BlackBerry Developer's Blog

One important announcement from the BlackBerry® Developer Conference that we didn’t want to go overlooked on the BlackBerry Developer’s Blog was the release of BlackBerry® Theme Studio v5.0. Because the new version of BlackBerry Theme Studio makes it easier for BlackBerry® smartphone users to build their own BlackBerry themes, our friend Mark Rathwell (Product Manager, BlackBerry Application Platform) has been blogging some great posts on the Inside BlackBerry blog. Of course, we couldn’t leave the BlackBerry developer community hanging, so below is a brief conversation I was able to have with Mark in San Francisco.

Explain the BlackBerry Theme Studio announcement in a nutshell.

The BlackBerry developer community has really been excited about using BlackBerry themes to personalize their BlackBerry experience. We wanted to do more to help our community of users in this respect so we're announcing two things today. First, we're now accepting themes in BlackBerry App World™. We'll launch the category to consumers in December but theme creators can submit their themes starting today.

 

Second, we're announcing BlackBerry Theme Studio v5.0, the next version of the product formerly known as the Plazmic Content Developer's Kit - or 'CDK' for short. We wanted to have a great new version of the product with some killer new features like adding ringtones and screen transitions and making themes for the new BlackBerry® Bold™ 9700 and BlackBerry® Storm2™ smartphones. We also wanted to make the theme creation process even easier and we've got some great new enhancements here as well.

 

Why should the BlackBerry developer community be excited?

 

It’s generally far faster to make a theme than an app, especially due to the new BlackBerry Theme Studio 5.0, so it can be a lower development cost. The prices themes command are often comparable to an application and consumers want them. The BlackBerry Theme Studio v5.0 and BlackBerry App World announcements give developers the tool and the distribution channel too. Plus, you can use themes to market your apps, company and products etc.

If you’re interested in learning more about BlackBerry theme creation, make sure to check out these two exciting Inside BlackBerry posts!

BlackBerry Theme Studio v5.0 - Build your own BlackBerry Theme!

BlackBerry Theme Studio - Build your own BlackBerry Theme! (Part Two)

Welcome to BlackBerry® Developer Resource Fridays (new name, same great taste, ed.), a reoccurring event here on the BlackBerry Developer’s Blog. Each Friday we’ll keep you up to date on helpful articles that have been added to the Developer Knowledge Base and other new additions to the BlackBerry Developer Zone. Here are this week’s pearls of wisdom:

BlackBerry® Bold™ 9700 BlackBerry Smartphone Simulator (v5.0.0.337)

BlackBerry® Storm™ 9550 BlackBerry Smartphone Simulator (v5.0.0.334)

BlackBerry® Curve™ 8530 BlackBerry Smartphone Simulator (v5.0.0.337)

Networking Transports II (Video)

Tune in next week for more Developer Resource Friday fun, and don’t forget to post a comment about your favorite article and articles you would like to see!

By chance, I happened to bump into Irv Henderson, Yahoo! Vice President of Global Mobile Products after his participation in the BlackBerry® Developer Conference Keynote. It was a great informal chat and we made promises to get some firm content on the BlackBerry Developer’s Blog. While I strongly recommend you watch Mr. Henderson’s portion of the keynote, I believe our conversation below about Yahoo!’s presence on BlackBerry smartphones is just as worthy. Read on!

We were discussing Yahoo!’s My Favorites tab on the mobile homepage and I was wondering if you could expand on what you were saying about adding any web feed…

At a high level, users want access to the same content and services on PC and Mobile - regardless of where they are and what screen they're using. Our new mobile homepage is completely personalized and based around three core principles – enabling people to:

• Discover via results from Yahoo!'s award-winning mobile Search, editor-selected content and news
• Stay connected through access to email and social networking accounts from the most popular Web providers, as well as instant messaging, address book, and calendar functions.
• Stay informed by bringing their favorite Web content --sports, news, local information, RSS feeds, weather, stocks, horoscopes, and more -- to a single location.

