Will I be able to create my app on Blackberry phone ?

[Ocelyn_J]

Hello there,

I would like to make an application in Flash, with Adobe Air for IOS, Android and I hope on Blackberry phone too.

It's pretty simple application, the only tricky part is I need to access camera, GPS and be able to share on twitter or facebook some information inside of the application.

For IOS and Android I know it's possible but what about Blackberry, I think access camera and GPS is possible but what about share stuff on twitter and facebook, should I do it in some HTML, Javascript view ?

Would I be able to export my app only in Blackberry OS 10 ? or older is possible ?

Thanks for your help

Ocelyn

[markerline]

good question.  the only thing i have seen is blackberry playbook (tablet) export using Adobe AIR.  I would like to know the same thing.

[boat5]

Air apps will only run on playbook's tablet OS and the upcoming BB10. I'm not sure if any earlier blackberry phones had flash in the browser.

I tested one of my air apps on a BB alpha device (phone prototype) it was nice.

[Ocelyn_J]

Yeah I was asking about Adobe Air converted in apps for BB. So do you think camera or gps would work smoothly on BB alpha device ?

Thank you!

[boat5]

Not only will it work on the new BB10 phones, but if you get approved for their developer promotion, they will guarantee you $10,000 income in the first year or pay you the difference!

https://developer.blackberry.com/builtforblackberry/commitment/

Honestly, anyone who does not port their existing mobile Air app to RIM is crazy.

-Resolution is similar to the new android phones, there's really not much code to change.

-Devices are new, app world will not be flooded yet (I assume).

-Air is pre-loaded on the OS

-Canadians are nice people

[JohnFarrell9]

Thanks boat5 for youe valuable comment!

[Ocelyn_J]

Thank you boat5! I'm curious if you already develop some app for BB10 mobile phones? And if you have some feedback or experience to share it would be awesome.

[boat5]

No I don't know  much about BB10 or the phones except that RIM seems deticated to AIR. I created a game with Air that I had already tested on the kindle fire, being that it was the exact same dimensions as the Blackberry Playbook, I "ported" it to Playbook (AKA simply package a .bar file in flash builder).

RIMs App world for the playbook is obviously far smaller than android/iOS. I can't say that I've made a lot of money, but it certainly helped pay for a few mobile devices so far.

As for the alpha device, my friend has one. I loaded my same .bar file on it and it ran great! I haven't been paying much attention BB lately, but I believe the touch models will all be 1280 x 720. (the alpha device was 1280x768... also the alpha device ran a modified version of the Playbook's tablet OS, not the real BB10 yet).

If you develop with Air and support the high res android phones, your app is already done for the new blackberry phones, just put some time aside to sign up with RIM get flash builder setup with RIMS SDK and all that jazz.

Here are a few possibly related comments to AIR and RIM:

-No developer sign up fee for the app world (Apple = $100/year, google = $25 one time fee)

-RIM takes 30% (same as google and apple)

-Packaging your swf in a .bar file for Blackberry can be compared to packaging a swf in an .apk for android

-The new phones should be powerful, none of that fragmented old phone crap like on android

-RIM actually provides an  SDK for AIR to do more with their devices natively.

-No captive runtime large file size or redirects to install/update Air, Air is on the OS and versions are managed by RIM. This one is really great... BUT! If that version of Air has a bug, your stuck with it. For example Playbook has Air 3.1 right now, 3.1 has a bug which crashes the app if you try to swith stage.quality in gpu mode...3.1 also did not have bitmapData.drawWithQuality() yet... but the device is powerful so stage.quality has not been an issue for me.

Air 3.1 also means no stage3D right now on blackberry.

You can package your swf to a .bar file with flash builder or the command line. Flash builder is much easier but I had originally made my swf in flash Pro, so I created a new mobile project in flash builder and loaded the flash pro swf...just mentioning that's a fine option when creating a .bar if you already had a flash Pro thing going on. (I think I have Colin to thank for that quick work around).

[edit] Also just in case this happens to come up with anyone loading a swf from your main swf. You can load swfs of a higher version than the runtime.

For example publish a swf for android/iOS with swf version 17 (air 3.4). If loading this same source swf from your document swf in your .bar (will end up running on Air 3.1 / version 15?) It works fine, just make sure it knows where it is so you don't call non existant methods in the lower runtime.

[JohnFarrell9]

In my opinion, it wouldn't work in Blackberry.