Geofencing app, in under 24hrs (BlackBerry WebWorks and Community APIs)

It’s impossible not to love the openness and community-oriented aspects of BlackBerry development, especially with WebWorks.

If you are on this bandwagon, make sure you check out the WebWorks community APIs, to extend the capabilities of what you can do with WebWorks. This is what I started doing yesterday and finished today:

GeoBerry GeoMinder – a simple way to geofence reminders for BlackBerry smartphones (available in AppWorld).

WebWorks already gives you a lot of good stuff. Getting the geolocation and running a background service are pretty easy. But I wanted to add a bit more of ‘bling’ to the app, so I added 2 WebWorks Community extensions:

• Location Picker – allows you to use the BB map to select a position, giving you the coordinates
• Notifications – registers your app to fire notifications integrated with the BlackBerry sound profiles (allows you to set up sound, LED and vibrations options for different profiles)

If you want to notify the user, you can do it without this extensions. WebWorks already allows you to do it in different way, either by changing the app icon, displaying an icon(and number) in the home screen banner or by requestion the app to be displayed in the foreground with an alert, for example.

So, it took me under 24hours to have this ready. Going to test it out more extensively now

Update: Forgot to mention that this was only possible by using the great bbUI.js toolkit, which allows you to easily create interfaces that look and behave like the native ones in BlackBerry smartphones.

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