The ‘My Favorites’ tab on the mobile homepage allows users to ‘add anything’ to their mobile experience and customize it based on their interests and communities. Further, any changes you make to Yahoo! on the PC (i.e. adding a stock to Yahoo! Finance, adding a RSS feed to My Yahoo!, adding an app to the new Yahoo! PC front page, etc.) will be reflected next time you’re on Yahoo!’s mobile homepage, we’ll prompt you to see if you want to add the same thing to your mobile experience.

As we create seamless mobile extensions and tighter connections between PC and mobile, we’re bringing their personalized experiences directly to the mobile environment.  

You had mentioned that Yahoo! Messenger was one of your favorite applications. How will the new BlackBerry APIs and services offered help to push that app forward now that IM apps have become so popular on BlackBerry® smartphones?

First of all, let me say we’re thrilled with the new BlackBerry APIs. Leveraging the BlackBerry® Widget Software Development Kit (SDK)  we’re collaborating to make the Yahoo! mobile homepage even more compelling by enabling push notifications, geo-location from the BlackBerry® Browser and a seamless transition in navigating from the browser into native applications. Exposing the BlackBerry® Push APIs as a part of the core platform capability has the potential to transform real time communication in so far as it now allows us to take the IM experience well beyond a dedicated Yahoo! Messenger.  It opens up opportunities for developers to use our APIs and integrate them into applications. It also allows for collaboration with other IM communities. 

What is the potential for customization so that users can build their own personalized Yahoo! Experience on their BlackBerry smartphone?

The potential is limitless - Yahoo!’s mobile homepage (http://m.yahoo.com) simplifies the mobile experience and allows consumers to bring together their favorite content and services from anywhere across the Internet in one location. As we work together to integrate the new BlackBerry APIs, we’ll be able to provide BlackBerry users with the best possible Yahoo! experience on their smartphones.   

Is the intent to build a great top level Yahoo! experience and then have people find great applications like Fantasy Sports? Or is it the opposite where people drill up from the apps? Or both? How do you balance targeted user experiences with all the great information/services coming out of Yahoo!?

We think the answer is both. For instance, you can come from the Yahoo! Mobile experience into the Fantasy Football application, or you can approach it as a Fantasy user who wants to see what Yahoo! has to offer. Both ways are great examples of how sharing content and services can lead to an enriched overall user experience.  We are focused on building products that deliver compelling and personally relevant mobile experiences for our users.  We find balance by letting them choose which information and services they want on their mobile phone and by making them aware that there is a seamless mobile experience for the Yahoo! services they use on the PC. Mobile is a continuation and complement to the overall Internet experience, not something separate.

Speak about Yahoo! Pipes and its possibilities on mobile. 

We think Pipes offers an interesting composition and presentment tool for mashing up content.  We are in the early days in working out a product implementation on mobile.  More broadly, Yahoo! provides many opportunities for developers to create their own services both on the PC and mobile.  We integrate things like SearchMonkey into our PC and mobile search results, allowing developers to use structured data to make Yahoo! Search results more useful and visually appealing, and drive more relevant traffic to their sites.  Specific to mobile, Yahoo! Blueprint is a technology for creating mobile web sites for many different types of mobile phones. Developers can use the technology that powers Yahoo! mobile products to reach mobile users on thousands of devices.

What is the most important new BlackBerry service or platform enhancement now offered by RIM for Yahoo!? Geo targeting, the advertising services? Is it a combination?

It’s clearly a combination.  We think the BlackBerry team has thought carefully about the prioritization of the APIs.  If we had to choose though, it would be the cell site geo-location capabilities as this opens the door for us to deliver even more compelling and relevant experiences.

There was so much going on at the BlackBerry® Developer Conference last week that it was impossible to cover it all during our daily wrap ups. This week we’re playing catch up and posting BlackBerry Developer Conference content that was too good to miss.

