Cliff has pushed out a first cut at a port of OpenCV, the Open Computer Vision Library. Our intention is to complete the port but we are pushing it out now to help other people interested in the library. If you want to help, go fork from here so we can more easily merge the changes back.
Our port is available as OpenCV in our GitHub organization.
For more information on OpenCV see the website – or the Wikipedia page.
The content below was posted in our forum on General Open Source Topics.
As promised, we have published a small revision to the AppWorld Vendor Agreement. The new document is available here; the only changes are in section 10(k). I talked with a company attorney that described the changes along the lines below:
The revised AppWorld Vendor Agreement includes a much simplified Section 10(k) which clarifies that open source components are not prohibited, provided that the inclusion of those components does not compromise the proprietary nature of any RIM proprietary code and information or that of any third party (e.g., RIM or third party proprietary SDK/NDK libraries).
Compliance with permissive open source licenses, such as recent BSD and MIT licenses, should be relatively straightforward. Other common open source licenses, such as the various versions of (L)GPL are more complex. Use of components subject to such licenses may or may not be permitted under the revised AppWorld Vendor Agreement depending upon a variety of factors including the specific license version, context, and use model. You may want to consult an attorney if you have concerns.
The last sentence is there because it is not appropriate for a RIM lawyer to give advice to non-RIM companies and individuals.
Now that the PlayBook OS 2 update that supports WebGL has been released, we are simplifying the development of WebGL applications on the platform, and to that end, improving support for Three.js, a popular WebGL framework.
Recently two Three.js fixes proposed by RIM were accepted for inclusion in future iterations of the framework. One of these fixes addressed an issue that affected many samples across all mobile WebGL implementations. The following screenshots showcase some of the content that now runs on the PlayBook:
Our commitment to improving WebGL support for Three.js and other WebGL frameworks is only just beginning. Stay tuned!
We have two new contributors:
Rory Craig-Barnes (glasspear) is contributing to bbUI.js and WebWorks-Samples.
Martin Kleinschrodt (MaKleSoft) is contributing to WebWorks-Community-APIs.
Welcome to both! And an encouragement to others to participate in any of our projects. Some, like WebWorks-Community-APIs already show a healthy number of contributors.
Second progress update on Qt support (see first update).
We have uploaded new installers for Qt 4.8.1 based on the Qt SDK installer. At this time we have installers for Windows and Linux, a Mac installer is in the works:
Please post feedback as comments to this post.
One of the uses of OpenBBNews is as a record of RIM’s Open Source activity but as such it lacks some early events because our first post was in mid-November 2011.
To fix this shortcoming, I’ve created a few posts to capture significant events that happened before Nov 2011. I’ve back-dated these posts so they show correctly in the archives but I’ve marked them as such to avoid confusions.
As of this writing, there are 3 such entries:
One more leg in the journey of TunnelTilt – From GitHub to your PlayBook… but now going through the BlackBerry App World:
More details in the official announcement in the DevBlog post.
You can preview the game in two ways: check this YouTube video, or point a modern browser to the Demo Page. The PlayBook 2.0 browser has WebGL support and will run the demo page but we disabled screen rotations to avoid triggering a landscape/portrait rotation and you will need to use touch instead to dodge the obstacles – which is much less fun.
Innovation Happens Elsewhere – Additional Open-Source related links:
Send us/post links to other interesting Open Source news.
RIM has announced that attendees to BlackBerry 10 Jam will be receiving a limited edition developer prototype device – the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha™.
Alex Kinsella makes it very clear that this is not the final hardware or OS for BlackBerry 10. This is a prototype running a modified version of the PlayBook OS which will help developers design their apps for the BlackBerry 10 smartphone form factor.
The device is only available to developer attendees at BlackBerry 10 Jam, so there you go, a great reason to visit Orlando in May…
We now have (unofficial) clipboard support in WebWorks courtesy of Martin Kleinschrodt. This extension is for tablets.
Martin is a new non-RIM Contributor, he is located in Munich where his work is visible at MaKleSoft.com. The clipboard extension was needed by his password manager / secure storage application: SecuStore uses HTML5 to deliver cross-platform support on webOS, iOS, Google Chrome and, now, BlackBerry PlayBook and relies on DropBox for cloud storage.
Martin’s contribution started around Adam’s repo (pull request); this is a very practical way to get up-to-speed with one of our repos: find an existing contributor and work with him or her first. After a bit we decided to integrate it directly (pull request) and Adam just approved it.
If you have useful extensions to WebWorks, look into WebWorks-Community-APIs, the “Community owned repository containing JavaScript Extensions for BlackBerry WebWorks”… come and join us!
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