackBerry PlayBook: 1024 x 600

BlackBerry 10 full touch devices: 1280 x 720 (16:9)

BlackBerry 10 keyboard devices: 720 x720 (1:1)

Vendor portal

BlackBerry App World has already opened its doors for you to submit your Android app for BlackBerry 10 full touch model.  To support BlackBerry 10 with an existing Approved/Up for Sale application, please submit it as a new release. Otherwise, when you’re creating a new release in the BlackBerry App World Vendor Portal, you will now see a new Family called “BlackBerry 10” and one new device “All Touch”. You can select “All Touch” to target your app for BlackBerry 10. The BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha is also still available for targeting your app for testing purposes.

The BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet is quickly gaining a reputation as a serious gaming platform. During BlackBerry Jam Americas 2012 in San Jose, I had a chance to talk with Stephane Jacoby of Square 1 Games – who has brought the classic title “The Bard’s Tale” to the BlackBerry PlayBook.

Being an event organizer myself with events such as Adobe Camp Brasil and Hackathon San Diego, and also seeing in so many events the big need to:

1) keep track of talks duration

2) show big enough messages from a distance to the speaker (like “Go Faster, 5 minutes left”)

3) do very FUN raffles

In March of 2012 I set the last project for Action Creations under my administration, called “Talk Clock”, to have a very polished design, focused on being very functional. After tons of prototypes and usability tests, it’s finally ready! And I’m proud to show it to you now:

As event organizer, you can have someone holding the tablet (showing it to the speaker) so he/she can see the time left and see your messages. During the raffle, you can plug the tablet to the projector via HDMI and show its screen to the whole audience.

The Talk Clock App is available only for the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ (and soon BlackBerry 10 smartphones) and it can be found here. Hope you enjoy it!

Last month, Adam Stanley discussed the giant leap forward that our WebGL support has brought to web development for the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet, Adam wrote:

“…you could build a standalone BlackBerry application, powered by WebGL, using theBlackBerry WebWorks SDK, and distribute that app to other BlackBerry PlayBook tablet users through the BlackBerry App World™ storefront.”

To get a true understanding of what you can do with WebGL, we’ve made our demo game “TunnelTilt” available for download in BlackBerry App World™ – check it out. This is really the power of our Web tools. This game feels native.

We took the TunnelTilt demo, which we had previously open sourced in the WebGL-Samples repository on our GitHub page, packaged it with our WebWorks SDK, signed the BAR file and submitted to BlackBerry App World – just like any other game. TunnelTilt is implemented completely using WebGL (specification, Wikipedia) and it is indistinguishable from any other BlackBerry PlayBook tablet application in how it performs!

Download TunnelTilt today and see if you can get through all five levels!

This game is also a great example of RIM’s continued commitment to the open source community. The source code, runtime, and tooling are all available on our developer site and Github page.

Additional Readings

• Native WebGL: A giant leap for the web development community on the BlackBerry PlayBook – Detailed overview of WebGL and its support on the BlackBerry PlayBook.
• TunnelTilt – From GitHub to Your PlayBook – Step-by-step on how to compile the sources into an app.

Let us know what you think of our WebGL support and make sure to let us know as your Web apps launch.

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

Hi everyone! We’ve got a special treat for you today – Mathias and Fredrik, our friends at The Astonishing Tribe, have put together a great blog post about the Arduino™ platform. If you’re searching for E.T., this might be your best weapon – how? Find out below… – Ed.

Today’s consumer devices pack an unparalleled bang-for-your-buck, giving end users blazing-fast and high-performing products. This is more than “fine and dandy” for users in the intended demographic of the device, but what about users like ‘The Prototyper,’ ‘The Hobbyist,’ and ‘The Startup Techie,’ to name a few? You recognize them from their desire to change the way that we use devices; to disrupt the established models; to get their hands dirty and create something new.

Yep, people like us are especially excited by new devices, and in our experience the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet’s power and performance has no equal for tinkerers.

With the relative complexity of today’s electronics, it’s not feasible to start from scratch; you need good building blocks to implement your vision. You’ll want to use commercial off- the-shelf (COTS) components as much as possible and you most likely don’t want to be bound to a bulky PC.