For example, I had the opportunity to attend the great COM05 “Lessons Learned - Building the 7digitalMusic Store” session led by James Shannon of DevelopIQ. This was a can’t miss session because DevelopIQ had just won the BlackBerry Partner Fund Developer Challenge for their work on the 7digital BlackBerry app. Read my interview with James about his session, winning the Developer Challenge and BlackBerry development.

What were the key takeaways you wanted developers to walk away with from your session?

I felt the key takeaways were really broken into two areas - technical and operational. From a technical perspective, I wanted to get across that a compelling consumer user experience is not just about an appealing UI, but also the optimization of the ‘invisible’ factors – from bandwidth optimization, content pre-loading and caching through to efficient ways to paint the UI and selective use of background threads. Also, that the BlackBerry® platform offers developers many powerful device integration APIs that really transform the user experience – for instance in our case, Bluetooth® audio streaming and integrated media key support. From an operational perspective the key takeaways were to use analytics to better understand your users and their usage patterns as well as providing comprehensive in-app support, with the aim to resolve every support query on the first reply.

What are your thoughts on winning the BlackBerry Partner Fund Developer Challenge?

It’s clearly an honor and great kudos for our development/QA team. However, I think the greatest benefit will be the effect on the profile of music on BlackBerry® smartphones. A clear message needs to be broadcast that the BlackBerry smartphone is a platform that can take mobile music to the next level. We have a great ecosystem of music applications that provide everything from identification through discovery to advanced playback features, and we now have a music store hub that glues all of these together to provide a user experience that offers so much more than other mobile platforms.

Describe some of the unique considerations for making music available on mobile devices.

As an mp3 download store and advanced media player, the 7digital application’s top priority is to maintain the optimum performance of a user’s BlackBerry smartphone – whether it’s by ensuring we’re playing music in the background in a memory & battery efficient manner, or allowing the user to make an impulse purchase, perform a quick download on the carrier network and then automatically replace it with high quality media when they return to Wi-Fi®. We therefore spent considerable time optimizing the download user experience and ensuring we were delivering and playing media in the most memory and battery efficient manner.

Is platform fragmentation a challenge?

Fragmentation is the challenge of mobile. How do device manufacturers innovate whilst providing a consistent platform and form factor for developers to create compelling applications? I actually think RIM does a pretty good job here – we have robust forward compatibility, powerful pre-processor support and device simulators that provide realistic performance when it comes to development and testing. We made a decision to support BlackBerry OS 4.6 and higher, which reduced our challenge to a certain extent. We also needed to take various screen resolutions into account, as well as display rotation.  We took the approach from day one to abstract many of the layout/display size factors from the application logic itself, thereby making the application easier to maintain as new devices are launched and new display sizes require supporting – this made it significantly easier.

In what ways will the new BlackBerry services or platform enhancements announced at the BlackBerry Developer Conference help you moving forward?

The new in-app purchasing and advertising APIs are huge. It’s been well proven that a free application can lead to greater downstream revenues than paid-for applications since it removes so much of the initial barrier in acquiring the user. It also offers consumers choice and application developers recurring revenues, since modular applications may be easily offered that allow users to incrementally purchase features or content over time. I think OpenGL ES support was also an exciting milestone for the BlackBerry platform.

What else would you like to see?

Robust support for shared libraries on the BlackBerry platform would create better options for inter-application integration, another opportunity for developers to commercialize or open-source their work as well as allowing larger developers to create common libraries shared between several of their applications – thereby saving the end user memory on their devices.

You placed an emphasis upon analytics in your session… Why do you feel it’s so important?

Analytics are critical to mobile consumer applications. With limited screen real estate, multiple carriers, regions and device models, it’s important to understand where and how your application is being used. It allows product management to make feature prioritization and user interface enhancements based on concrete data, and allows you to measure the impact of various marketing strategies on your application usage.

