The good news is the phone runs a WebKit browser, the bad news is that the phone still sucks. Nonetheless, without much digging a seemingly wonderful framework was brought to my attention from a company I'm familiar with, Sencha, the company behind the Ext-GWT framework.
Sencha Touch is probably the most powerful HTML5 mobile frameworks out today. However with all its greatness it has one shortcoming: Though they state they have Blackberry 6 support, they really only support one Blackberry 6 device, the Torch.
So what happens when you try to access an app built using Sencha Touch on a non-touch Blackberry? It renders well but you can't click anything, making the app just eye candy.
Alas, there is a quick and dirty solution to it.
NOTE: There are two versions of Sencha Touch, the open source (GPLv3) and the paid commercial license. This solution involves modifying the Sencha Touch source. I only show it as a demonstration, use it as-is.
Sencha Touch provides a wrapper for mouse & touch events to support gestures, dragging and touching. This modification involves making Sencha think of the Blackberry as if it were a standalone browser in terms of input. This may not be the best/only/right solution but it's a start.
I looked at the sencha-touch-debug.js file since its detailed and I could understand what was going on.
The three changes that need to be made are:
Line 4763:
Touch: ('ontouchstart' in window) && (!Ext.is.Desktop && !Ext.is.Blackberry),
Line 13964:
if (!Ext.desktop && !Ext.Blackberry) {...}
Line 18217:
if (Ext.is.Desktop || Ext.is.Blackberry) {...}
There you have it.
Hopefully future versions of Sencha Touch will implement support for non-touch Blackberry 6 devices through a much better way than my hack.
