We recently added support for the HTML5 File system API in our web rendering engine and BlackBerry WebWorks.  With this release, you can now emulate the file system, both sandboxed and unsandboxed.  Ripple will create an area your application can write to, and mimics the file system layout of the device.

A really cool piece of Ripple is the emulation of geolocation.  We recently added the live map view that allows you to select a new location on a map, and inject the location into your app code.  With this release, we received a great community contribution that really takes geolocation emulation to the next level.  Mark Dineen provided a patch that allows you to specify a route to follow by providing a GPX file.  Ripple will read the file and inject location update events into your code based on the route provided! Now you can better emulate end-user navigation and movement.

To better reflect the relationship between Cordova and PhoneGap – and due to the fact their core is the same – they are now both under the same entry in the Platforms window, and are represented by version number.

Quite often an application will wish to know when the virtual keyboard is displayed and closed, so that it can react accordingly.  You can now fire the relevant keyboard events into your application to test out your logic.  In the Events panel when you are emulating the BlackBerry 10 platform, you should now see the blackberry.event.keyboard… events.

HTML5 being inherently cross-platform in nature, there are many applications built using web technologies that are designed to target multiple form factors.  Part of designing a cross-platform application is ensuring that your application appears and lays out in a useful way depending on the capabilities of the target platform.  CSS media queries are a powerful tool in this regard, and Ripple now emulates media queries based on the target platform you have currently chosen to emulate.  Try it out and have some fun with this one.

So, be sure to visit our HTML5 developer site to get all the most recent updates, and particularly the downloads page.  Get Ripple, and the latest WebWorks SDK, and start building!

Many great APIs and features have been delivered to our BlackBerry® WebWorks™ developer community with the recent updates to the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK. The Ripple Emulator is a key part of our tooling story for our web developers, and Ripple just got richer. Today we have released Ripple 0.9.8 with some excellent new features. If you already have our Ripple Emulator installed, then you should be updated automatically the next time you start Google Chrome. If you haven’t yet installed Ripple, then don’t hesitate — get on your (virtual) scooter and head over to the Ripple download page to get the latest version. Please pay careful attention to the install instructions, as with the latest versions of Chrome, you can only install the Extension by dragging it right into the chrome://extensions page.

In this update to Ripple, you will find a new area in the Chrome Extension panel for Ripple that will allow you to start and stop the build and deploy services from within the tool itself. You will no longer need to start and stop the services manually. You can even set the services to start and stop each time your start Chrome if you like. This should be welcome relief compared to previous versions where you needed to start the services from the command line.

Also in this release is emulation for a number of APIs delivered in recent BlackBerry WebWorks SDK releases:

• Blackberry.app.exit
• Software version and hardwareId
• Support for the swipedown event
• Support for the Invoke framework, both invoking other applications and being invoked

Further, enhanced support for Apache Cordova emulation is included. A bunch of work has been done here, including:

• Navigator.camera
• The media APIs
• The File APIs
• Events
• Navigator.contacts
• Partial support for the navigator.device.capture API

We are really excited about how Ripple is evolving, and look forward to hearing your feedback on the latest additions. Fire up Google Chrome if you already have Ripple installed and start playing with the new features. Otherwise, head over to the Ripple download page to get the latest version and get started!

When we released our first Betas of the BlackBerry® 10 WebWorks™ SDK and Ripple Emulator at the BlackBerry 10 Jam conference in May, we spoke about our desire to bring frequent updates of these tools to you, our dedicated developer community. We want to keep fueling your creativity and desire to build the best BlackBerry 10 applications leading up to the official release. So, here is your next BlackBerry WebWorks and Ripple fix.

This update brings a few new APIs (and emulation thereof in Ripple) along with a host of fixes and a slight change to how we handle whitelisting of events.

First up is the addition of the blackberry.ui.dialog APIs that will be very familiar to existing BlackBerry WebWorks developers. This API provides two methods that allow you to launch asynchronous dialogs requesting feedback from the user. These dialogs leverage the standard system level dialogs so you can get a consistent look and feel for your application with the rest of the system. standardAskAsync provides a predefined set of buttons for your dialog, whereas customAskAsync allows you to customize the dialog buttons.

We have also added an API that, in conjunction with the standard HTML5 onLine API, will let you know just how connected you really are. The standard navigator.onLine property and online/offline events are supported to let you know if your application has connectivity in general. If you would like to know what type of connection you have and when the type of connection changes, check out our blackberry.connection.type property, and listen for the connectionchange event. This will tell you if you are on VPN, BlackBerry® Bridge™, WiFi®, etc.

