BlackBerry theme developers got a nice surprise from RIM today -- BlackBerry Theme Studio 6 Gold release will be made available for all through the BlackBerry downloads page. Although developers have been pushing new themes out for quite some time now, the Theme Studio used to create them was still labeled beta. The latest version has plenty of changes listed for it:
- Support for the latest BlackBerry devices, including the BlackBerry Torch 9800 and BlackBerry Style 9670 handsets, and BlackBerry 6.
- Support for theming BlackBerry 6 features such as graphic popup menus, plus the addition of BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), Facebook, and Twitter feeds to Today screens.
- New productivity features allow you to batch update all of the graphics in a theme automatically. You can also change fonts across multiple phone screens automatically. Also, BlackBerry Theme Studio continues to be compatible with popular graphic design tools such as Adobe Photoshop and Corel Paint Shop Pro.
- A Background Wizard makes it easy to add dynamic wallpapers to your theme. Options include date-based or time-based changes (to highlight a special holiday or change images by the time of day), and slideshow backgrounds (to cycle through your favorite photos).
- A new user interface lets you click on any item on the preview and directly edit its settings. This allows faster editing and a shorter learning curve, plus you can select multiple items to change them all at once.
- A new export option makes it easier to offer themes through BlackBerry App World. The export packages all of the correct files and settings into a single zip file, ready for upload to BlackBerry App World.
All sounds rather promising right? If you're a theme developer, you've no doubt already hit the download page -- if not, you can do so now using the link below.
