Native Development

[drdevil44]

Dear all

I'm a seasoned blackberry developer but I'm rather struggling to find clear information on what I should be doing in preparation for OS 10.

My primary questions are:

1) If I used the Native SDK - will it run on OS 10?

2) How am I supposed to develop UIs in Native?  Qt is mentioned but no docs anywhere.

Using HTML5/JS isn't an option for me as I've tried and failed miserably at developing native apps as web apps - the users just dont like them - and CSS/DOM is so quirky it's tiresome.

Best wishes

Gareth

[peter9477]

1. Yes, Native SDK and the HTML5 stuff are officially "the future" for PlayBook and BB10 (don't call it OS 10... you'll confuse people and yourself).

2. For now, there's no UI support except roll-your-own, other than the Qt stuff. As you've noted, the Qt stuff is a work in progress. If you want to get started on that path as many others are doing, so you'll be more than a newbie once Cascades (which builds on Qt) is released, start reading the http://wiki.qt-project.org site, possibly with a particular focus on the QtQuick/QML stuff.

There's an update to Momentics in the works which will have a Cascades plugin, providing among other things (apparently) a design view, integration with Photoshop, etc.

There's also a QtCreator plugin with support for QNX, allowing you to use it already for design, though without Cascades there's still no native widget set. The Symbian ones, or roll-your-own, work fine though.

AIR will also continue to be supported for the foreseeable future, and if you're strongly bound to Java you can also use the Android runtime (Google dev tools plus the APK->BAR converter).

[gbeukeboom]

Don't forget about Cocos . If you want to make a game then Cocos2Dx would be great to look into as well:

https://github.com/cocos2d/cocos2d-x/

[gbeukeboom]

Oh, and if you are familiar with Flash/AIR you could always use that for your UI then use ANE (AIR Native Extensions) to tie some underlying logic down to the native layer:

http://supportforums.blackberry.com/t5/Tablet-OS-SDK-for-Adobe-AIR/Creating-Air-Native-Extensions-fo...

[drdevil44]

Thanks folks for the summary. This simple explanation evaded me on the BlackBerry site.

It puzzles me why RIM strive to make our lives so hard.