Join Jason Scott (RIM), Mike Hostetler (appendTo) and Jonathan Creamer (appendTo) on November 15th from 2-3 pm EST for an exciting online presentation about using the official BlackBerry® 10 theme for jQuery Mobile.

During this one-hour webinar, our speakers will show developers how they can build Web applications that easily integrate the design elements and UI of the BlackBerry 10 user experience. Our speakers will provide a walkthrough on building and deploying a BlackBerry 10 app using jQuery Mobile, and will also demonstrate how to use backbone.js to create data bindings and a MVC architecture in your jQuery Mobile application.

As always, attendees are welcome to join into the discussion, as questions will be answered by these experts from the jQuery Mobile development community.

Register today!

There is still time to register for the October 11^th  webinar “Beta 3 update for the BlackBerry® 10 WebWorks™ SDK”.

As planned, this release delivers a number of significant features that were listed on the WebWorks beta roadmap.  In fact, we made an even bigger splash than anticipated by providing more features than promised (see release notes). Some highlights include: BBM™, contacts, notifications, localization and cards support through the invocation framework.

What do these features look like and how can you use them in your own BlackBerry 10 WebWorks applications? Join me, Adam Stanley, and Erik Oros from BlackBerry Developer Relations for a hands-on demonstration and interactive discussion about some of the new features and changes provided in the latest version of the BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK.

On October 4th at 10:00 AM EST, we kick off the first in a series of webinars on the subject of Near Field Communications (NFC).

NFC is in the media a lot these days, but usually in the context of contact-less mobile payment solutions. Through our series of webinars, we plan to explain and demonstrate how NFC has great potential for allowing the user to interact with the physical world in all manner of scenarios, and that applications of all types can benefit from a sprinkling of NFC magic. Non-developers will learn all about the concepts around NFC and the ways in which it can be exploited. Developers will learn how to code various types of NFC function for the BlackBerry® 7 OS and BlackBerry® 10. We’ll be leaving no NFC stone unturned as we make a structured and thorough journey through the many aspects and capabilities of NFC!

On October 4th, we’ll start the ball rolling with “An introduction to NFC on BlackBerry”. This session is aimed at non-developers and developers who want to start from scratch and learn about the most fundamental aspects of NFC; what it is, what you can do with it, how much effort is required, skills required, and so on. Developers are more than welcome (as always!) but this session will not look at code. The sessions that follow will include plenty of code and demonstrations too.

After this, initial kick off session, we have the following two sessions scheduled:

18th October (10:00 AM EST) – Working with NFC Tags on BlackBerry 10, presented by my learned colleague, John Murray. John is another member of the BlackBerry Developer Relations team who specializes in NFC.

25th October (10:00 AM EST) – Working with NFC Tags on BlackBerry 7, presented by myself, Martin Woolley.

After that, we’ll be scheduling other sessions to cover other aspects of NFC such as peer to peer mode. Watch this space for further news on this.

It’s forecast that there will be a quarter of a billion mobile NFC users by 2015. Make sure your apps are ready to exploit the NFC phenomenon and join me on October 4th for an introduction to this exciting technological development!

Sign up here!

We will have a number of exciting topics to cover during the webinar, including the following:

• What is BlackBerry® Mobile Fusion?
• BlackBerry Balance technology
  • Personal & Corporate perimeters
  • Protecting data at rest
  • Enterprise application connectivity & security
• Enterprise application management
• Mobile application integration

I am very excited to share the vast improvements that we have made in deploying your BlackBerry 10 application within the enterprise, along with enabling your enterprise application to securely connect to your corporate backend and provide a fully integrated experience.

Registration is open now, so please sign up to reserve your spot and I will see you on August 30th.

Date: Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Time: 2:00 pm ET
Duration: 1 hour
Presenter: Paul Bernhardt, Application Development Consultant, Research In Motion® (RIM®)

The webcast will cover:

• How to quickly port your current BlackBerry® platform application to BlackBerry 7 and key considerations when designing your app for the new BlackBerry 7 smartphones
• BlackBerry 7 API Overview: Includes new hardware enabled features on BlackBerry 7 devices such as Magnetomer, Near Field Communications, Augmented Reality, OpenGL ES 2.0 as well as APIs that enhance the Super Apps experience
• Q&A with RIM application development expert

Don’t miss out on this event! You must be registered in order to attend, so register today!

