Hot on the heels of our last episode, which covered the Momentics tooling, this particular video will fill you in on our SDK for Adobe AIR. Julian Dolce joins us to discuss upcoming roadmap items that we’re looking at to improve the AIR SDK.

BlackBerry Jam Unplugged is an ongoing series that gives a bit of color and insight into the BlackBerry 10 SDK roadmap. We’ll run this video series leading up to BlackBerry Jam Americas in Orlando to give some background on the topics that we will discuss at length during the conference.

So tune in, and find out which upgraded version of the Adobe AIR Runtime will come to BlackBerry 10!

For developers that are new to Cascades development, it might be worthwhile to give a brief explanation of what Cascades Builder and Cascades Exporter are. Cascades Builder is an extension to the Eclipse based Momentics™ IDE, providing developers with tooling features for developing Cascades applications for BlackBerry® 10. Our goal is to provide powerful source editing features like code completion, WYSIWYG style visual editing, and UI debugging and profiling functionality.

Cascades Exporter is an extension to Adobe® Photoshop® that automatically cuts up the layers and crops them snugly. The images and their layout positions are saved as a bundle that can be imported to Cascades Builder and converted to QML.

In my previous blog post I wrote about the features that we had in place for the first beta release, and the direction we are heading.

Improvements

Below you can read about the improvements we have made to the different feature areas in our second beta release.

Design view

As we have seen from your feedback, the design view is the one feature that stands out. But although it is a great feature, it has not been perfected. For example, a user study showed that it is not obvious how to switch on the preview. The tiny icons for switching between code and preview were apparently not self-explanatory enough.

Another tiny icon that did not do its job was the “error cue” — the green/red square in the top-right corner of the design view, which should indicate rendering problems due to errors in the QML. But even if you understood its purpose, it was easy to miss when it switched from green to red and virtually impossible for those with a color vision deficiency.

Now we have replaced the green/red square with an error indication that should be impossible not to see. A new icon clearly signals that the rendering is broken, together with an error message that explains the type of problem.

Another neat improvement to the design view is the “fit to window” zoom level, instead of only being able to select one of the predefined zoom levels like 100 or 50 percent. Please refer to the following Knowledge Base article for details on some known issues which will be addressed in an upcoming patch.

Edit actions in outline view

In the previous release, the outline view was purely “read only”. But even without the possibility to edit or rearrange the UI nodes within the outline view, it did serve a purpose. The tree of UI nodes that you can fold/unfold offered a convenient way to get an overview of the UI implementation, which quite quickly can become large and complex.

Certain tasks are easiest done by typing code; others by using your mouse. With the outline view improvements in this release, we take yet another step towards being a visual design tool. Using your mouse, you can now drag a component from the components palette into the UI tree in the outline view. You can also use the mouse to rearrange and remove objects.

New project templates

The purpose of the project templates is to set up the necessary project structure and to provide boilerplate code to kick start your application development. The first beta release only had two project templates. And considering that one of them was called “Empty project”, there was not really much to choose between.

With this release there are eight different and well-commented project templates. They all have quite different purposes, with different UI scenarios (and UI controls) in mind. All of them based on common BlackBerry 10 UI patterns, using a variation of Cascades core UI controls.

QML source editing improvements

As I wrote in my previous blog post, really solid source editing is what we believe is application developers’ – and hence our – top priority. This is something that (not surprisingly) was confirmed by a survey we conducted after the first beta release. Especially improved QML code assist (or “code completion”) was a commonly asked-for feature. This is something that we have been and will continue to be working on. The source editing improvements in this release, however, are in the area of QML validation. The previous release had validation of QML syntax. You would see an error if you did not type a colon after having typed a property. But there was no validation logic that checked that the property actually exists and is valid.

With this release, we have a certain amount of semantic QML validation in place. In addition to checking that the form of your code is correct, we also check that the code is semantically valid. For example, making sure that the properties you are trying to use actually exist:

More specifically, unknown properties and signals are now marked as an error. An error is also shown for read-only properties, when there are duplicate properties and for invalid format of the ‘id’ property. Warnings are displayed for id properties with quotes. Since we do not yet check for user defined QML components, we mark unknown components as info and not as error.

Another source editing improvement, albeit small compared to the improved validation, is color settings for syntax highlighting. Now you can customize the color of your QML code, with color options for keywords, comments, errors, etc.

