Category Archives: BlackBerry

Missing Christmas won’t matter to BlackBerry

Last summer when RIM announced that the release of BlackBerry 10 was going to be pushed back to early 2013, a lot was made of the fact that RIM was going to miss the Christmas season. Yet, I fail to see why this would be a big deal. Yes, the three month delay will hurt BlackBerry, but the fact that the three months happen to include Christmas is largely irrelevant. The set back is not more significant than any other three month period would have been.

The reason for this is that BlackBerrys have never been all that popular as Christmas gifts. Last year, I looked at the myth of the Christmas day sales spike and found that app downloads and sales on the days surrounding Christmas were no different than any other days that month.

Downloads of the free game Pixelated in December 2010 & 2011

Intuitively this makes sense as most people are unlikely to give a gift that also requires a two-year contract. In fact I think it is safe to assume that most of the mobile devices given as gifts this year will be wi-fi only devices, or pre-paid phones. BlackBerry 10 would not be making much of an impact on the pre-paid market either way, as the new devices would be priced a bit out of this market for the first few months anyhow.

Furthermore, RIM has never seen a spike in sales in the quarter that contains Christmas. The following chart shows the number of BlackBerry phones (excluding PlayBooks) that RIM has sold for the past five years in the quarter containing Christmas, the quarter before Christmas, and the quarter after Christmas. Of these five years, only in one of them did the Christmas quarter result in more devices shipped then both of the quarters surrounding it.

ChristmasDevices shipped in millions. Years correspond to RIM’s fiscal years which are stupid and off by 300+ days from reality

In short, while pushing back the release of BlackBerry 10 isn’t good news, the fact that BlackBerry 10 was pushed to the other side of Christmas is not that big of a deal.

BlackBerry, BlackBerry10

Zygote results in real speed improvements

Last week RIM announced project Zygote where they are improving the start up times of cascades apps by pre-compiling shared libraries. I gave it a go with some of my existing cascades projects and found significant improvements to the launch times of my apps.

App NameBeforeAfterImprovement
Mileage Tracker1.67 s0.76 s2.2X
Liar’s Dice2.08 s1.09 s1.9X
10,000 Farkle1.82 s0.82 s2.2X

On average these changes have eliminated 52.3% of the load times for these applications, making these changes well worth it. For details on how to implement this see instructions here and here.

BlackBerry, BlackBerry10, code

91% of PlayBook users on the newest OS

In November, (the first full month after the release of OS 2.1) saw 90.8% of BlackBerry PlayBook users running newest available operating system. At the same time there is almost nobody left using an OS prior to version 2.0, with 99.6% of PlayBooks running OS 2.0 or newer.

This data was collected by AppWorld at the time of download, for the popular PlayBook strategy game Pixelated. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of June 2011 through the end of November 2012.

BlackBerry, PlayBook, Statistics

Back to BlackBerry

At this time last year, I began experimenting with releasing some of my applications on non-BlackBerry platforms. I now have games available to be downloaded from the Nook Bookstore, Google Play, the Amazon App Store, the Windows Phone Marketplace, and the Windows 8 Store. While making my apps accessible from these stores has resulted in some success, it is hard to say that supporting these additional platforms has been the best use of my time. Twelve months later, BlackBerry AppWorld still brings in more revenue then all of the other stores combined.

During this past summer BlackBerry was stuck in an odd in-between state where BlackBerry 7 was beginning to be phased out, and BlackBerry 10 was still a ways off. With this gap in place it made sense to explore alternative platforms, and to prepare some apps for the launch of Windows 8. However, now that the launch of BlackBerry 10 is just 54 days away, it is time to concentrate on the upcoming OS.

With less then two months to go until launch (and Christmas in the middle of that time frame), there is no compelling reason to look at the other platforms. For the near future, I will going back to BlackBerry-only development. Hopefully this will allow me to offer a solid selection of BlackBerry 10 apps on day one.

BlackBerry, BlackBerry10

Thoughts on OS 10.0.9.1103

As was expected, there was not too much that was new in the announcements at BlackBerry Jam Asia. The only real news was the reveal of the DevAlpha C with a full keyboard. Besides that it was just the steady march of progress as the promised updates were released for the DevAlpha, and the SDKs. My thoughts on the updates to the DevAlpha are below…

New Version of AppWorld

The DevAlpha version of AppWorld (now renamed to just BlackBerry World) now allows for payments (and in-app payments) to take place. Also new in BlackBerry World are Trending, and Top Grossing lists. I am particularly happy to see a Top Grossing list as it has a tendency to show off apps that use in-app purchases like Xploding Boxes.

Blue headers

Any Cascades apps that make use of headers or alert dialogs, now see them in a garish blue color. To me it comes across as iOS-style ugly, and reinforces my decision to just create my own headers anyhow. I much prefer the more flat industrial look that Cascades had when first released and had less rounded corners and no gradients.

New Homescreen icons

BlackBerry has done away with the boxed-in icons that they were using in the last release, and while the new icons feel slightly small it is most likely due to the need to design for screens that are only 720px wide. This change goes back to giving developers more freedom in their icon design, and I may un-boxify some of my icons.

Default font sizes are larger

I don’t really have any thoughts on this, but it is noticeable.

BlackBerry, BlackBerry10

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I know my Canadian friends already celebrated a month ago, but thank you to everyone. I am extremely thankful to have my current job of creating apps, and would be unable to do it without the support that everyone has given my over the past three years. Thank you.

