BlackBerry 10 Jam in Belgrade was organized by BlackBerry Developer Group Balkan that takes care of BlackBerry Developer Relations in 12 countries of the Balkans. Event took place in Zira Hotel and with around 400 attendees this was one of the biggest events of this sort in the world.

The excellently organised event was second of its kind in the region and we are already planning next years event in Belgrade and a few smaller events in countries BlackBerry Developer Group Balkan is taking care of.

If you are not able to see video, click here to see it on YouTube.

I’ve met developers who are waiting for a Z10 to try out BlackBerry 10 in real life for the first time, claiming Dev Alphas are “unusable”. That’s a shame, because I can tell from my experience that Dev Alpha B is a *very* usable device in real life and there is no need to fear it.

Developers’ devices can be more than just software prototyping boards. They are built primarily to be strapped by their umbillical cord to a PC. One day, out of sheer curiosity, I took my Dev Alpha B for a walk and put a sim card in it to see how it will behave in day to day situations right next to my primary device. A month later, I had no need to stop using it. What happened is that I put myself into user’s perspective. Now I understand what Flow means, what use is Invocation framework, how BlackBerry World works…I’ve used it for all daily tasks: e-mail, surfing the web, making notes in Spanish class with bluetooth keyboard and syncing them to Evernote…What we are dealing with here is a totally new platform with totally new UX.

So, no matter whether you are porting your application from another platform, or creating a new app from scratch for BlackBerry 10 it is very important to get acquainted with the platform and the way it will be used on the other side of the .bar file.

The boy got to see the first Comodore64 that hit the back then Jugoslavian Market … and he was hooked on the corky keyboard that made games appear on the TV screen.

Step two was the pc 386 and 486 with more games … well that was what computers were for right?  Once old enough to visit the boy switched to Arcades and Sega spending days on end in the local play garages … good times.

Mario and Tanks … Nintendo of course and a summer spent playing 20h days … and few years later OMG Pentium, Red Baron, Warcraft, Comandos, …

Once in highschool discovered that the computer can be used for work also so what is the next logical step … creating games.  Man he was hacking and learning more than playing ???

Good times!

That boy is still me although I look like a full grown man now.

After finding my place in the universe because there was no other option I created a company for animation and video games.

So now the Motion Universe and X3M brand are 4+ years established service based studio advanced in design and creation of animation, vfx, cross-platform interactive digital media games and applications with 300+ ip’s making a switch to products.

We are pioneering a new age platform for channelling music industry content, tickets and merchandise to be distributed with in the gaming experience and our first title is in developing stage atm.

Our goal is to :
- publish 4 titles annually
- find investor for upscaling the business and competition of the products development
- publishers for distribution and marketing

We were in stealth mode and bootstrapped our way for 4 years building the team from 1 to 12 people all hand picked and trained. We broke our invisibility cloak few months back when we attended Mobile AppCamp SEE.

There “Mordor opened” as we presented our 200+ games and won and also connected to the new BlackBerry (Branko Nikolic and Lukasz Dzierżak proved to be more than we expected).

In in that short span of 1-2 months from stealth company we had our fair share of the Dawn of Victory!

All ready won:
- MobileAppCamp SEE (Games)
- GameFounders (Games)
- QuoVadis BlackBerry Balkan Challenge for Germany (Games)
- BB Port-a-thon Award 20 Games ported

Currently in finals:
- Eleven (Games)
- AppCampus (Games)
- Mass Challenge Accelerator…

Fairs these months that we were and we are going to so lets meet up:
- BBJam Europe - Amsterdam (Passed)
- MIT GSW - Tallinn (Passed)
- IGDA - Helsinki
- BBJam - Belgrade
- Festival of Games - Amsterdam
- QuoVadis - Berlin
- NordicGame - Malmo
- Monetization - London
- DemoDays - San Francisco

Looking forward to meet up with all of you there.

So onwards and upwards … sky is not the limit. Although not a commie my self I always admire the enthusiasm of the era.