Cascades Exporter

It is inspiring to see the Cascades Exporter being picked up. Since Cascades Exporter is a plugin to Adobe Photoshop and targets designers, the adoption is obviously not as widespread for developers as Cascades Builder. But for the people using Cascades Exporter, it seems to do its job well. On a scale between one and ten on how useful the features of Cascades Exporter were, approximately 50 percent of the survey respondents gave it a ten.

Performance improvements

A quite significant flaw in the previous release was that switching between layers became slow for Photoshop documents with a hundred or so layers. The lag was even a whole second for documents with a thousand layers. With the performance improvements in this new release this action is instant, even for very large documents.

As a side effect to fixing the layer switching lag, the export action has now become faster. The bigger the document, the more noticeable the difference, with a performance increase of roughly 20 percent for a large document.

UI controls palette

The resulting artifacts when exporting Photoshop design previously were essentially bitmaps and text objects. We have continued with the notion of UI controls in the Photoshop design and introduced a UI controls palette. A subset of the BlackBerry 10 controls are available in the palette and can be used in the design.

When performing the export action, these are preserved as actual controls, as opposed to being exported as bitmaps. So when importing the design into Cascades Builder, a Button in the Photoshop document will become a Button control in the QML file in Cascades Builder.

The near future

There is unfortunately a certain amount of tabbing wackiness left in this release. But this is being worked on, and will see the light together with other improvements in the next release.

Among the improvements that we have in the works is QML components aware validation and code assist. If, for example, you have a WarpDrive.qml, when invoking the code assist it will include WarpDrive among the proposals.

There will also be support for comment toggling, code indentation, and the formatting will be much better when dragging a control from the palette into the source editor. We’d love to hear what you think – let us know in the comments.

At the C API layer, we have introduced some important new functionality such as the Invocation Framework API, NFC, Geocoding, Cryptography, Audio Manager, Slogger2 and Notifications Manager. As you can tell, the teams have been working hard since the release of Beta 1 to bring all this functionality to you.

Invocation

The invocation framework enables the delivery of invocations between end points. It describes how end points can be addressed, and provides a mechanism for registering and brokering event handlers such that invocation sources may be loosely coupled to the handler. The invocation framework provides an advanced brokering scheme that allows it to address many different service scenarios, and also to easily be extended to cover new cases.

Your app can register as either a source or a handler. A good example of a source app is an app that supports nested URI’s, and requires a URI handler to handle the URI request. Your app can leverage the invocation framework to broker and determine the best handler for this URI – the assumption here is that there are handlers registered for this on the system. Alternatively you can develop an app that registers as an invocation target – for example, an NFC handler that registers interest in certain NDEF tags. When the NFC service reads a tag, it will leverage the invocation framework to find the best fit handler for that tag and invoke your app. We also support the Invoke API at the Qt layer, so if you are developing a Cascades™-based app, you may want to use the Qt-based invoke API as opposed to the C-based API. We also have built-in support for invoking the Cascades Action Bar and Context Menu. This support is now integrated in our Cascades UI Framework. Please refer to the following Knowledge Base article for details on some known issues which will be addressed in an upcoming patch

NFC

NFC (Near Field Communications) is a short range protocol that is used for contactless communication between devices and tags. Our NFC API will support multiple NFC use cases such as Bluetooth®/Wi-Fi® pairing, NFC contact exchange, reading and writing tags, contactless payment and so on. The possibilities here are endless and I look forward to some really innovative NFC apps for BlackBerry 10 smartphones.

Cryptography

If you care about cryptography, you are in luck as we now expose our Certicom APIs for encryption and decryption of data streams. Those of you who have worked on our Java-based BlackBerry platforms might have some familiarity with what these APIs are capable of. They provide a whole slew of symmetric and asymmetric encryption algorithms such as AES, DES, RSA, ECIES and many more. Along with this, we provide various algorithms for key agreement and transport such as DH, ECDH, ECMQV, RSA, a variety of digital signatures, numerous SHA, MD and HMAC hash functions and random number generation.

Audio Manager

For developers working on apps with audio content, we have introduced a new audio manager API that provides audio concurrency services. The audio manager allows you to choose which microphone and speaker to use. It also provides APIs to get information about different microphones and speakers so if you need that degree of control this API should provide what you need.