Fortunately, we have the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. It’s a powerful and portable consumer tablet, with a great user interface and an open SDK. We find it is an ideal platform to host your UI, crunch data, and more.

So how do we get started prototyping our ideas with the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet? For electronics concepts: enter Arduino.

Arduino is:

“an open-source electronics-prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.”

(via http://arduino.cc/)

Arduino platform has spawned an innovative and affordable range of products, ranging from various Arduino boards to meet your form-factor requirements to I/O boards (“shields”) that facilitate connectivity.

A Real World Problem

We need to catch the milk thief! Is there no justice in the world?

How can we protect our milk from aliens? Perhaps we can rig a BlackBerry PlayBook tablet and use its camera to capture a photo of the nefarious milk thief. But the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet camera can’t see in the dark, making it difficult to detect intruders in a dark kitchen at night.

We’ll need a BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, an infrared (“IR”) sensor, a servo to pan the sensor, and a way to control the servo as well as to handle the IR sensor.

Connecting

Done!

Implementation

The Arduino board uses an IR range sensor to find targets. The IR sensor is placed on a servo to scan the area of interest (e.g. kitchen). The data is sent to the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, on which we’ve built an application to present a sonar map and look for movement. If movement is detected, the application will sound an alarm and take a picture. The video above shows the system in action.

Now, let’s catch that thief and bring an end to domestic lactose thieving!

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

Here’s a guest post from our friend Anders at RIM TAT! – Ed.

Cascades is the user interface (“UI”) framework that TAT has been using for many years to create numerous advanced UIs and applications, such as Scrapbook for BlackBerry PlayBook. I’m happy to announce that it will soon be part of the BlackBerry Native SDK.

Here’s a short list of Cascades features:

• Great performance, including amazing transitions and animations
• Flexible UI layouts including free form lists.
• 3D support
• Support for mixing pre-packaged UI components with custom components
• Core UI feature support

Cascades was originally developed to enable development of really innovative and unique applications. This put hard requirements on the flexibility and extendibility of the UI framework. The need for designer/developer collaboration was also one of stronger driving factors when developing the framework. Let’s dig deeper into how Cascades will aid the development of rich and compelling UI.

The flexibility of Cascades enables UI innovation

Cascades has a unique level of UI building blocks. In other UI frameworks, when stepping beyond the set of standard UI components, developers must often resort to low level OpenGLES-commands. Cascades provides higher level building blocks for many of the tricky but application-defining UI scenarios. Features like Flexible List layouts, 2D/3D transformations, mixing of 2D UI and 3D objects are all made accessible to developers.

The Cascades workflow helps designers and developers collaborate

In Cascades, UI elements are exposed both programmatically and through mark-up. The mark-up also provides scripting support making it a suitable environment for more design-oriented developers to work with, allowing for quick turnaround times and prototyping to find best possible UI design.

The markup also enables strong tool support including a Photoshop plugin making it easy to take and .psd sketch to a working layout in an application.

Cascades has beautiful pre-packaged components

Not every developer is a designer, full of ideas around 3D layouts and crazy infographics. For developers who prefer pre-designed and pre-packaged components, Cascades provides a strong set of Core UI components with great look and feel. They come with a number of built in effects and interaction design that will risk making your app look prettier than you can take credit for.

Availability of Cascades

Cascades will be released as a Beta during the Fall of 2011, with more and more advance features coming in future releases.

(YouTube link for easy mobile viewing)

One incredibly cool demo that I saw this year at BlackBerry® World™ 2011 was Poynt’s integration of BlackBerry push services to call a number on a BlackBerry® smartphone from their BlackBerry PlayBook™ tablet app. Peter Werry from Poynt, winner of last year’s BlackBerry Partners Fund Developer Challenge, walks me through this new feature and other innovative uses of BlackBerry services in the above video.

Post a comment and let us know what super app features you’re building into your application.

Jamie’s posting on Friday raised a number of challenges that he faced while getting started with development for the BlackBerry PlayBook and while registering to become a BlackBerry App World vendor. First off, I’d like to thank Jamie for his candid feedback. Suggestions like his are critical in helping us improve our products and processes. I want you to know that we are absolutely listening.

