A few weeks ago Adam put together a template for WebWorks extensions, so future extensions could be done more consistently by just cloning the template and instantiating the actual code. The template comes in two versions, one for the Tablets and for the Smartphones.
The pull request stayed in the queue until today when Tim finished the review and merged the change. We are going to see more of Tim around GitHub…
Onward! Orlando is around the corner!
As you may know, the BlackBerry PlayBook browser ranks first among all native tablet browsers in the HTML5 test. We’ve pushed a new playbook-2.0.0 branch to our WebKit-PlayBook repository in GitHub. This branch contains the WebKit source code in the PlayBook 2.0 (b.7971) release.
We are also in the process of integrating the QNX port into the subversion repository at WebKit.org. You can follow our latest development at WebKit.org.
Youmi, correctly, complains that my post on GDC2012 only mentions Open Source repositories hosted at GitHub.com/BlackBerry, so here are some additional links that might be of interest:
Please send us/post links to other interesting Open Source news. I’ll keep this series going if I collect enough content.
We have added a port of V8 (home site, Wikipedia), an open source JavaScript engine developed by Google, to complement the other scripting language runtimes on the PlayBook. V8 ships with the Google Chrome web browser and other frameworks such as Node.js. Version 3.8.9 has been ported to the BlackBerry Native SDK and is publicly available on GitHub here: https://github.com/blackberry/v8.
Instructions for building on both Linux and Mac OS X are included in the repository README file. The native PlayBook web browser does not use V8 as it’s JavaScript engine.
This week is the Games Developer Conference at the Moscone Center, in San Francisco. RIM is a sponsor, has a booth at the Expo and has several sessions.
Our Open Source projects are a key part of the sessions. Some of the repos you will encounter at RIM’s sessions at GDC include:
Hope to see you around; I’ll be there tomorrow (Wednesday), and possibly other days. It will be fun to see the Moscone wearing another set of clothes, not JavaOne and not Oracle OpenWorld.
Check more details, including the full list of sessions, in Victoria’s post at DevBlog.
Martin Woolley and John Murray from our Developer Relations team have been hard at work creating sample applications that illustrate the use of the BlackBerry NFC APIs. Most of these samples are now available at GitHub; the latest addition is to the Samples-for-Java repository (in the NFC directory) and is an application called “NfcTransactionHandler”. This application illustrates key aspects of NFC card emulation.
The other NFC sample applications published to the Samples-for-Java repository to date are:
In addition to the Java NFC sample applications, Martin and John also wrote a Web Works extension which allows Web Works developers to integrate NFC tag reading functionality in their applications. The extension and an example application which uses the extension has been published to the WebWorks-Community-APIs repository in the Smartphone/NFC folder.
The applications are accompanied by articles which explain each of the topics; you can find an index to the full list of NFC articles here. You may also want to check the DevBlog posts on NFC.
As of this writing the series of articles and presentations includes:
For PlayBook users, a swipe-down from the top-bezel is almost always associated with the opening of an application’s menu.
To address this need for our WebWorks development community, we have just published swipemenu.js at our WebWorks-Samples repository. As a JavaScript micro-framework, it is designed to enable easy integration and customization of a swipe-down menu in WebWorks Tablet OS applications.
Download swipemenu.js and its sample application from Github and begin using it in your PlayBook application design.
Just before DevCon Europe we promoted a a new top-level repository: bbUI.js. The project was started by Tim within the WebWorks-Samples repo but soon it was clear it had general applicability and Tim started making it more widely useful. The recent promotion furthers helps that wider role.
The goal of the bbUI toolkit is to provide a BlackBerry® look and feel for HTML5 applications using the BlackBerry WebWorks framework. It provides common UI constructs that are found on the BlackBerry operating system so that you can create an application that follows the UI guidelines and looks at home on a BlackBerry with very little effort.
The toolkit is still in an incubation stage. The initial focus is on BB6/BB7; then we will back-port for BB5 and we will also be adding some PlayBook look and feel.
Ken and Tim will provide a more in-depth description of the toolkit in a forthcoming DevBlog post.
Also see our Second Update.
Two Three quick updates on Qt:
First, we have started uploading prebuilt Qt 4.8 binaries. As of this writing there are 2×2 sets, all available at the downloads section of our Qt repo at GitHub:
qt4.8-playbook.bin <install prefix>
We are working on additional installers for Windows.
The second update is on our participation on the Qt Project. As of this last Tuesday (c87445a), the BlackBerry PlayBook QPA (the Qt Platform Abstraction) Plugin is now at Gitorious. Further contributions will follow; our goal is to be able to work from the upstream directly.
And three (added), check out the QNX page in the Qt Project Wiki.
Tim has added a new WebWorks Extension to our WebWorks-Community-APIsrepository. The new feature is loaded through
<feature id="webworks.analytics" />Using the service requires registering with the service, adding some JavaScript setup code and including some instrumentation calls to track key events, from clicking on buttons to purchases. The logs are sent to the Analytics Service (when on coverage) and the vendor can then review this aggregate data about the user base in the Analytics Portal.
This extension is only available for the BlackBerry Smartphones. Basic information in the README file in our repo; additional information on the service is here.
Also see the official post at DevBlog by Tim with additional information (and nice pics).
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