BlackBerry 10 Jam Europe

published at 07.02.2013 11:02 by Jens Weller
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I visited the BlackBerry 10 Jam Europe in Amsterdam for Monday - Wednesday, and had a really great time. It was nice to watch the show, see what new stuff is coming to BlackBerry 10, and meet again with so many nice people from the Qt and C++ Community. Also, this was the first conference I visited after Meeting C++, its nice to be an attendee...

So, what are the important news from Amsterdam? First of course, everybody could finally try out the Z10 and Q10, see how BlackBerry 10 really comes to shine on its "native" hardware. I have to say, compared to the devalpha and the pre-OS Versions we've seen as devs, the Z10 with BB10 manages to top those. Its really a nice phone with a slick and natural feeling UI. At least if you are - like me - a long time N9 lover.

On Tuesday, first thing to warm everybody up was the keynote. BlackBerry shared some stories about BlackBerry 10 and Build for BlackBerry Apps with us, and showed the new Z10 phone and what you can do with the BlackBerry 10 OS. It really was a great show, you could sit in the audience and enjoy the ride. After the keynote, there was a short lunchbreak, and then the sessions started. There were some really great talks on interesting topics, lots of beginner sessions, on how to get started, and some advanced sessions on how to do this and that. And, as you can develop for BlackBerry 10 with different SDKs, there was a lot of sessions focusing on different technologies. Ofcourse I think that when building an App for BB10, you should use the native SDK with Qt and Cascades, as this brings you close to the best possible performance. And great news for all Devs: You can get a special Edition Z10 in red, if you submit an App to the BlackBerry World till February 28th. But please look up the details for this :)

So, some details on the sessions I visited. The first session I had on my schedule was "Building your own Application Service Layer", and it was about how to build servicelayers that connect you to webservices. This was the best talk. Must watch for everybody who builds apps who get data through the network. They showed a builder pattern to config the connection, and how to integrate with cacheing:

So, with the first talk already being the best, the others were still quite good. Mostly. I had some NFC talks on my schedule, which one of them, the deep dive, showed a lot of things, I had seen in the previous talk about NFC. So, I could have skipped the first talk. That's anyways a rule of thumb, go to the deep dive talks, if you have been using the apis already. Through my BlackBerry 10 Videotutorial, I'm already familiar with a lot of the BB10 System and Cascades APIs. I've been to the talk about streaming and multimedia playback, which showed how easy it is to make a Multimedia player in QML now:

Nice isn't it? I did play around with Qt5 Multimedia Framework in January, so I already new that there is a very nice API for this in Qt5, but you can also do it with Cascades on BlackBerry 10! One of the best slides I saw was the slide showing how elegant coding with Qt and QML can be, this slide shows the code, that's needed to take a picture in C, some boilerplate code and UI Code included, but still huge to the few lines of code you'll need in Qt to do this:

So, I've been mostly to talks about the native API or Qt, because that's what I am interested in, and I wanted to use the time in Amsterdam to learn how to improve my App Ideas and learn more about the BB10 platform. One very good talk was about improving your productivity with the Momentics IDE. This was really a good talk, and helped me a lot with my tool setup. Still, I'd prefer BlackBerry fixing some of those Issues, instead of showing us how to fine tune their IDE. But, as a long time QtCreator User (and eclipse hater), this was a good talk to see how I can change some of the things I find annoying. This slide is a wrap up of the Tips Elena gave us, on how to be more productive with building apps in Momentics IDE:

She also mentioned some details on that there is support for unittesting on the way to be integrated in the IDE. Unittesting on the device is not that easy, but it can be done, and as far as I know, the frameworks you can use are Google Test, CppUnit, boost::test, QtTest or CATCH. But there is no IDE support for either one. The last session for me was about building infinite lists. Nice topic, they showed how you can reload ListViews in a combination of QML and C++ Datamodels. But I missed the part about cacheing or how to tune this on the C++ side. But as long as you don't have more then 15000 Items on your ListView, you should be fine. They couldn't answer the question about the max Items for listviews, so thats something left to try. But with the model-view Approach, most ListViews will stay stable for a long time.

So I had 2 great days about BB10 and Qt. On Tuesday night there was a nice party, where you could meet a lot of new people, and I finally could meet some of you who I already knew from twitter. And of course, meet a lot of people again. Its nice to see how the Qt community grows, and new people show up at conferences. I made some really nice contacts. So, was a great time in Amsterdam with BlackBerry!

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