BlackBerry WebWorks Contributions

[pnewhook]

With Tim recentrly posting the first sneak peak of the delta SDK (http://supportforums.blackberry.com/t5/BlackBerry-WebWorks/Delta-Release-for-Tablet-OS-Branches-Avai... ) I've found myself looking at the Take A Picture/Video API. While it's good, it's not quite what I had in mind. I wanted to break out into a distince thread because I didn't want to Shanghai that post.

I'd love to see a way to bring the camer right into my application. There's a couple problems with relying on the camera app for my photos. You can't manipulate the image in real time to make a photobooth like app, nor can you add overlay to do something with AR.

Ideally, what I'd like to see is the ability to subscribe to the camera stream in my app. I'd register to receive frames, and specify a callback each time a frame is received. Then I'd use an html canvas to manipulate images.

That said, I can see how JavaScript isn't really fast enough to handle most real time image manipulation scenarios. And I think getting better access to the camera is a step in the right direction. I just wanted to submit the thought that there's more possible.

[tneil · Accepted solution]

On the Tablet OS the Take A Picture/Video API does actually open up a camera window embedded in your app.  It doesn't invoke the camera application.  On the Smartphone it does invoke the Camera.  The reasons why we did this are:

- On the Tablet OS the only way to get notified that a picture was taken is to embed the camera view in your app

- On the Smartphone, if we were to embed the camera in the application we would have to re-write all the camera functionality.  The embedded Camera API is a very "raw" API

The current limitations around this API are actually on purpose.  Our first use case scenario is to simply take a picture/video and return it to your application.

We're definately not ruling out other types of interactions with the camera, but to start, we wanted to get the majority use case we've been asked for nailed down.

[pnewhook]

Got it, I misunderstood. Thanks Tim.

[tneil]

No worries

I'm sure we'll build more functionality onto the "blackberry.media.camera" as we push the API further.  We wanted to make sure we had the ".camera" on there so that we had more room to grow for other interesting camera APIs.

[kiranmobile]

Neil: If I am understanding you right, currently in Webworks SDK we cannot create any apps where we can enhance the camera (AR apps) or embed the camera inside a html DIV element.  Is this correct?