Today, we are very pleased to announce that we are adding support for BlackBerry WebWorks 2.0.0 to Ripple. This support includes most of the APIs in the WebWorks stack as well skinning for 3 supported BlackBerry devices (The BlackBerry Torch, BlackBerry Bold, and the BlackBerry PlayBook).

If you don’t already have Ripple installed, we invite you to install it and take it for a test drive. You can also visit our docs page to see the extent of the WebWorks support as well as what’s new in this release.

We also invite you to read more about this release and other great news about the WebWorks road map on the BlackBerry developer blog.

Happy coding!

Today, we are thrilled to announce that tinyHippos Inc. has been acquired by Research In Motion (RIM).

We are extremely excited about our future at RIM and continuing to grow and support Ripple. This is a great step towards our goal of providing a cross-platform mobile application development and testing tool to developers worldwide.  Specifically, we will be working to bring BlackBerry support to the Ripple product.

We also want to reassure all new and existing users that we expect that the Ripple product will continue to be offered for download and the team will continue to develop features, provide support, and help grow the mobile application developer community.

We would like to extend a special thank you to all of you that have supported and believed in us.

More information here: http://devblog.blackberry.com/2011/03/rim-welcomes-tinyhippos/

Stay tuned for more details.

If you’d like to take The Ripple Mobile Environment Emulator for a spin, please visit our product site at http://ripple.tinyhippos.com

The PhoneGap Start application can be found here: http://github.com/phonegap/phonegap-start

We have enhanced the PhoneGap Start application to gracefully handle a GPS time out, for that source code, please visit: https://github.com/tinyhippos/ripple_demo/tree/master/public/phonegap

A big thanks to Ernst & Young and Communitech for sponsoring the event and supplying all the beer and all-you-can eat poutine buffet.  Another Big thanks goes out to Redwoods Media for hosting this event and making it a huge success!   There were 9 start-ups present last night and over 160 local students from the University of Waterloo, Wilfrid Laurier, and Conestoga College. The students were given the opportunity to meet the Founders, CEO’s and CTO’s of many great startups!

If you missed the event – take a minute and check out these startups!

Redwoods Media (http://www.redwoodsmedia.com/)

InfiniDy Corp. (http://www.infinidycorp.com/v1/)

tinyHippos (http://tinyhippos.com/)

Enflick (http://www.enflick.com/)

Kik (http://kik.com/)

Cyborg Trading Systems (http://www.cyborgtrading.com)

Canadian Cloud Computing (http://www.canadiancloud.com/)

Skillter Inc. (http://www.skillter.com)

Miovision Technologies Inc. (http://www.miovision.com)

StudyMonkey (http://www.studymonkey.ca)

Please join us to listen to our CTO, Dan Silivestru speak at Communitech’s new Mobile Peer2Peer series on February 23rd at the Communitech Hub at noon.  Sign up is free!

Topic: The native app…is it dying? With all the fragmentation in the mobile marketplace, building mobile apps largely means 1 app per platform… will the native app survive?  Are HTML5 Mobile apps the answer? With frameworks such as PhoneGap, Appcelerator,  and browser/cloud based development, testing and deployment tools… They just might be.

Hope to see you there!

When I reflect back on the best moments and opportunities in my career, it’s clear to me that 2 things are always present: smart, passionate people, and a market and technology that really excites me.  I have found both of these in large amounts at tinyHippos.

The mobile app space is a very fast moving, rapidly growing and exciting one.  It’s a space I’m very passionate about – I carry around an iPhone 4, BlackBerry Torch, and Nexus One!  Today, getting your mobile apps onto all the important platforms is a daunting, expensive and frustrating task for app developers.  But we see a transition underway – a move to more open web-based technologies as the platform to build upon.  This will also enable millions of traditional web developers to bring their expertise to the smartphone world. And that’s a good thing, because there will be over 500 million smartphones shipping in 2014, and we’re going to need lots of great developers to create all the wonderful apps those users will need. tinyHippos is going to help make this new world evolve by helping these developers get their products to market faster, cheaper and with much higher quality.

We’re a small company (today), but we’re blessed to be living here in Waterloo, in the heart of a rich support ecosystem. The resources at Communitech and the advisors and investors we have access to are helping to scale us up quickly.

Stay tuned for many upcoming exciting announcements.  It’s going to be a lot of hard work, but it’s also going to be a lot of fun!