Native SDK Logging with slogger2

With slogger2, the most important thing that you gain as a developer is speed. Slogger2 will have minimal system overhead and will be several times faster than the original slogger. Slogger2 will also log when interrupts are disabled, which might be of use to those hardcore low-level developers who require this type of capability. If you have code that uses the slogger APIs, don’t worry — we will continue to support it. Our slogger2 APIs will happily co-exist alongside the legacy slogger.

Notifications Manager

Some apps may want to send notifications to the user – for example, say an app that communicates with the cloud wants to inform the user when new data has been uploaded. The app can register with the notification service to send such a notification. We support simple LED notifications, sound and vibration, toast messages, dialogs, and Inbox notifications. Apps that want to leverage this service need to indicate this by specifying the post_notification action in their bar descriptor. The user will have the ability to customize the notification through the notification settings dialog.

Cascades Platform (C++) APIs

I’ve already used up so many words and haven’t even touched upon the C++ APIs yet! On the C++/Qt side of things, we’ve introduced a whole set of new APIs such as invocation API, Barcode processing, vibration control, copy and paste, and video capture (plus I already described the invoke API earlier). The C++ invoke API is similar in scope to the C layer API and is geared towards folks writing Cascades apps who would naturally be working with the Qt paradigm and would benefit from a Qt API.

Barcode Processing

Barcode Processing is a new API that was developed for encoding and decoding QR codes. While we’ve made the basic encoding and decoding functionality available to non -Cascades apps, the real interesting use cases would occur in conjunction with Cascades apps. The barcode-extended APIs in the Cascades namespace that will allow apps to create and display a barcode scanning control, which will in turn trigger the camera API to show a viewfinder surface as a Cascades foreign window. The app can then scan the QR code and use the provided APIs to encode it as a string and display it on screen.

In addition to this, you will also have APIs that allow your app to customize properties of the Viewfinder surface such as size and location.

Video and Camera

Speaking of camera, we now provide APIs to control camera settings and capture pictures within an application. This allows you to develop apps that interact with the camera, as well as ones that programmatically request a still image from the camera and start a video stream recording.

Location

For developers creating location-based apps, we have added a subset of the QtMobility location APIs. We have introduced APIs for querying current location such as latitude, longitude and altitude. We expect to continue to evolve this API in subsequent releases and plan to provide APIs for geocoding shortly. However, I should mention that we will likely not end up supporting the entire QtLocation API – certain functionality such as maps will be covered by Cascades-specific APIs in upcoming releases.

Vibration Control and Clipboard

Last but not least, we provide a C++ API for vibration control and a clipboard API, both of which are similar in scope to the C layer APIs we already provide. There have also been a myriad number of bug fixes, enhancements to existing APIs and optimizations, which are too many to list in this blog. The best way to explore all these changes is by downloading the NDK and taking a look at the headers, documentation and samples.

Tooling

On the tooling front, we’ve introduced some neat features such as invocation framework tooling, an option for faster bar deployment time, and pretty printing of objects in the debugger. More importantly, we also allow you to specify multiple icons and splash screens in your bar file. This is important for when we start releasing new devices based on the BlackBerry 10 platform, such as the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet. To make it as easy as possible for you, Beta 2 of our IDE will allow you to package multiple icons and splash screens in your bar so that the bar can be deployed on multiple targets.

One of the challenges in writing a blog post like this is that there is a lot of content to present, and unfortunately I can’t do justice in describing all the functionality being released. My colleagues on the Developer Relations side and I are hoping to deep-dive into some of these technologies in dedicated blog posts that we plan to publish in the near future. Meanwhile, I hope this blog post provides at the very least a map of what’s available in Beta 2.

For more information, you should download our NDK on our website and take a look at the new headers. You can also navigate to our NDK documentation and API reference to get more information on each of the APIs. If you still aren’t satisfied, please do not hesitate to consult our developer forums if you have questions or need support. API requests and feedback about our APIs are also very much welcomed — if there is an API you need on our platform, we want to hear about it so we can help unblock you. Happy coding!

The BlackBerry® Jam World Tour has officially begun! Developers in Milan, Italy have been working with our Developer Relations crew all day, attending sessions that they may have missed at BlackBerry® 10 Jam in May, getting hands-on time with our BlackBerry 10 tools and connecting with other developers – all of whom are ready to build apps for BlackBerry 10!

