BlackBerry 10: Tracking the Virtual Keyboard from Cascades

There are things in BlackBerry 10 that are relevant to the UI of an application, which are not directly exposed via the API for the Cascades UI framework. One such thing is the state of the virtual keyboard. While you can infer this by the focus state of the text fields on a screen, that only takes you so far. Sometimes you really just need to know whether the keyboard is visible and how tall it is. Fortunately, they actually did expose an API for this through BPS.

What I'll be showing in this article is how you can wrap this event-providing BPS API for use from within a Cascades UI. In order to do this, we'll have to do several things:

BlackBerry 10: Multiple OS versions from one source tree

Since launch, we've been iterating through several major versions of the BlackBerry 10 OS (10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 10.2.1, 10.3, and soon 10.3.1). Given that many users can't or don't upgrade immediately, and some never upgrade at all, this means we now have a wide variety in the field. While developers often want to provide quality support for the latest OS version, they also don't want to cut off support for older ones.

To keep the latest version of your app available across the full range of OS versions that users are running, it takes a few tricks. I figured it was about time to start writing up some of the tricks I've used to manage this.

Qt for the BlackBerry PlayBook

At the keynote to the BlackBerry Developer Conference last week, two very interesting things were announced.  First, the BlackBerry PlayBook Native SDK is finally in public release (it had previously been in a semi-closed beta).  Second, RIM unveiled the Native Open Source Components Initiative on GitHub.  This GitHub site includes ports of many open source libraries to the PlayBook, including the Qt Framework!  The only real downside here is that all they've done so far is to push out the code.  No how-to documentation has been provided.  Therefore, I'm going to attempt to give a walkthrough for setting yourself up to use their Qt port for PlayBook development.