Our development teams here at RIM have been working hard to get our tools ready for PlayBook launch. While we’ve come a long way for a pre-release product, we know that we have a lot of work left to do to ensure that our developers can build and distribute apps without any hindering costs or painful download processes.

Jamie’s post covered various topics, including the process for registering for downloads, managing the install and configuration procedures on a Mac, and using the simulator tools. The concerns he described were completely fair – in fact, they include some of the priority items that we’ve been working to improve prior to our final gold release. So we’ve taken this feedback, along with other information we’re collecting from our dev community, and are prioritizing it as we continue to refine the platform and development process leading up to launch. One example that directly relates to Jamie’s feedback is that if you register an account on our Developer Zone web site, you can sign in with that account and download all of our tools without needing to re-enter your information several times. However, we’re going to work on improving the download steps for those of you who just want to get at the tools without registering an account. I apologize that this was overlooked up until now.

Jamie also discussed our current App World vendor process and posed some good questions. We are continuing to evolve this process and remain committed to ensuring developers can register and submit apps at no cost. We will also review the requirement to have a Notary as this has come up as a challenge for some members of our community recently. I’m grateful this was brought to our attention.

We will be making a concerted effort over the next few weeks to publish more information to help our developers be successful in developing for PlayBook. We will work hard to resolve the issues being raised by our community, and we will use our Inside BlackBerry Developer’s Blog and forums to update you as key improvements are made. For those of you who are having challenges getting started today, we’ll be providing some updated information on our site to help you understand exactly what steps you need to take to get up and running with the latest Beta tools. We’ll also be providing more and more practical tips and best practices – from RIM and from PlayBook developers — to ensure you’re able to get going as quickly as possible. Stay tuned for further updates on this.

I want to thank Jamie and all of our developers for their open partnership. We look forward to working with our community to get better every day. Please continue to use our developer forums to ask questions, to provide feedback, and to share your experiences with us.

Cheers,
Tyler

The BlackBerry® PlayBook® Tablet Webcast series wrapped up a couple of weeks ago with the final session around BlackBerry App World™, and in my opinion, the entire series was a big success. I really hope everyone came away with something that you can use in your own applications so that we can get them up onto BlackBerry App World, and hopefully get a device out to you!

Over the course of the four webcasts that I took part in, we received hundreds of really great questions, and we tried to answer as many as we could while on the air. Going over the questions afterward, I wanted to post some of the most common questions that came in and address the most common themes that came up. In no particular order:

Q: What are the SDKs that will be available and when will they be released?
A: The BlackBerry PlayBook OS will support application development in Adobe® AIR®, HTML5 and BlackBerry® WebWorks™, Native C/C++ with support for OpenGL and Java. The Adobe AIR SDK for BlackBerry PlayBook is available today. More details on the availability of SDKs for developing in HTML5, BlackBerry WebWorks, Native and Java will be coming soon.

Q: Is Flash Builder 4 required to build apps?
A: No – in fact, anything that can generate a SWF file can be used to build BlackBerry PlayBook tablet apps. Webcast #2 went through how to use Adobe® Flash® Professional CS5 and we are planning on building a Flash Pro plugin to help developers build apps. The webcast also showed how to use the command line to package an application for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. We also recently released a new version of the SDK which works seamlessly with the preview version of Adobe Flash Builder 4.5 (Burrito) as well.

Q. What types of persistent storage are available on the BlackBerry PlayBook?
A. There are 3 different types of persistent storage on the data:

1. SharedObject – This is the standard AIR SharedObject API used to store limited amounts of data in very quick access memory. Typically, you’ll store variables or other information that you need to access very quickly or frequently in the SharedObject store.
2. SQLite – The standard AIR SQLite API’s can be used to leverage the SQLite database on the device. Generally, you’ll be storing any medium to large sized data in the SQLite database. Since SQLite is in memory, this is typically the best combination between speed and size for data storage.
3. FileIO – The standard AIR File I/O API’s can be used to store data or files in the device memory. Any types of multimedia or images will typically be stored using File I/O. The tradeoff for being able to store essentially any file size is that this is typically the slower of the mechanisms for retrieving stored information from the persistent store, however for any type of media files, this is the recommended approach for storing them on the device.