However, to build a truly successful business, we realize that it takes more then just technology and passion. Over the past year, we’ve had the pleasure of working closely with Mark J. McArdle, our Executive In Residence through Communitech. Mark’s passion, knowledge, and guidance while working with us made him a clear choice as a future member of the tinyHippos team. Today, we are very pleased to announce that Mark will be joining tinyHippos as our CEO.

Mark is a seasoned technology executive, with over 18 years of technical experience in some of the best brands in Technology. We look forward to Mark brining the knowledge and experience he has built over the years at companies such as MKS, OpenText, PGP and McAfee to our team.

Please join us in welcoming Mark, the newest tinyHippo to the team!

One morning we were talking about how to solve this problem when Brent mentioned a plan that he thought might work.  We all debated and agreed that it sounded like it might work.  As we talked, we started to realize that for this to work it would require a rather large refactoring of the entire bootup process of Ripple; basically a rewrite.  We were about to put this on the backlog to forever rot when Dan challenged us to give it a try. Brent and I went off for the day to see if we could prototype a simple example of the idea to see if it would even work.

I would be lying to you if I said that we solved anything this first day. We spent the day with Ripple throwing errors, causing chaos, and crashing our browser. It was a challenging day and Brent and I left the office feeling spent and deflated. It wasn’t until Brent spent an hour or so that evening and ended up with a “working” prototype, that we even knew what we were attempting to do was possible.

Fueled by this small glimpse of success we hammered out the rest of the code to get it working over the next couple of days. The end result was our 0.4.0 release where we are now able to support some of the more complex mobile web frameworks.

Embarking on this path could be viewed as risky and even potentially wasteful. However, we find that by applying a few basic rules when going down one of these “rabbit holes”, these kind of exercises have helped us take Ripple to the next level. Here are the rules we use when we go exploring the unknown:

Try it: The best way to see if an idea will work is to try it! Breaking down the idea into a manageable chunk to prototype out will allow you to quickly see if it is possible. Keep the prototype simple but not trivial. The success or failure of the prototype should give you a good idea about the end result.

Timebox it: It is very easy to get lost while working on a prototype, it will feel like you are shaving a yak so it is important to timebox your work.  At the end of the alloted time you should be able to give your idea a yes or a no.

Don’t be married to it: During our progress we deleted a lot of code. We were proud of that code and it was battle tested, under test and generally awesome.  This code was the result of a lot of blood, sweat and tears and was hard to part with. Just because the code works and is in production, it doesn’t mean it should continue to live forever. The same can be said about your new code. It might have felt like a good idea, and you are a few days in and success is just around the corner, but not all attempts will be successful and the sooner you call it quits the better.

Pair it: Don’t go down the “rabbit hole” alone. Trying new things is scary. The entire first day Ripple was broken and not even close to working. A lot of times during that day we second guessed our approach and lost track of where we were. Having another person down in the weeds with you helps keep you from getting lost.

Happy coding…

Here are the features and bug fixes included in this release

- Accelerometer: A new interface for controlling the accelerometer. You really have to use it to appreciate it.
- Full support for mobile web JavaScript / UI frame works like jQTouch, Sencha, etc.
- API objects are available immediately, you no longer need to wait for the document load event
- Improved loading time
- Support for WAC 1.0 spec

You can find our full change log here: http://rippledocs.tinyhippos.com/index.html#changelog

We had a lot of fun on this release, we even built some of the features while on the move :-)

So how can you get the latest and greatest? If you already have Ripple installed, it will just auto update. To get Ripple please go to the download page and install it, only takes a couple of seconds!

Once you’ve installed Ripple, you can visit our docs site to learn more about using it: http://rippledocs.tinyhippos.com/index.html#ripple_tour

Happy coding!

The tinyHippos team.

Here at tinyHippos we have been following the development of PhoneGap (www.phonegap.com). They have released a mobile-spec for their platform which is a series of unit tests that asserts that the expected API methods are present on the device. The project is hosted on github (here) and is available for everyone to use and add too. It wasn’t something we have seen before while working on other platforms and when compared to the amount of code that goes into developing a mobile platform it isn’t a huge portion of the codebase. When I grabbed the source and started running it on Ripple (ripple.tinyhippos.com) I was reminded of the bass section and how their small addition to the song made it into something great.

I took the time this weekend to add in support for passing a large portion of the unit tests for phonegap. The experience was amazing and I was able to quickly build up support for the portions of phonegap that was missing from ripple:

We only have most of the framework stubbed in at the moment, but the framework exists in ripple in it’s entirety. We understand that this is a small addition to our emulation of the platform but we hope that you agree that it is the building blocks of a great testing platform.

If you would like to try Ripple and give us some feedback of what you think, you can download the beta here.