“Money” by PTMoney/CC/flickr

Most people like to be rewarded for hard work. There are of course many ways in which people derive reward. Fame. Adoration. Legions of followers on Twitter. Free cookies. But perhaps the most prevalent and obvious is cold, hard cash.

With BlackBerry World, there are a number of ways to get money out of your investment in your BlackBerry 10 application. Today’s refresh of the BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK brings support for ourPayment Service. The Payment Service allows you to implement in-app purchases, either one-time purchases or subscription-based services. Now you can choose your monetization strategy for your BlackBerry 10 WebWorks application: paid download, freemium, in-app purchases, digital goods, etc.

Check out the API reference to get started.  You will immediately notice that there are a few new additions to the API compared to previous implementations in BlackBerry WebWorks, such as cancel subscription.

While payment should be enough to get your excited on its own, we also were able to sneak in some of the final bits of the BBM Social Platform – namely support for the Profile Box.  The Profile Box is a customizable box for your app that appears in the current user’s BBM profile. You can use it to broadcast achievements or provide updates. The box contains a list of items, each composed of text and an optional icon. The Profile Box API allows you to manage the items in your app’s profile box. The API reference for this new API is here.

One final item that you should be aware of is how popup windows are handled. With this release, the popup blocker is disabled by default.  This means that popups will display in the Child Browser window.  If you wish to enable the popup blocker functionality there is a new parameter that you can pass in config.xml to the “blackberry.app” feature.  For information, see the <param> element.

<feature id="blackberry.app">
  <param name="popupBlocker" value="enable" />
</feature>

Be sure to download the latest SDK, and check out the Payment service to see how you can develop a richer monetization strategy for your application.

We found many examples of things we’re doing right (e.g. automatic updates in Ripple). However, as we hoped to find, we also discovered examples of sub-optimal experiences where new developers could possibly be road blocked in their ability to complete their BlackBerry application. It is these latter examples that proved why we ran this exercise, and we are committed to continuing this review and will re-evaluate the platform again on a regular schedule.

Our group first started by identifying who our development community was. How did they think? What was important to them? How would their potential backgrounds influence how they flow through the “getting started with BlackBerry” experience? Our focus was on the following 5 personalities:

• “The coder” – Lives in a text editor and can modify their own path variable. Comfortable troubleshooting advanced issues without assistance. Likely have built a mobile app already.
• “The beginner” – Just getting started with mobile development or are evaluating BlackBerry Web dev. May have strong development skills in another language or none at all.
• “The desktop web developer” – Have a very strong understanding of client-server web development. Have successfully built web sites and may have used frameworks like jQuery, Sencha or Dojo.
• “The enterprise developer” – Cross platform is a primary goal. Prefers to use IDEs and typically works under an IT enforced environment.
• “The PhoneGap developer” – Someone who has come to the BlackBerry developer site to learn how to port their PhoneGap application

So what did we find? Lots! In fact, I’m still going through all the feedback. Everything from “would be nice” changes to “this is a gating bug and must be fixed” is being documented, and our intent is to file issues so the public can track them in the developer issue tracker . Here are just some of the results from the group:

• Discovery process: Search engine optimization should be improved. Keywords that each developer persona would expect to search for did not always generate correct search results.
  [Michelle] Search term: “enterprise development for BlackBerry 10” on Google. First result is to register for an outdated/unrelated course; next search results are for BlackBerry® Enterprise Server development.
• Sample applications: A number of BlackBerry WebWorks sample applications are published in Github. We need to refine the flow of navigating a user between blackberry.com and github.com. Also, for new developers, Github is unfamiliar. Some preparation of what to expect and how to use it will be helpful:
  [Kevin]: Sample apps… I am not super familiar with Github. Didn’t like getting dumped into git for samples. I’d prefer to get a zip to download. Managed to figure it out then.
  [Brent] – Click the link for samples on Getting Started – Taken to Github – what is Github? And what are these samples for – what do they do?
• HelloWorld sample: More developers will successfully complete the “Creating HelloWorld for BlackBerry 10” tutorial if we provide a direct link to a ZIP file that contains the sample application assets.
  [Brent] HelloWorld sample – copying and Pasting seems like a waste. Possible to download the helloworld package? – Creating config.xml in notepad and pasting the copied xml text puts it all on one lovely line. #NotImpressed
• Ripple: The Ripple Mobile emulator is currently designed to build and sign a BlackBerry WebWorks application. It also provides an option to deploy to a target device, but only when the app is unsigned. For simulators this is ideal; however, not for live devices where a debug token would be required. Not all developers want / know how to use a debug token.
  [Ed] The build choices are confusing and missing the one option I want. I want “package and sign, or package sign and deploy” to a real device. Package and launch is confusing because I don’t want to package and launch to a simulator, but when I do want to for a real device, I want it to do so signed, not with debug tokens I don’t use. I suggest: “Package”, “Package & Sign”, “Package & Sign & deploy” (to a real device” and “Package and launch” to simulator. the last one, the least likely to use.

Here’s how you can send us feedback -

1. Join the discussion in the BlackBerry Web and BlackBerry WebWorks community forum.
2. Log into the developer issue tracker and file a bug report. Remember to provide as much detail as possible about how to reproduce the problem and what are the expected / actual results.
3. Let’s have a chat via @BlackBerryDev on Twitter® or the BlackBerryDevCommunity on Facebook®.

