Happy Halloween, everyone. You can celebrate Halloween on your BlackBerry this year with the free Jack-O-Lantern app, available for all touchscreen BlackBerrys.
This app allows you to change the Jack-O-Lantern’s face by swiping in different designs for the eyes, nose and mouth from the left and the right. Also, you can change the back lighting of the design by clicking on the screen.
Little known fact is that BlackBerry actually does have a few stores. Ok, technically run by a third party called Wireless Giant, but something I had no clue about. Returning from DevCon last week, I passed by one in the Newark Airport and was completely shocked. The store itself had BlackBerry posters everywhere and was 100% dedicated to selling just BlackBerry phones and accessories.
After asking on Twitter, Alex Kinsella mentioned that the Philadelphia Airport has one as well. While the store was pretty cool to see, I have to admit that I am a little confused on its value to RIM. I would assume that the main benefit to having a brick and mortar BlackBerry store is so customers have a place to go for help and support. Placing the store inside of an airport terminal makes that pretty much impossible. Still the store had a good number of people in it, and I honestly don’t understand the business model of most of these in-airport stores.
I have to admit to be thoroughly confused by the class action lawsuits against RIM due to the service outage earlier this month. While the disruption in the EMEA region was significant, in North America, the outage only lasted at most 6 hours, and personally my device was disconnected for maybe two. While outages do suck, I am not sure what people expect to get from RIM. With most data plans costing only $30/month, six hours of downtime would justify a refund of $0.25. At the end of the day, twenty-five cents is not worth the paperwork.
Tomorrow I will be at BarCamp Rochester. While I am not currently planning on giving a presentation, I hope to learn some interesting things, and look forwards to meeting everyone there. If you find me I would be more then happy to take some time to talk.
If you read my DevCon expectations you will notice that they are very different from what was actually announced. In short everything that was not directly BBX related was ignored at the event, so no announcements about BBM 6.0.1 or the 9380 Curve.
I should start by pointing out that I expected version 2.0 to be rolled out to everyone by the end of DevCon, and am extremely disappointed that it did not happen. OS updates have not exactly been coming every two weeks like it looked like early after release, and the most recent update is about two months old at this point.
Still RIM did release a developer beta of the update, and it is worth taking a look at that. This is a true beta so there are many apps not included, and there are issues with Bridge but I think it is safe to ignore those things for now. The changes on the OS level are actually pretty limited, and include an overhaul of the homescreen, support for Android Java apps, and AIR 3.0.
The new homescreen is pretty nice, and most usefully now includes folders. Creating folders is pretty awesome one you figure out how to do it, but discovering how to do so is not that intuitive. Most of the other changes relate to an increased preview size for apps in the card view, which I think is just a result of the designers trying to figure out how to make BBX look decent on a phone sizes screen.
Android support is nice, but all of the apps launch in a single ‘Android player’ which means that they multitask differently, and are not quite true first level applications. Unless this is fixed, I think that many users will be disappointed by Android apps on BBX.
Most disappointing is what 2.0 has still not added. Mainly spell check/auto completion. Since launch, Docs to go has included a spell check, and some autocompletion (at least double space for a period) and it is completely unclear why this is not available for all text on a system wide level. More then any other feature this is the one that I really need.
Last week during the keynote at BlackBerry DevCon Alec Saunders posted his email address (alec.saunders@rim.com) on the screen and asked developers to email him. As a result he is “blown away by the passion and dedication” of those that emailed him. Really all he did to get this great feedback was to post his email.
I think the main reason that many others don’t do this is that they are afraid that they will be overwhelmed with email. Over the first few days Alec reported that he had received over 225 emails, while that is a big number it is not an amount that is unmanageable. Furthermore as director of developer relations this is what he should be doing anyhow.
One of RIM’s larger issues, communications wise, is that developers too often feel that their emails go into a “black hole”. While some departments at RIM are better then others it would be nice if more of them followed this policy of posting open emails.
On a related note, if you would like to talk to the head of a much smaller company, my email address is eric@ebscer.com
Xploding Boxes has been updated to version 2.1 in BlackBerry AppWorld. This version adds 15 new levels, adds BBM profile boxes, and improves navigation on the level selection screen.
Xploding Boxes is a strategy game for BlackBerry where the goal of the game is to start a chain reaction that will explode all of the boxes on the screen. Each level gives you a different number of touches, and requires a different strategy to solve. The first 25 levels are free, while the full 230 levels can be accessed by making an in-application payment and requiring no further downloads. This game is available for both the PlayBook, and for most smartphones running OS 5.0 or higher.