UPDATE: We have added more convenient times to our BlackBerry 7 webinar schedule for developers who are based out of Europe or Asia. The details and registration links are below, so sign up today! You must be registered to attend these events:

EMEA
Date: Thursday, July 7, 2011
Time: 2:00 pm BST
Duration: 1 hour
Registration: Sign up here for this webcast
Presenter: Paul Bernhardt, Application Development Consultant, Research In Motion (RIM)

AP
Date: Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Time: 12:00 pm HKT
Duration: 1 hour
Registration: Sign up here for this webcast
Presenter: Paul Bernhardt, Application Development Consultant, Research In Motion (RIM)

Sincere thanks to everyone who joined us for the “Developing using the BlackBerry® WebWorks™ SDK” Webcast series. The recordings for each session of the webinar are available to access online. If you haven’t already done so, please schedule some time to set aside and watch them at your own convenience.

During this series, attendees were presented with a variety of topics, code samples and best practices. The goals of each of these sessions were to provide developers with new information they can use to build great applications for the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet, as well as enabling them to share the knowledge they learn within their own development communities. Here’s an overview of what each webcast covered:

Webcast Part 1 – Getting Started: Discover the purpose and capabilities of the BlackBerry WebWorks platform. Learn how to setup your development environment and build a “Hello World” application. Understand how to configure and deploy applications to a BlackBerry® Tablet OS virtual machine.

Webcast Part 2 – My First App: Learn how to add visual enhancements and application functionality to your BlackBerry Tablet OS applications using BlackBerry WebWorks. Discover how easy it can be to leverage existing assets in constructing your application. Become more confident and efficient at using the development tools.

Webcast Part 3 – BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet Integration: Understand what platform features and supported APIs exist that can be used to add functionality to your BlackBerry PlayBook tablet applications. Discover how to use the BlackBerry WebWorks JavaScript® APIs to integrate your application content with the underlying BlackBerry Tablet OS.

Webcast Part 4 – User Interface Guidelines and Best Practices: Learn how to design great BlackBerry PlayBook tablet applications that optimize the experience for your end users. Incorporate best practices and habits in your development processes to help reduce overall development and troubleshooting time of your BlackBerry WebWorks applications.

As always, our attendees were eager to participate in the discussion, and as a result we held extremely popular Q&A periods at the end of each webcast. Many of these questions have already been posted to the BlackBerry Web Development Community Forum (Webcast #1 Q&A summary and Webcast #2 Q&A summary); however, I wanted to paraphrase and share the five most popular questions asked:

What Web technologies can I use to develop my BlackBerry WebWorks application?
WebKit is the Web rendering engine used to power BlackBerry WebWorks applications on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet (and BlackBerry® 6). For a complete listing of supported Web standards, please refer to the BlackBerry browser guides. This includes reference guides for HTML, CSS and JavaScript which detail supported features and elements. As well, developers can make use of custom JavaScript APIs from the BlackBerry WebWorks API collection to integrate their content with the underlying BlackBerry Tablet OS.

How can I use assets from my existing Website, such as a MySQL® database, Web page or Service?
You can use all of this content in your app! A BlackBerry WebWorks application can connect directly to live Web content via direct HTTP or AJAX requests. By combining the power of Web-connected database with RESTful Web services, developers can produce very compelling applications!

What virtual machine players are available to use for running the BlackBerry Tablet OS?
We recommend that Windows developers use VMWare Player, and Mac developers use VMWare Fusion. Understanding that developers are interested in free tools – and that VMWare Fusion is a paid license – we also wanted to share that some Mac developers have reported success using the Open Source Virtual Box. That being said, it is very important to note that our product management and development teams have evaluated VirtualBox already and do not recommend it due to performance and security concerns.

Why does media (audio/video/flash) content not play in the BlackBerry Tablet OS simulator?
This is a known issue that we are working on resolving. The BlackBerry PlayBook tablet simulator currently does not have the proper media codecs necessary for playing audio/video from the BlackBerry Tablet OS. We are very interested in providing developers with this capability and are working closely with VMWare towards a solution.

I received when deploying my app to the BlackBerry Tablet OS simulator – why?
There are a couple possibilities. Please see the following Knowledge Base article for more info: Troubleshooting: Common failure reasons while deploying applications to the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet simulator

Thanks again for your interest in using the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK to produce BlackBerry PlayBook tablet applications! Please let me know how your development goes. If you have any questions, concerns or suggestions, feel free to reply directly to this blog post, send a message via the Web Community Forums, or even mention @BlackBerryDev on Twitter®.

