BlackBerry 10 Developers Amazing Support Continues with What comes next!
RIMs ongoing support for BlackBerry 10 developers just continues to get better and better.
Today, the latest BlackBerry® 10 Beta SDKs are were released for download! They bring a whole lot more functionality, along with a software upgrade for the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha testing device.
This new device update now includes the BlackBerry App World™ storefront client application (the same version that is on the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet).
This means you can start to submit your BlackBerry 10 applications to BlackBerry App World and share it with fellow BlackBerry 10 developers to get early feedback.
Now most companies would be sitting pretty smug right now, pleased with the fact that they had just provided their developers with a feat of new developer material.
Not RIM! They are already looking at What comes next.
To keep the ball rolling for the developer community, they’ve scheduled a series of tooling and SDK releases that will be rolled out over the next few months. Each runtime (Native, HTML5, Adobe® AIR®, and Android™) will have incremental updates to functionality. Each runtime’s functionality won’t necessarily be in sync, as they each have different developer audiences where APIs are prioritized based on what each of these communities are asking for.
Each release is named Rn where R stands for “Release” and n stands for “number”. So for the first BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha release, the SDK was R4 to match with 10.0.4.xyz version.
Internal-only releases explain why you’ll see some numbers skipped.
The BlackBerry 10 SDK Beta schedule looks like the following:
- R4:May SDK Beta Release (first beta)
- R6:July SDK Beta Release (just launched)
- R8:September SDK Beta Release (API Freeze, Binary Compatible with Gold)
- R9:October SDK Beta Release (bug fixes)
- R10: November Gold SDK Release (bug fixes)
But what’s coming in these releases?
RIM are attempting to do something they’ve never done before and quite frankly, something that I’ve rarely seen any tech company do in this industry. They’re going to share with you the feature release plan for each of the runtimes. They’ll be providing a list the top level line item deliverables — but not getting into the details of each feature, or else the list will turn into something as long as a DVD’s extended director’s-cut limited edition!
The beta roadmaps will be posted in the form of flight arrival boards so that you can see the feature, the flight/release it is on, the scheduled arrival time and the current status. These roadmaps should be available in a couple of weeks.
Source: BlackBerry DevBlog