When launching the game, the level selection screen now automatically starts with the last level played pre-selected. This allows you to restart the game where you left off, and get you back to playing the actual game quicker. Also you can use the keyboard short cuts ‘T’ & ‘B’ to quickly navigate to the top and bottom of the level selection screen.
This version of Xploding Boxes, also allow you to attach a box to the bottom of your BlackBerry Messenger profile, to show off your success in the game. This feature requires that you have BBM version 6.0.1 installed, and that you check the box to allow Xploding Boxes to “Post recent activities to my profile”. There is a direct link to these BBM options from the Xploding Boxes options page, in order to make this checkbox easier to find.
I am arriving today in San Fransisco for BlackBerry DevCon. This is my first time at DevCon, and I am looking forwards to it. If you run into me at the event, as always, I would be more than happy to talk.
Ideally, RIM will find a way to surprise me at DevCon, but this will be tricky to do given how many things are already expected to be announced. My expectations for the event are as follows:
Overall sales of the BlackBerry PlayBook have been a bit disappointing. However that does not imply that it is a device that should be ignored. Support for this tablet was added to Version 2.0 of Xploding Boxes in mid September. Bolstered by having a spot in the top 25 free apps (peaked at #8, currently at #22), and by being featured in the carrousel, the game got a good amount of downloads on the device. More importantly though is that it significantly outperformed the BlackBerry phones when it came to users upgrading to the full version of the game. Over the past month, the PlayBook accounted for 5.13% of all downloads of Xploding Boxes, and 9.55% of all purchases of the app. So while the PlayBook makes up a relatively small part of the BlackBerry market, when it comes to purchases, the PlayBook outperforms its market share by almost a factor of two.
Version 2.0 of Xploding Boxes added support for Spanish, so now almost a month later I figured that it would be worth a look to see how much of an improvement (if any) that this additional feature had on customer adoption of the product.
These first two charts show the break down by language for downloads, and purchases of version 1.6 of Xploding Boxes from July 23rd through September 8th. At this point Xploding Boxes was only available in English. None of the languages in the “other” category are close in size to Spanish, for a more detailed look at the languages in the first chart see this post from early September.
While English is by far the most dominant language for downloads, it is even more dominant when it comes to purchases of the full game. While part of this is probably due to correlations between language and income (and payment options), I supposed that part of it was also due to the game requiring you to play (and upgrade) in English.
So support for Spanish was added to version 2.0 of the game. The below chart shows the break down by language for downloads, and purchases of version 2.0 of Xploding Boxes from September 16th, through October 13th.
Despite expectations that support for Spanish would result in more downloads and purchases by those who speak the language, the data actually shows the trend going the other way. One possible explanation for this is that version 2.0 also added support for the BlackBerry Tablet, which has seen most of its sales in English speaking countries. However given how few tablets have been sold this does not explain away the lack of growth from Spanish users. As such the only conclusion that I can come to is that the benefits of localization are minimal.
In the original version of the BBM SDK it was a real pain for users to have to tweak the settings in order to enable apps to create profile boxes. Version 1.2 of the SDK still requires some work from the user but makes things a little better by allowing you to directly launch to screen where this needs to be edited. The code for doing so is as follows:
UiApplication.getUiApplication().invokeAndWait(new Runnable()
{
public void run()
{
try
{
if(platformContext.getSettingsManager().getSetting( SettingsManager.SETTING_PROFILE_BOX ) == SettingsManager.VALUE_DISABLED)
{
Dialog d = new Dialog(Dialog.D_OK,"In order to enable BBM Profile Boxes please check \"Post recent activities to my profile\" on the next screen", 0, null, 0 );
d.doModal();
platformContext.requestAppSettings();
}
}
catch(Exception e){}
}
});
This code assumes that platformContext is the name of your already created and registered BBMPlatformContext object. This code uses a check so, the user does not see anything if this feature is already enabled. The UiApplication invokeAndWait wrapper is required, as an exception will be thrown if this code is not run on a UI thread. Also note that this code requires v1.2 of the BBM SDK, and therefore version 6.0.1 of BBM.
Not sure what update added this, but setting the subject line when using mailto: on the PlayBook is now supported. This is a required feature in order to best use a built in email support feature like I recommended in July. In ActionScript this code would take the following format:
navigateToURL(new URLRequest("mailto:eric@ebscer.com?subject=Pre-populated subject line"))
Boosted by a single month 5% increase in the use of OS7, and a 2% increase in the use of OS6, the percentage of users with a minimum OS of 5.0 has exceed 90% for the first time. Meanwhile the use of OS 7 is up to 7.7% after just two months, while last year it took OS6 4 months just to get to 7.2%.
This data was taken from downloads of the popular BlackBerry strategy game Pixelated. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of September 2010 through the end of September 2011.