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- The BlackBerry Playbook Native SDK (NDK): What Is It Good For? (A Developer’s Perspective)
- Automatically turn WiFi on and off when connected to Bluetooh
- How Do You Arrange Your BlackBerry Homescreen? Share Your Tips!
- Announcing the BerryReview PlayBook Edition Beta!
- Unsubscribe.com adds BlackBerry support
- BlackBerry Travel Updated to v1.0.384.99 – No Change Log
- Telus Rolls in With Sweet BlackBerry PlayBook Commercial
| The BlackBerry Playbook Native SDK (NDK): What Is It Good For? (A Developer’s Perspective) Posted: 13 May 2011 04:18 PM PDT Intro: Chris Balavessov is the developer behind the popular BlackBerry personal organization app Viira and its MS Outlook companion the Viira Outlook Suite. On Thursday I tuned in to RIM's Webcast on the Playbook's Native SDK (NDK). As a BlackBerry developer my goal was to get a feel for the various ways you can make apps for the Playbook and also get a sense for the kinds of apps that are possible on it. Here is what I found. Let's start with the positive. In addition to all the QNX goodness like file access, networking, sockets and what have you, the NDK will provide access to all current BlackBerry Tables OS stuff (eg. SQlite, OpenGL, etc) as well as the BlackBerry platform services like Payment and Advertising SDK. Developers will also have access to the BBM social platform at some point so you can do cool things like BBM with your friends while playing Quake 3 in multiplayer mode or have a games with additional levels that get unlocked through an in-app purchase. Very cool stuff. The caveat here is that while the intention is to provide access to the BBM social platform soon it doesn't sound like it will be available in the first release but please stay tuned.
The NDK will be available first in a public beta sometime this summer and then in a 'gold' release during DevCon 2011 in the fall. RIM promised the gold release to be available on both Mac and Linux in addition to Windows. The tooling will have live debugging and profiling capabilities built in and will be available free of charge. So what kinds of apps can you make with the NDK? For those of you looking to port your native BlackBerry Java apps and code to the PB, the NDK is not the way to go. That's because in this case by 'native' RIM means C/C++ so unless you have a magic compiler that takes your J2ME/CLDC Java code and spits out C (POSIX-compliant at that) you should look elsewhere. What I found very odd is that the NDK does not provide a UI toolkit and the RIM rep said they have no plans of making one available any time soon. Hmmm. So unless you are comfortable writing your UI from the pixel up or in OpenGL, or have the time on your hands to port something like the popular UI framework Qt to the Playbook then the NDK is probably not for you. From the looks of it, RIM's approach on this one is to leave things to developers at first and see what comes out of it (my prediction: not a whole lot of native apps that are not games, at least initially). My take is that the NDK is intended for game makers and the likes of EA trying to port their games over to the PB (which would be awesome imo). Or for someone like Netflix or Samsung who want to stream all kinds of media over Flash or bring over their own native C codecs. Or a large medical software company who already has a ton of legacy *nix C/C++ products and its own proprietary UI libraries. But if you are a making the everyday kind of business-centric applications, you know like the ones that have a UI and don't require you to port code libraries the size of Texas just to say "Hello World", then there really isn't a whole lot to be excited about here. If you liked this article, you might find these interesting:
Posted by Viira Dev for ©BerryReview, May 13, 2011, 7:18 pm. | The BlackBerry Playbook Native SDK (NDK): What Is It Good For? (A Developer’s Perspective) | 6 comments |
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| Automatically turn WiFi on and off when connected to Bluetooh Posted: 13 May 2011 04:10 PM PDT
AutoWiFi will will remember up to 32 BlueTooth profiles and will also turn WiFi back on when the BlueTooth connection is lost or disconnected. You can find it in the BerryReview Store for $0.99 and here are some more screenshots of the app. If you liked this article, you might find these interesting:
Posted by Fubaz for ©BerryReview, May 13, 2011, 7:10 pm. | Automatically turn WiFi on and off when connected to Bluetooh | 2 comments |
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| How Do You Arrange Your BlackBerry Homescreen? Share Your Tips! Posted: 13 May 2011 03:15 PM PDT I always enjoy learning about how others use their BlackBerrys. One of the most personal choices I have found users customizing is the order of their icons on the BlackBerry Homescreen. Specifically the top 4 or top 8 icons on the screen. These are the apps you tend to use throughout the day and I am curious to know how everybody sets theirs up along with the reasoning behind it. Here is my favored setup:
Personally I like to put the apps I use the most in the corners of the 4×2 box so that they are easier to scroll to. Then I use the touchscreen on my Torch to access the middle apps. Let us know how you setup your homescreen in the comments. Feel free to use a service like ImageShack or PhotoBucket to share a link to a screenshot! If you liked this article, you might find these interesting:
Posted by Ronen Halevy for ©BerryReview, May 13, 2011, 6:15 pm. | How Do You Arrange Your BlackBerry Homescreen? Share Your Tips! | 4 comments |
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| Announcing the BerryReview PlayBook Edition Beta! Posted: 13 May 2011 12:13 PM PDT After a good 10 hours of work and a little help from some friends I have managed to ship up a PlayBook Tablet optimized version of the BerryReview website. The new PlayBook Edition has bigger buttons and simply works much better on the BlackBerry PlayBook than the desktop website. It is currently in a rolling beta with new features rolling out as we develop them. We have a few things on our roadmap but in short expect it to be really cool!