We have our team assembled here in Mississauga, Ontario ready to start experiencing what it is to be an AIR developer for BlackBerry® 10. We will be wearing the hats of a developer that uses Flash Builder, one that uses Powerflasher FDT, and one that has a game already built using Flash Professional and would like to port it over to BlackBerry 10. We’ll be installing the SDK and experiencing what it is like for everything from:

• Creating a BlackBerry App World™ storefront vendor account
• Getting signing keys
• Downloading and installing the tools
• Downloading and installing the SDK
• Downloading and installing the simulator and what the experience is like using it to test applications

We’ll be logging bugs and annoyances we find along the way all in an effort to make the AIR development experience for BlackBerry 10 better.

If you would like to participate please help us by posting bugs in the Developer Issue Tracker, or an easier way to participate is to submit your experience in the forums. You can follow what’s going on here by following @DustinMalik, or @BlackBerryDev, using hashtag #BBDevXP.

With a two to three month window between API feature complete and the gold release, we thought it was an excellent time to conduct a full end-to-end developer experience review… and we’re doing it across all our tools and in the full public eye.

That’s right – today we’re bringing together teams from all across the company to sit down with a clean PC (or Mac), start from http://developer.blackberry.com, and end with a full app that is signed, debugged, running in simulator, and running on a BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha testing device.  We’ll walk through our own samples and tutorials, navigate our own documentation, and build a few apps all using the exact same tools and resources that you do.  And while we do it, we’re going to be blogging our progress here on the Inside BlackBerry Developers Blog. We’ll be sharing some videos of our review on the BlackBerryDev YouTube channel, logging bugs in the Developer Issue Tracker, and tweeting about what we find. All in an effort to make our tools better and show our devs just how much we love them.

Want to join in?  Submit bugs throughout the day to the Developer Issue Tracker and tweet them to @BlackBerryDev using the hashtag #BBDevXP.  We want your feedback and we want to make our tools better.  Have your say!

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!

Hot on the heels of the release of the BlackBerry® 10 WebWorks™ SDK, we have posted a new Ripple Emulator with support for BlackBerry® 10. All the power of Ripple can now be put to use developing and testing your BlackBerry 10 applications over the summer to get into the BlackBerry App World™ storefront right out of the gates!

Inside Ripple, you can now select the BlackBerry 10 Platform and target the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha device for emulation. The tool will configure the API emulation interface to reflect the current available APIs delivered in the BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK Beta. And once you install and configure the BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK with Ripple, you can build you application, sign it, and even deploy it to the simulator or, if you were a lucky attendee of BlackBerry 10 Jam, to your shiny new BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha developer device.

With this release, you will find two different versions of the Ripple Emulator on our developer site. The reason for this is that Ripple is moving back to the future. Starting with this release, Ripple is returning to its roots as a Chrome Browser Extension. While we believe this gives us the best path forward, there are still a few things to clean up, coming in new beta refreshes through the summer. Until that time, the current version of Ripple will remain the primary tool for supporting all platforms.

For this first beta release, after you complete the install process, you will need to manually install the extension .crx file into Google Chrome by dragging and dropping it onto the browser. After that you just need to click on the Ripple icon to the right of the URL bar and enable Ripple, and you are good to go.

If you would like to leverage the BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK build/sign/deploy functionality within Ripple, you will also need to manually start the Build and Deploy Node.js-based services. Closing the command prompt window will stop the services. For more information on this and the install process, please review our Getting Started guide.

An additional feature that we have added in this release is the addition of dynamic mapping for the emulation of geolocation features. You can now click-drag, and zoom in and out of the map in the geolocation panel and the latitude/longitude information will dynamically update. Give it a try for testing your location based service applications.

No need to fret though – we are hard at work abstracting the manual setup so that this is all seamless as soon as possible. We are aiming to deliver Beta refreshes to both Ripple and the BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK on a monthly basis, in order to get the latest and greatest into our community’s hands as frequently as possible.

Check our BlackBerry WebWorks development site frequently through the summer in order to ensure you always have the latest tools to develop the best BlackBerry 10 WebWorks applications.

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.

• Two runtimes: BlackBerry WebWorks for BlackBerry smartphone OS and the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet
• Corresponding API Documentation for each runtime
• A growing number of Code Samples, including the code for Aura, the BlackBerry WebWorks based demo shown at BlackBerry Developer Day at this year’s Mobile World Congress
• Alice, a micro-library focusing on fancy visual effects using CSS3 2D and 3D facilities – to see it in action, point your modern browser to the demo page
• A community owned repository containing JavaScript Extensions for BlackBerry WebWorks
• Two repositories for our Ripple Emulator: one for the UI, and one for the Framework.

Open Source is changing how we interact with the BlackBerry WebWorks community in many ways, including:

• The samples are now directly usable, with a clear, well-known (ASL2) license, and in a location we can update easily – our plan is to take all existing useful samples, currently in places like Knowledge Base articles, mail threads, forums, or posts, and post them as Open Source.
• When we wanted to add BlackBerry WebWorks support to Nitobi PhoneGap, Ken and the team travelled to Vancouver and leveraged that both projects are open source. This is especially useful to us now that Nitobi is contributing PhoneGap to start incubating Apache CallBack.
• When Laurent and Jim want to add new features to Alice, they can change the repository directly… and the demos are available right then. And all the GitHub features are available from Fork-me to Watchers.
• Tim, Ken and the team can make new experimental features available via the BlackBerry WebWorks Community APIs
• And we can have a continuous release for both the runtimes and the tools. You can even check our Roadmap.

Year two is just beginning and we will continue our commitment to providing more source code to the community, contributing to other OSS projects as well as a focus on performing our daily development in the open.

Do you believe that support for open source projects is important? Share your thoughts in the comments.