Speaking of events, we have adjusted how these work slightly from the first release. In the initial beta, all events were defined in the blackberry.event namespace. Without getting into gory details, this proved to be somewhat inefficient on the final code size, so we have moved the event definitions into the namespace that contains the functionality related to that event – i.e. the battery events are now defined in the blackberry.system namespace. Note that you no longer need to whitelist blackberry.event, since it only has the add and remove listener functions (these will always be available to call), but you will have to whitelist any namespace that has an event you are specifically interested in. Please check out the API reference.

In terms of bug fixes, there are a couple of key ones that I want to call out. If you use a module loader, you can now also use BlackBerry WebWorks, hooray! In the first release, the last one included into your app would work but break the first. Now webworks.js and module loaders play nicely together.

In the first release, you also could not sign your application at the same time as enabling remote web inspector. You can now do this so you can test your application on secure devices without needing to worry about debug tokens. That said, be sure to turn off web inspector before you submit your application to the BlackBerry App World™ storefront.

The team here at Research In Motion® (RIM®) is hard at work on the next Beta refresh, currently slated to land in early July. If you are really eager/curious/have lots of free time, feel free to check out our progress in GitHub, and let us know whether we are heading in the right direction on new features and APIs.

For BlackBerry WebWorks SDK work, check out:

https://github.com/blackberry/BB10-Webworks-Packager

https://github.com/blackberry-webworks/BB10-Webworks-API

Ripple? Check out:

https://github.com/blackberry/Ripple-UI

Looking forward to a great summer of BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry WebWorks coding!

The latest version of the Ripple Emulator v0.9.1 beta for Microsoft® Windows and Mac is now available for download. This beta refresh is designed to add more BlackBerry® WebWorks™ API support, debugging support, bug fixes and a designated area where you can place your application files to use with the Ripple Emulator without configuring your own local web server.

The full list of improvements:

• Support for JavaScript® breakpoints in Web Inspector
• Added SSL support for Microsoft Windows®
• WebWorks File I/O API support
• HTML5 Audio/Video support on Microsoft Windows
• Local solution for emulating your app without configuring your own local web server
• Ability to work offline after an initial connection to the Internet

Did you know that the Ripple Emulator v0.9.1 beta and BlackBerry® PlayBook™ OS 2.0 beta support WebGL in BlackBerry WebWorks?

That’s right! The latest BlackBerry PlayBook tablet OS 2.0 beta developer release has support for WebGL when used inside of an HTML5 application packaged with BlackBerry WebWorks. When packaged with BlackBerry WebWorks, it is the same as any OpenGL based application on the platform.

On top of that, WebGL is also enabled in the Ripple Emulator so that you can test out your application with the desired screen size and incorporate touch events in order to get your application just right. We have even made the source code available for the Tunnel Tilt WebGL demo seen at BlackBerry® DevCon Americas.

How does the Local Solution work?

This latest Ripple Emulator refresh is designed to provide a way to allow developers to emulate and test their applications residing on their development machine. Leveraging node.js which is run as part of Ripple’s build and deploy features, we effectively configure and run a local web server that can be accessed from the Ripple Emulator.

In order to test your local application, ensure that your application is stored on your file system at the locations listed below, and access your application by entering http://localhost:9900//index.html into the URL bar of the tool.

On Microsoft® Windows XP machines: Documents and Settings\<Username>\RippleSites
On Microsoft® Windows 7 machines: Users\<Username>\RippleSites
On Mac OS X machines: /Users/<Username>/RippleSites

Playing HTML5 audio/video content in Ripple Emulator v0.9.1 beta

Ripple Emulator v0.9.1 beta is designed to allow you to play HTML5 audio/video content so that you can ensure your media content is integrated correctly. While the tags are supported in the Ripple Emulator, they rely on the system having appropriate codecs installed for the media content type you are trying to use. The Ripple Emulator does not bundle any media codecs, so in the event that your content is not played in the Ripple Emulator, please download the appropriate codecs.

What will happen to the Google® Chrome™ plug-in?

The existing Google Chrome plug-in will remain available for download up until February 29th, 2012, when it will be removed from the extension store. The stand-alone Ripple Emulator architecture is evolving daily to allow us to provide a more extensive emulation framework with the ability to tailor the rendering and simulation to each platform Ripple supports.

Our goal is to minimize the time our community needs to spend testing on simulators or devices by providing a best in class desktop browser-like emulation environment that comes as close as possible to runtime behavior. We encourage all our developers to make the transition to the current Ripple Emulator tool found on our site at http://developer.blackberry.com/html5/download/ripple.