The new PlayBook edition of BerryReview works well in both portrait and landscape orientation. That way no matter how you hold your device you can still get the best experience. We could really use your help in ironing out the bugs or adding features to please feel free to suggest them in the comments, forums, or simply use our contact us page or tip line.
The best part is you simply head on over to www.berryreview.com from your PlayBook to get the optimized version. Enjoy!
The new PlayBook Edition of BerryReview is based on the open source Slablet project which has been abandoned. We hacked it up and made it work like a charm on the PlayBook along with implementing scrolling through another open source project called iScroll. Once we get things optimized I am hoping to release the project as a WordPress theme so anybody can enjoy. Currently the PlayBook Edition does not work on the Apple iPad or other tablets but if I get a chance to test one of the devices out I will consider turning it on.
If you liked this article, you might find these interesting:
Posted by Ronen Halevy for ©BerryReview, May 13, 2011, 3:13 pm. | Announcing the BerryReview PlayBook Edition Beta! | 28 comments |
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| Unsubscribe.com adds BlackBerry support Posted: 13 May 2011 11:04 AM PDT Unsubscribe.com has just launched their BlackBerry app that simply allows you to remove yourself from spam/mailing lists with a few simple clicks. Unsubscribe.com has been specializing in this for a while now with Outlook, Gmail, Thunderbird and more. You can simply go to Unsubscribe.com and download the application to your BlackBerry, and from there when either in your Messages folder or directly in one of your email, the Unsubscribe option will be in your menu. Once you click Unsubscribe it automatically unsubscribes you. There is a free version which lets you block 5 emails a month. Subscriptions are available $2.95/month, $19.95/year or $149.95/lifetime, and these allow you to block unlimited emails. You can find more information, OTA download link and subscription information on the Unsubscribe.com website. They have also done a great job adding compatibility with a version for OS4.2 and below, as well as OS4.5 and above.
If you liked this article, you might find these interesting:
Posted by Fubaz for ©BerryReview, May 13, 2011, 2:04 pm. | Unsubscribe.com adds BlackBerry support | Leave a comment |
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| BlackBerry Travel Updated to v1.0.384.99 – No Change Log Posted: 13 May 2011 07:25 AM PDT RIM has updated their free BlackBerry Travel app to v1.0.384.99 this week. I just got the notification on my BlackBerry and sadly RIM does not make use of their own change log feature in App World. If you are a regular traveler I recommend downloading the update even though it weighs in at over 3MB. Let us know if you spot anything new! Download BlackBerry Travel in App World If you liked this article, you might find these interesting:
Posted by Ronen Halevy for ©BerryReview, May 13, 2011, 10:25 am. | BlackBerry Travel Updated to v1.0.384.99 – No Change Log | 3 comments |
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| Telus Rolls in With Sweet BlackBerry PlayBook Commercial Posted: 13 May 2011 05:44 AM PDT Desktop Video Link | Mobile Video LinkIn the US we have not really had any carrier actually advertising the BlackBerry PlayBook but hopefully that will change once the 4G versions come. That has not stopped Telus from rolling out a sweet new commercial for the BlackBerry PlayBook. As Bla1ze points out Telus is even promoting the fact that you can browse the web for free without a tethering plan. Cool right? Here in the US we still have AT&T pathetically trying to block the PlayBook Bridge. Let us know what you think of the commercial! If you liked this article, you might find these interesting:
Posted by Ronen Halevy for ©BerryReview, May 13, 2011, 8:44 am. | Telus Rolls in With Sweet BlackBerry PlayBook Commercial | 4 comments |
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