Talk to me about pre-processing and why you’re a proponent…

Pre-processing allows us to support multiple BlackBerry OS builds/APIs from a single codeline. This was important for us since the majority of variances between the builds were largely either to support additional hardware features (like media keys) or the BlackBerry® Storm™ touch-screen interface. There are other good strategies for multiple OS support, but these approaches weren’t really justified or appropriate in our case.

What’s the future of the 7digital app?

Our vision for 7digital is to become the hub of music on BlackBerry – whether it’s acting as the purchase & download gateway for radio or streaming apps, offering the user location-based recommendations for their favorite band’s local tour dates, or integrating your music preferences with your social network. You’ll be seeing several updated releases over the next few months, each integrating feedback from our growing user community and adding additional compelling features.

There's no better way to wrap up a developer event than with robots, and that's exactly what took place on Thursday at the BlackBerry Developer Conference. Contestants were challenged to post their best time navigating their LEGO® MINDSTORM robot friend through a perilous obstacle course using a BlackBerry Storm2 smartphone. Check out the best times below and thanks to everyone that helped make this week so much fun!

FIRST PLACE (56.95)
James White – TDC Group (BlackBerry®  Storm2 smartphone + LEGO® MINDSTORM robot)

SECOND PLACE (62.269)
Mathias Marquardt – emacberry.com (BlackBerry Storm2 smartphone)
 
THIRD PLACE (65)
Thomas Krueger – Cortado (BlackBerry Storm2 smartphone)

FOURTH PLACE (65.978)
Daniel Baird – Slacker (BlackBerry Storm2 smartphone)

We’ve been working hard to bring you coverage of the BlackBerry® Developer Conference this past week, but sometimes a photo can articulate an experience far better than any blog post could. Enjoy these photos from the show, and hit the link below if you’re interested in see more!

http://www.blackberrydeveloperconference.com/overview/photo-gallery

BlackBerry Partner Fund Developer Challenge

BlackBerry Developer Conference Breakout Sessions

BlackBerry Developer Conference Mobility Pavilion

BlackBerry Developer Conference Mobility Pavilion

LEGO BlackBerry Smartphone

Taking a break from visiting the great sessions at the 2009 BlackBerry® Developer Conference, I began to wander around the Mobility Pavilion. By chance, I bumped into Terry Hughes, President of Widality (formerly Redwood Technologies). Terry mentioned that he had begun blogging himself, and recently published a post on insights his company had gained from having their Call Time Tracker application in BlackBerry App World™. After checking the post out, I knew it would be something great to share with our readers. Here’s a sneak peak at some of the information Widality gained by having Call Time Tracker in BlackBerry App World:

• We have built up a loyal fan base of users who write great reviews and who have joined focus groups to help us as we evolve; good reviews are critical for success, and we have a 90% positive rating.
• It was fascinating to see how the early adopters behaved so differently to the early majority, and how our service had to evolve as our users matured.
• We learned how subtle changes in wording can have a major impact on such a large user base, so we refined the wording of all of our materials as we evolved.

To read the rest of the post (highly recommended), click on the link below:

http://www.momentem.net/news-popular-business-app.asp

Mike Kirkup, as well as being the Director of Developer Relations at Research In Motion, runs the show at the BlackBerry Developer’s Blog, so I couldn’t miss his session, DEV50 “Designing the Optimal BlackBerry Application: Understanding Market Dynamics and Mobile Applic.... Mike outlined important market dynamics for BlackBerry smartphones to a very interested audience. I took the opportunity to sit down with Mike to dig deeper on some key points from his session.

Tons of questions and photos taken during your session today!! What’s your take away from that?

There is pent up demand from our development community to better understand the market dynamics, the opportunities and the risks. I want to enable our developers to make more informed decisions about where to invest in our platform.

What do you think about their specific questions around demographics and regional breakdown?

I think it really speaks to the hunger for information to drive better decisions being made about investing in the BlackBerry platform.  As the platform continues to grow we need to be able to share this information with everyone as much as possible.

