In the past month or so I've been dabbling around in my free time with developing applications for the BlackBerry PlayBook. There were two simple reasons for this. First of all RIM's 'WebWorks' SDK allows applications to be developed as pure HTML5 applications which is obviously pretty awesome for a front-end guy like me. Secondly the fact that RIM is handing out free PlayBooks may have had something to do with it. By now I have finished two applications that are available for free in BlackBerry AppWorld and I'm working on a third one. Based on the first two applications RIM has already deemed me worthy of receiving a free PlayBook so I'll be the proud owner of one of these puppies as soon as they hit the market. Go me!

BlackBerry PlayBook: awesome.

So what's it like, developing for the BlackBerry PlayBook? There's quite a lot to talk about which is why I figured I'd do a little writeup on it and provide some completely unsolicited advice to RIM for the future. I'm just going to pretend for a while that I'm Head of Tablet Development at RIM. Here's what I would do and what I would not do.

I just ran into JSFiddle. An absolutely AWESOME way to showcase html/javascript/css examples. Here's my earlier CSS3 LCD display example embedded right into this post.

GREAT stuff!

Lately I've been quite busy messing around with HTML5. Since RIM was so kind to offer a free BlackBerry PlayBook for anyone who develops an app for it I figured I'd go for it. By now it has all horribly ran out of hand and it's becoming a pretty awesome application. A lot of functionality is done but I'm still working on an in-application animation editor which will hopefully allow people to go nuts with it. Have a look at the screencast and let me know what you think!

Screamager will hopefully be available on the day the PlayBook launches. After that I'll be working on porting it to HP WebOS, iOS and Android.

You're probably all thinking I must be dead but... I'm not. I suppose those who keep an eye on the Tumblr box at the bottom of this page know but for everyone else: I'm still alive. I've been busy lately with HTML5 and some application programming for the upcoming BlackBerry PlayBook. In one of the apps I made for the PlayBook i wanted to have a realistic looking LCD screen. I managed to achieve this with @font-face and some CSS3 trickery. I figured this would be something nice to share with you all which is why I put up a small example page. The effect is truly convincing and fairly easy to achieve. So, if you're dealing with mobile which is almost exclusively WebKit or you just don't care about Internet Explorer here's what can be achieved:

If you like it, head over to the example page for the code.