When you start developing Blackberry 10 native apps, whether using Cascades API or Core Native ‘down to the metal’, your starting point is Blackberry Developer website where you can find latest SDK with IDE and simulator for your target device.

If C++ is not your cup of tea, don’t be scared – check one of the previous posts which will introduce you to other available platforms.

At the time of the writing of this post, Blackberry just released Gold SDK 10.1 with support for both Z10 and Q10. Included is QNX Momentics IDE which Eclipse-based and should be already familiar to many developers.  It has gone long way and keeps getting better.

Still, there are few things that may confuse newcomers.

After creating a new project (e.g. Hello Cascades, one from the great selection of sample apps) you will probably discover several strange warnings or even errors. For example: Syntax error Q_DECL_EXPORT. What’s even stranger is that code will compile and run as expected, despite these “errors”. It turns out IDE is not able to figure out many of the identifiers, but build process itself works fine as the project is correctly set.

In other words, you need to add reference to folders where the Qt stuff is declared.

Open project properties, then C++ General / Paths and Symbols. Select “All configurations” and add following directories in the Includes  GNU C settings:

C:/bbndk/target_10_1_0_1020/qnx6/usr/include/qt4
C:/bbndk/target_10_1_0_1020/qnx6/usr/include/qt4/QtCore

You should use forward slash ‘/’ when declaring folders, otherwise build process will complain about backslashes being deprecated. Note that actual path depends on the folder where your build target is, in my example it is 10.1.0.1020.

Instead of absolute path, you could also use {$QNX_TARGET} environment variable. It is not set by default, so do it here: Window / Preferences / C++ / Build / Environment.

After setting folders, clean and rebuild your project and now IDE should behave as expected:

Prior to this role, Sinisha managed BlackBerry enterprise and government business relationships with Verizon Wireless, and he provided consultative service to United States Fortune corporations, state public sector organizations and United States Federal agencies in Washington DC. He has also held IT infrastructure management roles with the Economical Insurance and IBM Canada, as well as executive support roles in the international missions of European Commission and the United Nation’s DHA department.

Outside of his corporate duties, Sinisha was associate faculty at the Conestoga College Polytechnic Institute, teaching in the Network Security Program.

Editors note: “Meet Sinisha at the BlackBerry 10 mini Jam in Belgrade, 2013!”

Organized by the Blackberry Developer Group Balkan and Embassy of Canada and supported by BlackBerry, this event will be an unparalleled opportunity in the Balkans to learn about the future of BlackBerry and to get the most in depth content on developing mobile applications for the game-changing BlackBerry® 10 platform.

The Mini BlackBerry 10 Jam will unite the experience and knowledge of developers from Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Hungary, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia and Turkey and the group will hereby develop tighter bonds, open knowledge and information flow and establish a better development potential. BlackBerry Developer Group Balkan will thus ensure the best possible information flow and participation with the knowledge of the experts from BlackBerry so the experience and effect of the developers will be as top quality as possible.

“I’m glad we are organizing BlackBerry 10 mini Jam in Belgrade. We’ve prepared great sessions and invited “best in business” experts, carriers and industry innovators who’ll gladly share their knowledge and experiences with developers. Beside that we have BlackBerry experts, VIP guests, partners and investors at Jam Space and a lot of prizes for developers in Prize Lottery.” said Branko Nikolic, Chief Developer Group Manager at BlackBerry Developer Group Balkan.

Venue can host no more than 500 participants, so make sure you register ahead of time in order to reserve your spot for all of the content on developing for the BlackBerry 10 platform. Mini BlackBerry 10 Jam registration is FREE and includes admission to the conference and all sessions.

Be Among the Game Changers! Whether a Native, Web, or Android™ developer, you will get the opportunity to explore the powerful, game-changing BlackBerry 10 platform.