Research In Motion® (RIM®) and Telefonica have teamed up to host a webcast happening on Thursday, March 17, 2011. This webcast is for developers to learn how to take advantage of new features introduced in the BlackBerry® 6 platform and BlueVia network APIs to build Super Apps.

Date: Thursday, March 17, 2011
Event Start Time: 4:00 PM GMT
Duration: 1 hour
Presenters:
Sanyu Kiruluta, Team Lead, Developer Relations EMEA (RIM)
Andres-Leonardo Martinez-Ortiz, BlueVia Developer Programs Engineer (Telefonica)

Topics that will be covered include:

• BlackBerry 6 overview – learn about improvements to the UI and new APIs that you can take advantage of when creating your applications
• Learn about BlackBerry® platform commercialization services
• Learn how to use BlueVia SMS APIs

Register for this event and find out more information today!

A special thanks to all who were able to attend the Super Apps webcast presentation on boosting your application experience. I was pleased to have such an amazing turnout, which shows how both developers and vendors alike are keenly aware of the opportunities that Super Apps can bring. One other takeaway from the conversation was that the BlackBerry® development community understands how efficiency is a key characteristic of any ‘Super App’. In case you missed it, a recording of the presentation can be viewed (at no charge!) from the webcast event site.

As usual, we ran out of time during our Q&A period, and there were some questions that we could not get to. I have posted as many answers to these as possible in the Boost Your Super App Experience Webinar thread in our Java® Development Community Forum. I encourage you to post any follow-up questions about the webcast in this forum.

Stay tuned for announcements about future webcasts in our BlackBerry Developer’s Newsletter. If you haven’t done so already, be sure to register for the Developer Updates Newsletter to also receive updates about new development tools and developer tips & tricks.

We hope you found this presentation to be valuable, and we look forward to seeing you online in future webcast presentations!

Last year, I took a close look at the home screen on my BlackBerry® Bold™ 9700 smartphone and skimmed through the grid of application icons. I remember pulling all my favorite icons to the home screen for easy access – without realizing that I never actually used the icons to launch the apps. Over time, they got tucked away into folders where I couldn’t see them. But this definitely wasn’t the result of deleting unwanted apps or device-icon spring cleaning! My apps have been part of my daily experience at all times – they know when I want to open a PDF attachment, launch BlackBerry® Maps when I click on an address in my e-mail, or to display my friends’ Facebook® pictures when they call. These apps always feel part of my daily workflow, and they help me stay productive by integrating with core tasks like e-mail, phone, calendar and browsing.

We are BlackBerry® platform developers, but we are also BlackBerry smartphone users – and we know that apps that are tightly integrated with core device functionality can be easily developed on the BlackBerry platform.

So whether you’re hard at work on your next Super App Developer Challenge winner or working on your next killer corporate app to wow your boss, register now for the next part in our Super App webcast series! Learn more about BlackBerry APIs and concepts that are designed to provide the integrated experience BlackBerry smartphone users have come to expect in every app.

Date:
June 15th, 2010

Time:
11:00 AM to 12:30 PM EDT

Presenter:
Rajeev Massand, Senior Application Development Consultant

See the answers to additional Super Apps follow-up questions here!

It’s a busy and exciting time for all of us here on the BlackBerry® Developer Relations team. With all the announcements and developments coming out of WES 2010 and the BlackBerry Partners Fund Super Apps Challenge that’s now underway, there’s been a ton of discussion within the developer community.

That said, we thought we’d switch up our webcast format slightly and offer you an interactive video session, where we’ll talk further about Super Apps, the Partners Fund Challenge, and the key takeaways from WES that are most important to you. We’ll answer your questions throughout the hour-long session.

So please join myself and Tyler Lessard, VP Global Alliances & Developer Relations, Research In Motion (RIM) on May 25th. We look forward to speaking with you then.

An Interactive Hour with BlackBerry Developer Executives

Date:
Tuesday May 25th, 2010

Time:
2:00 PM to 3:00 PM EDT

Presenters:
Tyler Lessard, VP Global Alliances & Developer Relations, RIM
Mike Kirkup, Director, Developer Relations, RIM

Registration is required to attend this event. Register now!