There is a slight change in Cascades 10.3 dealing with conditional variables based off of the length of the hint text of a field. For example the following code (designed to only show the TextField when the hint text is not an empty string) would work on BlackBerry 10.2 but fails when run on BlackBerry 10.3

Container
{
    property alias hint:newTextField.hintText
    property alias text:lbl.text
    Label
    {
        id:lbl
        multiline:true
    }
    TextField
    {
        id:newTextField
        visible:
	{
            if(hint.length>0)
            {
                true
            }
            else
            {
                false
            }
        }
    }
}

Fortunately the work around for this is extremely simple. You just need to create (and set) an additional alias for the visibility of the field. This is shown below…

Container
{
    property alias hint:newTextField.hintText
    property alias text:lbl.text
    property alias showTextField:newTextField.visible
    Label
    {
        id:lbl
        multiline:true
    }
    TextField
    {
        id:newTextField
    }
}

I have made claims about my Erie Canal app being the first BlackBerry app to make use of the Ionic framework, so it should be worth pointing out how this was done. Technically the Ionic framework only support iOS and Android, but it is based off of Cordova just like BlackBerry’s Webworks framework is. Knowing how well BlackBerry 10 supports HTML5 I assumed that it was likely that supporting this new framework would be no trouble at all.

Using either BlackBerry Webworks or the Ionic Framework require quite a bit of set up involving the installation of Node.js and Cordova but once everything is set up, the process is fairly simple. First create two separate instances of your new project, one with the Ionic framework, and one with BlackBerry webworks. Then copy over the www/lib folder from the Ionic project to the BlackBerry project. This folder includes all of the css and javascript that make up the Ionic framework (and also includes the libraries needed to support angular.js). Once this folder is included, BlackBerry HTML5 apps can be compiled as normal.

In fact the entire www folder can be shared between BlackBerry, Android, and iOS versions of the app with the platform differences mostly taking place in manifest files and the actual compilation of the apps.

After spending months refusing to be honest with developers about the specs for the Z3, it has finally been revealed that the phone has a 540×960 resolution. For developers the phone presents itself as 720×1280 device and then downscales the content to 75% of the size, which is exactly what I predicted two months ago.

While BlackBerry claims that this will work flawlessly and magically, that is not exactly the case. Downscalling content such as this has some issues, mainly that any UI elements that are only a single pixel wide have a one in four chance of disappearing completely. Scaling can work, but it is best when you are scaling up and are doing so by a power of two. This is why iOS devices doubled their horizontal and vertical resolutions when they switched to a higher res format.

In fact, any element with a size less than 4 pixels has the possibility of looking to be a bit off. The images below show the result of scaling a 1×1 pixel grid (in pink), a 2×2 pixel grid (in blue), and a 4×4 pixel grid (in orange).

Grids are kindof a worst case scenario, so most apps actually won’t look too bad. But nothing is going to look great.

What is worse is that the device really believes itself to be a different resolution than it is. As such developers have no simulator, and screenshots are the same 720×1280 resolution that the Z30 produces. This also implies that all text (which is full of the thin strokes that are susceptible to issues) also goes through this identical scaling process.

At $190 the BlackBerry Z3 is not significantly cheaper than the Z10, so there is no reason that this should be your smartphone of choice. Pay a little extra and get something better.