And can I just say – wow. I am completely amazed and thrilled at the response to the BlackBerry Jam World Tour. BlackBerry developers, you are amazing! We’ve already had several stops sell out, including Toronto, which filled up in less than 24 hours. It’s pretty clear to me that people are not only interested in BlackBerry 10 – they are excited to be part of the launch and are already invested in what BlackBerry 10 will mean to the mobile industry.

What is the BlackBerry Jam World Tour?

The BlackBerry Jam World Tour is a series of full-day events dedicated to providing the developer community with insights on the BlackBerry 10 platform; its strengths, the vision, and how developers can make apps that stand out to app-hungry BlackBerry users.

Developers in attendance will:

• Be amongst the first to develop for the BlackBerry 10 platform.
• Discover the power of BlackBerry 10. Learn about the unique capabilities that will set applications apart.
• Collaborate with others in the developer community. Learn, share and network with fellow developers.
• Have access to BlackBerry 10 platform and tools experts.

The Tour events offer one-on-one expert guidance from BlackBerry platform experts, to help attendees build better apps. Sessions focused on HTML5 + BlackBerry® WebWorks™ and Native C/C++ and Cascades QML development for the BlackBerry platform. Developers will be able to interact with development experts who can provide guidance, tips and tricks, and other information to help developers get started building apps for BlackBerry 10.

Check out upcoming dates and locations here, as well as more info on the tour – www.blackberryjamworldtour.com

Thank you for your support

I’m going to take this moment and thank all of the developers who are joining us on the tour and those who joined us at BlackBerry 10 Jam in May, as well as those who were not able to be with us but are already downloading the tools and building. The feedback we have had to date on the tools and the BlackBerry 10 apps that are already underway has been phenomenal. Please keep sending us your stories and letting us know what you’re creating.

Image By André Karwath (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

ZXing (pronounced “zebra crossing”) is an open-source, multi-format 1D/2D barcode image processing library implemented in Java, with ports to other languages. It decodes barcodes on the device without communicating with a server. ZXing currently support these formats:

The port of ZXing 2.0 for BlackBerry® 10 devices is available in our ZXing repository at GitHub; note that only the C++ source under zxing/cpp/core was ported. See the README.md for build instructions.

The ZXing unit test suite uses CppUnit, so a port of version 1.12.1 of this C++ unit testing framework was also done for BlackBerry 10 and it is available at the CppUnit repository. Build instructions are listed in the README.md.

Do you remember the liftoff sequence in the movie Apollo 13? How the Saturn V engines lit up, the incredible rumble as the rocket, slowly at first, and then faster and faster, propelled the astronauts into space? The anticipation, and the excitement?

I feel like that right now. The momentum we’ve seen for the BlackBerry® platform in the last few months has been phenomenal. In the last quarter, the BlackBerry App World™ storefront has seen:

• 21% increase in BlackBerry smartphone apps
• 89% increase in BBM™ connected apps
• 240% increase in BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet apps submitted to BlackBerry App World

We’re going to keep driving that momentum and building that excitement – it’s a rush and we don’t want it to go away. We’ve decided that from now until May 1, 2012, there will be some extra incentive to our community to keep up the development. Starting April 10, 12:01 am, every 100th new app submitted to BlackBerry App World is eligible for a prize package that will bring you to BlackBerry® 10 Jam in Orlando, Florida from May 1-3. (Click here for legal terms and conditions)

The prize package includes $500 USD cash, a voucher for an airline ticket (up to $1,500 USD in North America and $2,500 USD outside of North America), a pass to BlackBerry 10 Jam on May 1-3 and four nights at a hotel. Winners will be notified via the primary email on BlackBerry App World vendor account and we will keep the community informed here at the Inside BlackBerry Developer’s Blog.

Now, back to bragging about that momentum! Last quarter was the single biggest quarter for developers in RIM’s history.

Looking at developer stats, we had a 68% increase in the number of registered vendors in BlackBerry App World. There are over 35,000 registered or pending approval vendors in BlackBerry App World – with over 70,000 apps up for sale to more than 77 million BlackBerry subscribers and over 1 million BlackBerry PlayBook tablet users around the world. And the best part? Over 20,000 BlackBerry PlayBook tablet applications have now been submitted to BlackBerry App World.

