While designing my first app that is intended for media consumption (rather than my usual puzzle games), I quickly realized that it is necessary to to take into account orientation changes. The orientation is the direction the device is being held, either landscape or portrait. The idea of properly handling orientation is to effectively use screen real estate for both use cases....
The 10.2 SDK was released a while back now and included the ability to build headless apps. If you missed our detailed post on what a headless app is you can catch up here - I needed a reminded too! To cut a long story short - up until now, all running applications would need to remain open in an Active Frame. For me - this kind of sucked and I was put off by a few apps which would...
Three important aspects of your BlackBerry app are the name, icon and the splash screen (also known as the loading screen). They are the first three things a user will see when launching your app so they are important to have. The name will appear below the icon. The icon is the face of your app when users are browsing BlackBerry World or once downloaded in their grid of icons. The...
If you're looking to port your Android app onto BlackBerry 10, BlackBerry has just updated their developer tools to make the process even easier than it already was. The update brings support for repackaging your APK file via a GUI-based tool, and ABD-proxy support for any Android IDE of your choice. BlackBerry Plugin for ADT - Since most Android developers tend to choose eclipse...
This is by far the coolest thing that I saw at BlackBerry Jam Asia 2013. Our good friend Gary Klassen, inventor of BBM, had a session on Tilt UI, a part of Cascades that's available now and allows developers to use device orientation to show useful information. This hearkens back to something the old TAT crew made years ago called Horizon. In one demo app, users can keep tabs on...
As we learned during BlackBerry Jam Asia, gaming on BlackBerry 10 is huge and it's only going to get bigger as the number of available titles grows. As most folks already know from our hands-on at GDC 2013 and Dev Blog coverage, gamepad support for BlackBerry 10 is available and developers are encouraged to implement it whenever it fits. To help spread adoption of gamepad support,...
Last month there was a big stink about a single developer accounting for about 47,000 apps in BlackBerry World - roughly a third of the total catalog count at last tally. Lots of press painted a picture of a manufacturer that encouraged low-quality, spammy developers to beef up their numbers and ultimately project an inflated sense of health in the app ecosystem. Even outside of the...
Today during the Jam Asia keynote, we got a lot of numbers thrown at us about the health of the BlackBerry 10 platform. It was a bit hectic trying to initially make heads or tails of everything, but now we've got all of the main stats that were mentioned. 131,700+ apps for BlackBerry 10; total apps in BlackBerry World 256,668 - at same point (7 months) in OS lifecycle, Apple had...
My article yesterday on headless apps sparked up quite the discussion. At the time I'm writing this the blog has accumulated nearly 500 comments and yes, I've read each and every one of them. Rather than attempt to reply throughout the comments I thought it would be better to address as much as I could in a singular post. First off, I stand by my original article. That being said I...
It was just over 5 weeks ago that BlackBerry released the Gold 10.2 SDK to developers which was to include support for headless apps. I had planned on writing this article right after the release to update everyone on how headless apps would work. However, I wasn't expecting to have to write a negative article about it which is why I held off until now, hoping that BlackBerry would...