BlackBerry

PlayBook users quick to adopt OS 2.1

As seen with previous OS versions on the PlayBook, users have been very quick to adopt OS 2.1 when it was released last month. October saw 73.3% of PlayBook users running the new OS. Most of those running early versions were from the first week of the month, when OS 2.1 was not yet released.

This data was collected by AppWorld at the time of download, for the popular PlayBook strategy game Pixelated. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of June 2011 through the end of October 2012.

BlackBerry, PlayBook, Statistics

OS 7 now on 1 in 4 BlackBerry phones

October saw the use of BlackBerry OS 7 increase to 26.5% of users. This was the largest single month gain in the past year, but follows two months of very little change. The increase came mostly at the expense of OS 5.0 users, as the other OS versions remained mostly steady.

The majority of remaining OS 4.x devices are Curve 8520 devices running OS 4.6.1 in the UK. In fact, an astounding 58.1% of all OS 4.x devices are in the United Kingdom.

This data was taken from downloads of the free BlackBerry strategy game Pixelated. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of October 2011 through the end of October 2012.

BlackBerry, Statistics

Xploding Boxes gains more levels

Xploding Boxes has been updated to version 4.1. This new version adds an additional 10 levels, bringing the total number of levels up to 350 for the full game.

New in version 4.1.0

In addition to the new levels, this version of the app also improves the smoothness of the screen transitions in the PlayBook, Nook, and Android versions of the app. Additionally, for Android users, the app no longer requires you to download and instal the AIR framework. On the Nook, the app now adds support for the newly released Nook HD models. For BlackBerry 10 DevAlpha users, the app now supports an active frame for when the app is in a minimized state.

About Xploding Boxes

Xploding Boxes is a strategy game for BlackBerry, Android, Nook, and Windows 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 game itself, and the first 25 levels are available for free, while an in-app purchase can be used to access the rest of the levels for just $2.99 while maintaining your progress from the free levels.

Links & Information

Android, BlackBerry, BlackBerry10, Nook, Windows, Xploding Boxes

Mileage Tracker released for BB10

The brand new Mileage Tracker app has been released for BlackBerry 10 devices. This app is designed to help you track miles driven each trip for use in tax deductions, accounting, and business reporting. Instead of keeping this information charted on your computer, it makes much more sense to be able to do so directly from your phone, which you would have with you in the car anyhow. This app allows you to create different categories, so that you can have separate lists for different billing periods, each vehicle, or on a per project basis.

How to use

In order to start a new entry select the ‘Add’ option on the bottom of the screen. For each trip, you must include a reason, a date, and the starting and ending odometer readings. Selecting an entry gives you the option to edit or delete it. New categories can be added from the menu, and you can switch between existing categories by selecting the category name at the top of the screen. The options screen allows you to restore the most recently deleted entry in case you accidentally delete something.

Links & Information

BlackBerry, BlackBerry10, Mileage Tracker

The odd ecosystem of DevAlpha apps

Last night I submitted a new app to BlackBerry AppWorld. This app was written in Cascades, and therefore only supports BlackBerry 10, which will not be released for another three months. This allows for a unique approach to the release of apps.

There is little to no point of having apps ready to go too much before the release of BlackBerry 10 in 2013, so there is very little pressure to have apps 100% ready to go at this point. As such the app I am releasing is actually not 100% complete. It is in good shape, but there are still a few more features that I would like to add.

So if the app is not yet fully featured then why am I ok releasing it into AppWorld? Because the only users who can download it are other developers. Given that the audience is exclusively developers right now, I can get an audience that is both understanding, and that is also capable of delivering some useful feedback for pointing which direction the app should go, as it gets finished up for the launch of BlackBerry 10.

I doubt that I will do this with most of my BlackBerry 10 apps, but I think that it will be an interesting experiment.

BlackBerry, BlackBerry10, Mileage Tracker

BlackBerry 10 and the UI formerly known as Metro

With the rollout of BlackBerry 10.0.9 RIM is starting to show a different design to their UI that seems to take some cues from Microsoft’s Metro UI. This is most clearly seen on the icon screen, where all of the first party apps have gotten a very boxy look to them. Furthermore every app icon is placed in a square, even if the icon doesn’t plan for it. As with Microsoft’s Windows 8 the use of transparencies in icons is technically allowed, it just looks terrible (on both operating systems).

This squared off look goes even further into the design language of the apps. In cascades most of the native controls have a boxy feel to them (except for the parts that are blue), and contain very few curves on any of the UI elements. This design can easily be seen in the BBM app where the curved text bubbles on BlackBerry 7 have given way to right angles on BlackBerry 10.

For example, the how to play dialog in Xploding Boxes uses the default alert dialog in order to display. While this presented a very curved and rounded UI on the PlayBook and BlackBerry 10.0.6 (first image), it has changed to a more boxed in look on the most recent BlackBerry 10.0.9 release (second image).

BlackBerry, BlackBerry10, Windows

PlayBook OS statistics

With version 2.1.0 not released until early in October, September saw very little change in the OS breakdown on the PlayBook, as the vast majority of users were already running the latest version. As with last month 99.6% of users were running OS 2.0.0 or higher, and 98.6% of users were running 2.0.1 or higher.

This data was taken from downloads of the popular PlayBook strategy game Pixelated. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of June 2011 through the end of September 2012.

BlackBerry, PlayBook, Statistics