Last quarter we also released porting guides to allow WebOS and jQuery apps to be ported to the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet and announced a port of Qt to allow Nokia developers to target BlackBerry PlayBook tablets and soon, BlackBerry 10.

We’re talking developers and sharing their BlackBerry success stories, as well. Since its launch 10 weeks ago, the BlackBerry Developer Success Story page has added more than 20 stories with more to come soon.

But most of all, we continue to have a clear and solid commitment from the team here at BlackBerry to you, our developer community. This commitment combines tools focused on usability and ease of development; increased involvement and contribution to open source; reinvigorated community event involvement over the last six months; as well as the unprecedented seeding of a non-commercial testing device – the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha device – at BlackBerry 10 Jam in Orlando this May.

I personally invite you to come be part of the future of BlackBerry by joining us in Orlando for BlackBerry 10 Jam – there’s never been a better time to build for BlackBerry and we want to show you the future of our platform first-hand.

See you in Orlando!

While CES is, by name, a consumer showcase, there is still an undercurrent of developer goodness to the event. Developers are just as interested as consumers in new hardware, because they need to know which cool pieces of tech to develop for. I had the wonderful opportunity to chat with Adobe evangelist Renaun Erickson about BlackBerry PlayBook development, and the rich tools available to developers that make life easier. Check it out!

Here are some of the links mentioned in the video:

BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK Overview (VIDEO)
Q&A from the BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet Webcast series
Adobe Developer Connection

• How To – Use App World to target your application (ARTICLE)
• BlackBerry features and their impact on battery life (ARTICLE)
• Display Thumbnails and create a Photo Picker (ARTICLE)
• Understanding BlackBerry MDS push process flow and its best practices (ARTICLE)
• Notifications Made Easy (ARTICLE)
• javac – target parameter used by the rapc.exe tool (ARTICLE)

BlackBerry® Developer Zone BlackBerry Smartphone Simulators (BlackBerry® Device Software v5.0.0):

Tune in next week for more Developer Resource Friday fun, and don’t forget to post a comment about your favorite article and articles you would like to see!

• BrowserField Sample Code – Create your first BrowserField2 application
• BrowserField Sample Code – Using the BrowserFieldConfig class
• BlackBerry® Developer Zone BlackBerry Smartphone Simulators:

BlackBerry Device Software v5.0.0:

BlackBerry Device Software v4.7.0:

BlackBerry Device Software v4.6.1:

BlackBerry Device Software v4.5.0:

With the latest simulators and BlackBerry® Java Plug-in or BlackBerry® Web Plug-in, it’s possible to change your code and publish it to a running simulator without a reset. This new feature will greatly improve your development experience and is particularly valuable for those little UI tweaks when you’re working on getting something just perfect.

The hot swap feature is integrated right into the debugging process, so all you really need to change about your existing workflow is to stop closing the BlackBerry® Simulator. After you’ve launched the simulator and need to make a change to the code, just jump back to your code and make the change without closing your app or the simulator. When you’ve completed the change, run the debugging configuration that you ran before.

In the background, the tools will:

1. Rebuild your code.
2. Unload the modules from the running simulator.
3. Load the new version to the simulator.
4. Reconnect the debugger.
5. Return to the application that was in the foreground.

So if you left your application in the foreground, you’ll see your changes without even launching the application again, and all this takes only a few seconds. Watch the video above to see an example of hot swap in action.

Added to the improvements is the simulator startup time; it’s faster and easier than ever to get developing on the simulators, and you still benefit from the simulators running the same Java code as the BlackBerry® smartphone does for outstanding accuracy.

If you upgraded from the BlackBerry® Java Plug-in for Eclipse® v1.1.1, make sure you are using the new JRE by following these steps:

1. Manually select the upgraded BlackBerry JRE by navigating to Windows > Preferences > Java > Installed JREs.
2. Select the old BlackBerry 5.0.0 JRE and click Edit.
3. Change the Definition File by navigating to the new BlackBerry JRE (with the File button).
4. In the components folder, select the BlackBerry.ee file and click Finish
5. Your Definition File path should look like this:

Have you tried out the hot swap feature yet? Leave us a comment and let us know how it worked out for you!