[Event Report] BlackBerry 10 Jam Jakarta Introduces BlackBerry 10 Platform to Local Developers

BlackBerry 10 Jam Jakarta has been held by RIM on Tuesday, July 10, 2012 at JW Marriot Hotel. telah diselenggarakan oleh RIM pada hari Selasa lalu, 10 Juli 2012 di JW Marriott Hotel. Enthusiasm of the local developers are shown in welcoming the new and different platform by RIM. This BlackBerry 10 platform is indeed very interesting technology-wise, very different with the platform in the previous BlackBerry phones (OS 7 and below).

Although the launching of BlackBerry 10 is postponed until 2013, but that does not hinder the enthusiasm of 350 local developers who came to learn about BlackBerry 10. From the developer’s side, BlackBerry 10 is very interesting because it uses many programming languages in its development such as C/C++, Java Android Runtime, HTML 5, etc. as explained by Muhammad Syumandityo Noor - Evangelist Developer of RIM for Indonesia.

“There are many talented developers in Indonesia and Jakarta is the most important city for BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour Asia. Our goal for BlackBerry 10 Jam is to make sure that our developers all over the world have every source and support they need to prepare the apps before the launch of BlackBerry 10”, says Alec Saunders – VP Developer Relations of RIM.

After a couple of main sessions in BB 10 Jam, there are two sessions, namely Native Track and Web Track. The Native Track session discusses things surrounding native app development. What’s interesting in this session is Cascades. The native app development and UI in BlackBerry 10 with Cascades uses Cascades’ own library and the library uses QT. QT is a library used to build an apps on Nokia’s Symbian platform.

There are also some interesting thing in the Web Track session such as app development for BlackBerry 10 platform using HTML 5, WebGL and several other web frameworks. To be sure, this ease the web developers to try and switch to mobile development, especially to BlackBerry 10 platform.

What is also interesting is the lighting pitch session where several selected local developers are given 2 minutes time to pitch their apps which can run on BlackBerry platform. The winner is Record-It app, a phone recorded app and Aikibot app, a bot designed for the education of children. Both winners get BlackBerry Playbook.

Becoming early adopter may be the thing that drives these developers to attend the event, to be some kind of preparation to develop the apps before the launching of BlackBerry 10 platform in 2013. Although RIM is facing a heavy challenge, but it will still be interesting to see how the loca; developers reacted on this development and bring out new apps for BlackBerry OS.