Alongside the refresh for the BlackBerry® 10 WebWorks™ SDK, we have also released an update to the Ripple Emulator. Never to be left out, Ripple gets a big update with emulation support for some of the latest BlackBerry 10 WebWorks APIs. Let’s get started!
We recently added support for the HTML5 File system API in our web rendering engine and BlackBerry WebWorks. With this release, you can now emulate the file system, both sandboxed and unsandboxed. Ripple will create an area your application can write to, and mimics the file system layout of the device.
A really cool piece of Ripple is the emulation of geolocation. We recently added the live map view that allows you to select a new location on a map, and inject the location into your app code. With this release, we received a great community contribution that really takes geolocation emulation to the next level. Mark Dineen provided a patch that allows you to specify a route to follow by providing a GPX file. Ripple will read the file and inject location update events into your code based on the route provided! Now you can better emulate end-user navigation and movement.
To better reflect the relationship between Cordova and PhoneGap – and due to the fact their core is the same – they are now both under the same entry in the Platforms window, and are represented by version number.
Quite often an application will wish to know when the virtual keyboard is displayed and closed, so that it can react accordingly. You can now fire the relevant keyboard events into your application to test out your logic. In the Events panel when you are emulating the BlackBerry 10 platform, you should now see the blackberry.event.keyboard… events.
HTML5 being inherently cross-platform in nature, there are many applications built using web technologies that are designed to target multiple form factors. Part of designing a cross-platform application is ensuring that your application appears and lays out in a useful way depending on the capabilities of the target platform. CSS media queries are a powerful tool in this regard, and Ripple now emulates media queries based on the target platform you have currently chosen to emulate. Try it out and have some fun with this one.
So, be sure to visit our HTML5 developer site to get all the most recent updates, and particularly the downloads page. Get Ripple, and the latest WebWorks SDK, and start building!
