BlackBerry 10 Mini Jam and the Excited Nigerian Developers

More than seventy entrepreneurial mobile developers from the Nigerian developer community attended the BlackBerry10 Mini Jam developer event in Lagos recently at the CcHub in Sabo, Yaba, showing a high level of interest in designing apps for the forth coming BlackBerry10 platform.

To date, RIM has held BlackBerry 10 developer events in cities across North America,Europe, the Asia Pacific and now in Africa, bringing developers around the world the latest information about BlackBerry 10 and the opportunities the new platform offers for creating powerful apps.

RIM has transformed the developer experience with BlackBerry 10, creating an open platform to enable developers to leverage their range of existing skills, while at the same time providing them with powerful new tools to simplify the development process.

“It was fantastic to see the level of excitement among developers for the BlackBerry 10 platform,” said Waldi Wepener, Regional Director for East, West and Central Africa at BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion. “Whether developers choose to develop HTML5 apps or native apps, our environment will enable them to use their best skills to quickly create apps with great user experiences.”

Developers excited to create BlackBerry 10 apps

There is already growing excitement among developers in Nigeria and their enthusiasm for BlackBerry 10 was evident as people queued in the room to pitch and share ideas and mingle with other BlackBerry developers.

In a competition, the BlackBerry application “Make We Bet” was chosen by the attending delegates as the most innovative application, winning a BlackBerry 10 DevAlpha prototype for mobile development, and a BlackBerry® Playbook™ tablet. William Ukoh, the creator of “Make We Bet” said: “For some years, BlackBerry has been an appealing platform for me and my colleagues. I wanted to take the opportunity to meet with my peers and learn more about the BlackBerry platform. The experience has been worthwhile.”

Femi Longe, a Co-Founder of the CcHub, said : “We were impressed after seeing what BlackBerry 10 has to offer, and we are excited by an even closer look at the platform and its capabilities at the BlackBerry 10 Mini Jam sessions in Lagos. At CcHub, we have strong ties with the developer community and encouraging development is our goal. We’re eager to start utilising the updated UI features offered by Cascades in BlackBerry 10 and we look forward to enriching the user experience to ensure our BlackBerry-based solutions and applications remain attractive and cutting edge in the competitive smartphone arena.”

Currently in beta, the BlackBerry 10 developer toolkit includes the BlackBerry® 10Native SDK with Cascades, which allows developers to create graphically rich, high performance native applications in C/C++. The Native SDK for BlackBerry 10 has a rich set of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that give developers access to core device features and a range of BlackBerry application services, such as Push and Payment services. Cascades is a powerful native application development toolset that allows developers to easily build visually stunning applications in C/C++ or QML without having to write complex, low-level graphics code. Earlier this month,RIM released an update of the BlackBerry 10 developer toolkits.