Talk more about your snowball effect metaphor and the need for developers to focus on OS version and not smartphone version.

The BlackBerry platform is “forwards compatible” in our technical jargon, meaning that if you write your application for OS 4.2.1 it will run on all future handheld software versions after and including 4.2.1.  I call this the snowball effect because at each version of the operating system contains all the APIs of previous versions, and we are constantly adding more and more APIs to the platform. (For how the snowball effect is related to the Paradox of Choice – see below.)

What specific information did you want to make sure Developers took away from your session?

Two things, actually.  First, a better understanding of how we are responding to the requests of the community for better information to help guide their decisions.   Second, I wanted the developers to fully understand their options for how to handle platform fragmentation.

You mentioned the Paradox of Choice – can you elaborate?

Developers want to leverage the latest and greatest APIs. However, they still need to support older versions of in-market software.  For example, if you develop for OS 4.2.1 or higher your application can run on 97% of the BlackBerry smartphones in-market today.  But that kind of lowest common denominator approach causes challenges for developers because their customers expect more on the latest BlackBerry smartphone.  This is the paradox of choice.

The best way to handle the paradox of choice is to aim for the best of both worlds through use of the preprocessor. We’ll be talking about the preprocessor a lot more on the BlackBerry Developer’s Blog, so stay tuned!

I had the opportunity to attend the DEV09 “Game On: Building High Quality Games for BlackBerry Smartphones” session today, which discussed user expectations for BlackBerry smartphone games and how to implement to meet those expectations. I’m glad I did. Talking game development is always fun, but this session was particularly exciting because it delved deeper into the announced OpenGL ES support and how that supports game development. I had a chance to sit down with Research In Motion Application Developer Consultant Brian Zubert after the session to discuss all this and a little more. Read on! 

Talk to me a bit about the OpenGL announcement and how it affects BlackBerry gaming.

I couldn't be happier about the OpenGL announcement. It's been a lot of fun over the last few months, working with companies who've been my childhood heroes.  With the likes of Electronic Arts and Sega bringing Need for Speed Shift and Super Monkey Ball to BlackBerry smartphones respectively, it's a very exciting time for mobile gaming on the BlackBerry platform.  

The best part of it all is that OpenGL benefits more than just game developers.  We had one developer here showing a photo viewer in the DEV41 session. With just a couple of weeks worth of effort, these guys were able to build out pieces that will really enhance their applications.  I honestly can't wait to see some of the other uses that people come up with.

Can you sum up how to approach BlackBerry gaming in a nutshell?

Know the device, know the user.  Make the user feels like the game was made just for their BlackBerry smartphone and just for their lifestyle.  What do I mean by that?  Follow the user interaction models of the device (take your lead from existing apps on the device) and know how the user is going to be playing the game.  More often than not, it’ll be for a short period of time, multiple times per day.

Can you point developers towards more resources?

The jcp.org website contains the specs for JSR 239 and there are samples all over the web.  It’s also worth checking out my blog posts from a month or two ago where I discussed what to expect of a BlackBerry smartphone user and what the user expects of your game.

What do you hope were the key takeaways in your session? Is BlackBerry game development more about design or implementation?

BlackBerry game development is about design and implementation.  There was definitely some information about general design guidelines, but there was also a ton of the nitty gritty for optimizing your JSR 239 experience on BlackBerry smartphones, including coverage of some extensions we created to simplify your efforts at implementation.  

Talk a bit about the games that you demoed and why you were excited about them.

PBA Bowling from Concrete Software is one of their better selling mobile titles and the transition they made from 2D to 3D just looks incredible.  These guys did some fantastic work and when you compare the 2D version to 3D version, it’s just amazing to see the difference.

As for Super Monkey Ball from Sega… well, the title speaks for itself.  It’s got to be one of the best selling mobile games of all time; I nearly jumped out of my chair when I heard that they were going to bring it over to the BlackBerry platform.