Introducing BlackBerry 10 Support to Sencha Touch

February 05, 2013 | Jamie Avins

We’re excited to announce the availability of BlackBerry 10 support for Sencha Touch! Developers can use Sencha Touch 2.1.1 to create amazing web applications that run fantastically well on the BlackBerry 10 browser. We’ve been collaborating with the team at BlackBerry for the last few months on two paths: first, to optimize Sencha Touch to run on the BlackBerry 10 browser, and second, to build a whole new theme and a set of components to make building BlackBerry 10 applications as easy as possible. Developers can use these new features in Touch 2.1.1 to build new BlackBerry 10 applications or port existing Sencha Touch apps over to run on the BlackBerry 10 platform. BlackBerry has published a handy guide for porting applications.

Download Sencha Touch 2.1.1

Let’s dig in to the details of the new theme and the new components.

Theme

Once you download the latest version of Touch, if you want to check out the theme, you’ll need to enable it. As with all of our themes, in the resources/scss directory, there is a new “bb10.scss” file, which can be used to compile the theme from scratch. Of course, the compiled theme already exists in resources/css as bb10.css.

If you want to get up and running quickly, in examples/kitchensink/app.json, there’s a section of JSON you can uncomment (make sure to comment out the default app.css) to enable the BlackBerry 10 theme for the Kitchen Sink. Load it up in your browser, and you’ll see the Kitchen Sink look and behave like a BlackBerry application.

Components

In addition to the BlackBerry 10 theme, we’ve included a new component that is central to building a BlackBerry user experience: the CrossCut menu. The Kitchen Sink, when viewed from the BlackBerry 10 browser automatically uses the CrossCut menu for navigation, but if you’re interested in using the component, it’s the new Ext.bb.CrossCut component (xtype: crosscut).

We’re excited to have had the chance to work with the BlackBerry team to help make this happen and wanted to say thanks to teams there for collaborating with us to help get Sencha Touch to BlackBerry 10. Build new apps for BlackBerry or port your existing apps, either way, Sencha Touch makes it easy to build to stay on top of device diversity and get to new platforms like BlackBerry 10 as fast as possible.