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What's Going On With Plazmic?

by Bla1ze on 8 Sep 2009 02:28 PM
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What's Going On With Plazmic?

*UPDATE* - Just got an email from Mike Kirkup, Director, Developer Relations at Research In Motion explaining the happenings with Plazmic and their site and it is as I had hoped, an effort to reorganize and provide better offerings for developers. Thanks to Mike for taking the time to explain it for us all.

This is one step among many to bring the Plazmic products inline with the other offerings from RIM to our developer community by bringing it in-house to ensure that it receives the same level of attention and focus that our other developer tools receive today.  This is most definitely a vote towards improved tooling and development of themes and content on the BlackBerry platform.  We are also phasing out the existing Plazmic discussion forums and moving that discussion over to the BlackBerry Developer Support Forums along with moving the existing posts on that board to the new board to ensure we don’t lose the great information accumulated over the years.

It wasn't that long ago that RIM released the "update patch" for their Content Developers Kit that enabled the ability to create themes for the 9630 Tour and the BlackBerry Curve 8520. Theme developers across the board were happy to see it's release but soon found out it was obviously not the most ideal update to have, and more likely should have been marked as a beta then anything else. Plazmic has long been a tool that theme developers love to hate, it's buggy and has some issues to say the least.

The past week some interesting stuff has happened with the Plazmic.com website as Daniel Black pointed out in the CrackBerry Forums. Plazmic.com, the domain used for all things Plazmic, has mysteriously been redirected to a general BlackBerry page with all the download links for the tools in one spot. Maybe RIM is revamping the site? Maybe the site was no longer useful? Seems rather odd to me that they would pull it considering it housed their community forums.

Either way, the redirect and removal of Plazmic.com as a site seems rather odd. With the BlackBerry Developers Conference coming up, hopefully this is a sign of better things to come from Plazmic but I'm not going to hold my breath (and I'm sure some theme developers out there won't either).

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14 Comments

Posted by thezman Tuesday, Sep 08, 2009 887 days ago

I think they're probably revamping the site to reflect the traditional BlackBerry bar across the top and to be more "BlackBerryish" versus looking like an independent company (which they once were)

They may be getting ready to also release PTB 5.0 since 5.0 is (hopefully) just around the corner and we're going to need a new PTB for OS 5.0 devices.

 
 
Posted by thezman Tuesday, Sep 08, 2009 887 days ago

The Plazmic Forum is officially closing on September 18th.

https://www.plazmic.com/PlazmicForum/ann.jspa?annID=27

 
 
Posted by billmags Tuesday, Sep 08, 2009 887 days ago

Hopefully they will rework Plazmic to a more stable release with all the bugs fixed. One of the MANY things that makes BB's great is the ability to "skin" or theme them. Let's all hope it gets the rework it deserves

 
 
Posted by Dem0 Tuesday, Sep 08, 2009 887 days ago

call me paranoid, but RIM is messing with all web access... Since last week they pulled mobile.blackberry.com for all updated OS, now this....
Maybe they plan to release a all in one website... not sure, just IMHO

 
 
Posted by Ebscer Tuesday, Sep 08, 2009 887 days ago

Blackberry has a history of pulling web content, and an even more annoying one of keeping dead links around. As such this does not surprise me at all...

 
 
Posted by garment69 Tuesday, Sep 08, 2009 887 days ago

To be honest, I would think you guys at crackberry, with all your sources, could figure out what is going on. The themes for the storm (sms counters) have never worked and now we have issues with the tour? Isnt there anybody at Blackberry headquarters who can shed some light into why blackberry has been doing such a crappy job with themes? Hey, they havent even inlcuded a native "today" theme like they used to do on my curve 8330. As users, we just sit around with our thumbs up our asses waiting for official word? If I had an iphone that might be acceptable, but come on, this is blackberry nation!!

 
 
Posted by fizzz Tuesday, Sep 08, 2009 887 days ago

i noticed that the incoming call screen can't be customized to display any other background screen which was never an issue in any previous versions which surprised me. hope they come out with another fix to resolve this as well as making the idle call screen customizable.

 
 
Posted by Daniel.Black Tuesday, Sep 08, 2009 887 days ago

Hey Bla1ze, thanks for the plug. I thought I was in the twilight zone for a while there since no one had commented on my post. At the very least I thought someone would say something about the Monty Python humor. :)

 
 
Posted by tmp3150 Tuesday, Sep 08, 2009 887 days ago

As big as Rim is you would think they would get their crap together and make this program work. The program has so many problems this is why every theme has issues.

 
 
Posted by mcfly27 Wednesday, Sep 09, 2009 887 days ago

are plazmic going to update themselves so Storm custom themes will work beyond .164!!

 
 
Posted by victorcrums Wednesday, Sep 09, 2009 887 days ago

That really nice update, yeah I hear from my friends too...
Meladerm

 
 
Posted by CalxDesign Wednesday, Sep 09, 2009 886 days ago

Would be so nice to get a proper v5.0 update. Maybe a polished interface, Adobe style navigation and selection tools, and some X/Y coordinate input for placement would be really nice.

 
 
Posted by hatyai Wednesday, Sep 09, 2009 886 days ago

I do not feel any suprised because this program has so many problems needed to be improved.

 
 
Posted by heavywolf Thursday, Sep 10, 2009 885 days ago

i want it