BlackBerry®10 mini Jam Belgrade 2013 is a showcase for the bold, new direction BlackBerry is heading with the BlackBerry® 10 platform. The event will attract you and other developers who understand the power of BlackBerry and want to take advantage of building mobile applications for the platform.

Free registration at www.bbdevbalkan.com/bb10jam

Having had experience with many devices I can say that from my own prospective the PlayBook has 3 main advantages: user interface, applications, design.

The user interface, the gestures, is my favorite. Not having physical buttons is the greatest advantage of this approach. Tasks switch is so intuitive. Sneaking behind an app is so cool.

Applications, although not that many, they are sophisticated and cover pretty much all that I do – emails, news, videos and podcasts, show presentations and some games for the kids.

The design is very stylish, looks solid and it is nothing like those cheap ones that you can buy from the street. You can carry it with confidence at your business meetings as well as to your casual meetings.

Having the HDMI is great feature. Recently we bought new 32 inch TV set with 3D and is so cool to just plug the tablet to the TV and watch videos straight from YouTube on the TV.

I’m planning to buy that case+keyboard combo from Shop BlackBerry website, when it becomes available, and them I will stop carrying that huge laptop wherever I go.

–

Follow our BBDev Group in Veliko Turnovo on Twitter at https://twitter.com/BBDevVT, or check our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/BBDevVelikoTurnovo. You can also follow me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/boyanov.

That means that there are very few competing apps, as Shadid Haque the presenter beautifully put it. Instead, there are many complementary apps that invoke each other. The more apps invoke yours the more you get out of your code.

Invocation framework is deeply integrated into native apps that come with each BlackBerry 10 device and many applications that are avalable on the BlackBerry World, especially those with Built For BlackBerry certification. iF is evolving and as more apps that use it become available we are off to an exciting future of user experience.

One of the best recently written posts that deals with the matter is  difference between rejected and accepted BFB Application – Example: ClipMan where the author explains his experience with Built For BlackBerry (BFB) certification. These “small” differences can mean a lot even if you are not applying for BFB. In the above article it is clear and obvious that the author wants to point out the design guidelines.

However, many posts and reviews about BlackBerry 10 were not written to teach the reader how to design an app. There are device reviews, thoughts on the OS, projections and visions of the future…and reading between the lines can save time and make guidelines clearer. How? Let’s take an example: somewhere on the Internet you find a BlackBerry Z10 review from techradar. You go to page 2 and read:

” This has resulted in a platform which is very different to the one found on previous BlackBerry handsets running BB OS7, which means a steep learning curve is required for both new and current BlackBerry users.

BlackBerry decided to move away from the physical buttons found on iOS and many Android devices, instead opting for a gesture-based system as the main form of navigation.”

In the context of app design this can be translated as: Do not design strictly as you would on BB 7. The users will have to learn. That will happen quickly and gestures are dominant.

Before the user even has the opportunity to download an app, she/he will already be used to the gestured flow interface with tabs sliding out from the side of the screen. Making use of knowledge the user already has will make the app more pleasant and easy to use.

And that can be learnt from a nontechnical review written for general public that you, as a developer, would probably read one way or the other.

This is just one example. There are many different post you can run into, and depending what you want to know, you can get informed even if the main topic is something completely different.

Be Among the Game Changers! BlackBerry®10 mini Jam Belgrade is a showcase for the bold, new direction BlackBerry is heading with the BlackBerry® 10 platform. The event will attract you and other developers who understand the power of BlackBerry and want to take advantage of building mobile applications for the platform. Whether a Native, Web, or Android™ developer, you will get the opportunity to explore the powerful, game-changing BlackBerry 10 platform.

Get ready to Jam with us in Belgrade on 6. April 2013!

BlackBerry 10 mini Jam will be held at Zira Hotel in Belgrade. Venue can host no more than 500 participants, so make sure you register ahead of time in order to reserve your spot for all of the content on developing for the BlackBerry 10 platform. Mini BlackBerry 10 Jam registration is FREE and includes admission to the conference and all sessions.

Register and reserve your spot now!