The other major line of questions that came during the webcast focused on BlackBerry App World and the free BlackBerry PlayBook tablet offer. We’ve since been able to clarify the offer and provide more details on it, which you can find here.

The press release posted here also offers a lot of answers to the questions that came in during the session. Also, at Adobe MAX, there was a presentation given that will undoubtedly help out a lot of developers in building UI’s for apps: Developing Adobe AIR apps for the BlackBerry Tablet OS.

For even more information on developing for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet and answers to questions, please feel free to watch any of the webcasts that were recorded:

Week 1

• Setting up your development environment
• Creating your first “hello world” Adobe AIR application for the BlackBerry PlayBook
• Packaging your Adobe AIR application for the BlackBerry PlayBook
• How to test your applications on the device simulator

Week 2

• using Flash Builder and Flash Professional to create applications targeting the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet
• Use the Adobe AIR SDK and BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK to create applications for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet
• Test and Debug your application using Flash Builder and the BlackBerry Tablet Simulator

Week 3

• Adobe AIR 2.5 device integration APIs
• BlackBerry Tablet OS device integration APIs
• Testing and Debugging your application BlackBerry Tablet Simulator

Week 4

• Creating an application icon for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet
• Building optimized screens for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet
• Learn how to apply skins to your UI controls

Week 5

• Walkthrough of the BlackBerry App World Submission Process
• Selling your app on BlackBerry App World and how revenue is paid
• Overview of the BlackBerry Commercial Services (Advertising and Payment)
• Best Practices for Global Distribution of your Application

And lastly, I have also started up a forum thread on the BlackBerry Developer Forums in order to try and get more of your questions answered. If you have anything specific you’d like answered, please feel free to post a message on the forum so the entire community can benefit from the information.

Please feel free to post a question in the comments section below if you’d like. Thanks for tuning in to the webcasts and joining us on Dev Blog!

You may know that many attendees were surprised during the Adobe MAX keynote when Kevin Lynch of Adobe revealed that the tablet he was using was a BlackBerry PlayBook. You may have also seen RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis joining him soon afterward for a detailed BlackBerry PlayBook app demo.

What many of you might not know is that, owing to the ease-of-development of the BlackBerry Tablet OS and related tools, developers are already writing apps—and quickly. (Keep in mind that the BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK for Adobe AIR has only been out since Monday!) Here’s a quick highlight of what developers are already building for the BlackBerry PlayBook.

First, there’s the eUnity app from Client Outlook that Kevin demonstrated using data streaming over the conference hall’s WiFi connection. eUnity allows medical professionals to share and collaborate around medical images.

According to MobiHealthNews, “it only took [Client Outlook’s] developers two hours to get its eUnity application running on the PlayBook, because the software development kit (SDK) that RIM provided was so easy to use.”

Image Credit: Shao128, Retrieved via CrackBerry Forums

Next, we have the folks at CrackBerry.Com. Claiming to be the first ever BlackBerry PlayBook app (the judges are still poring over the photo finish), they’re highlighting a CrackBerry launcher produced by Shaosoft.

They assure readers that “the app will only get prettier and more feature-packed by the time you get your hands on a PlayBook of your own.”

Now, check out these two tweets from developer Jerome Carty the very day of the PlayBook SDK introduction:

Jerome was kind enough to provide a video sample of the browser after a bit more polish (2 1/2 hours total development time, ed.):

Here’s what Jerome had to say about the whole process:

“Once I heard the PlayBook announcement, I was excited to get coding. The recent announcement of the AIR SDK being made available was a motivator and I started to write something that could be a challenge so I can gain knowledge of the APIs as fast as possible.

I was amazed to find that everything I needed was available via the API and made it simple to develop a browser for the PlayBook within a half an hour! I cannot wait to get started on my submission for App World now that I know how straight-forward it is to program for the PlayBook.”

One reason why Jerome is eager to get his app submitted into BlackBerry App World: we’re giving away BlackBerry PlayBooks to developers whose Adobe AIR apps are accepted into BlackBerry App World prior to the PlayBook launch. (More details as to eligibility coming soon.) Post a comment and let us know about your own BlackBerry PlayBook app development story!