Devs who have already written a BlackBerry WebWorks app for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet or BlackBerry smartphone and are wondering how to port it from one to the other, RIM has pieced some tips together via DevBlog. Check below for details
Here are a few tips and tricks to consider before starting your porting efforts:
BlackBerry WebWorks APIs: There are differences between the BlackBerry WebWorks API sets for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet and the BlackBerry smartphone, which are documented in the BlackBerry WebWorks API Reference Guide. Some APIs are available only in the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK for Tablet OS, while others are only available in the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK for smartphones. This gap in functional parity is due to the availability of the given feature in the underlying OS. We’ve also recently updated the BlackBerry WebWorks API reference guide to make it more developer-friendly by bringing together both sets of APIs into a single view that makes it easy to see which APIs are supported on each platform. Note that custom JavaScript® extensions are only available on the smartphone version, so if you’ve implemented any of these extensions, they will not be supported on the BlackBerry Tablet OS.Check out the latest BlackBerry WebWorks API Reference Guide.
Optimization: Your BlackBerry WebWorks application may render faster or perform better while running on the tablet, since its hardware specifications are more advanced as compared to the smartphone. However, the BlackBerry 7 OS introduces a “Just In Time” loader for JavaScript which, coupled with the new smartphone hardware, should vastly improve performance. If you are using JavaScript to perform animations, transitions or to conduct intensive computations in your BlackBerry smartphone application, you should look at ways to optimize your code to improve performance. Download the device andBlackBerry PlayBook tablet simulators to validate performance.
Adobe® Flash® Content: If your application contains Adobe Flash content, note that it will be supported on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet only.
Icon Sizes: Icon sizes are different on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet as compared to the BlackBerry smartphone. Take a look at the UI Guidelines document for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet and UI guidelines for smartphones to understand best practices for creating application icons.
Ripple Development Tools: Our friends at tinyHippos have created a tool called Ripple that allows you to easily develop, test, and debug your application for both the BlackBerry smartphone and tablet platforms. Check out the blog post on the Ripple Emulator beta program here. We highly recommend using this tool to develop your BlackBerry WebWorks applications as it provides an easy way to develop for both platforms.
Code Signing: There are separate code signing processes for signing BlackBerry PlayBook tablet versus BlackBerry smartphone apps. Take a look at the guide here on how to sign tablet applications and thisknowledge base article on signing your BlackBerry WebWorks application for a smartphone.
More info via DevBlog