RIM's vice president of developer releations, Alec Saunders, officially unveiled RIM's developer toolkit for BlackBerry 10 during his BlackBerry 10 Jam keynote here at BlackBerry World. Included with the toolkit is RIM's BlackBerry 10 Native SDK with Cascades to help create graphically rich apps for BlackBerry 10 and the BlackBerry PlayBook 2.0 operating systems in C/C++ using Qt.
By using the Native SDK developers get access to BlackBerry 10's APIs, allowing them to create apps that work with BlackBerry 10's payment services and push notifications features. The toolkit also offers support for HTML 5 developers through RIM's BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK. According to RIM, the WebWorks SDK will allow developers to use HTML 5 and CSS to build new apps for BlackBerry 10 and PlayBook 2.0 that will offer "native-like" capabilities.
During his announcement, Saunders said he understands the frustration developers have faced waiting for RIM to release the BlackBerry 10 developer toolkit and admitted that the wait had been just as frustrating for him. In fact, prior to his announcement, Saunders was featured as the lead singer in a music video lamenting the bad press RIM has received in the past year, as well as the fact that RIM was unable to show off a final version of BlackBerry 10 here at BlackBerry World.
But Saunders later went on to express RIM's support for app developers, something the company desperately needs. RIM is already well behind both Apple and Android in terms of the number of apps available for the operating systems.
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