Black Out has been updated to version 1.4 adding support for Android and BlackBerry 10. This strategy game is played by flipping the tiles one at a time until all of the tiles are ‘blacked out’. This is trickier than it sounds because whenever you tap to flip a tile, it also flips all of the tiles surrounding it. In order to accommodate different difficulties, the game supports board sizes from 3×3 all the way up to a 10×10 grid. Versions of the game on the already supported BlackBerry PlayBook, and Barnes and Noble Nook platforms were also updated.
10,000 Farkle has been released in AppWorld for BlackBerry 10 phones. While the app has been completely rewritten, anyone who purchases Farkle on their current BlackBerrys will be able to download the BlackBerry 10 version through AppWorld for free. The game contains statistics, achievements, and local leader boards, as well as four different game modes.
How to Play
Farkle gives you six dice to roll and awards points for a straight, three pairs or three or more of the same number. Fewer points ares also awarded for each individual 1 and 5. Any dice that do not score can be re-rolled for additional points. If all 6 dice can be scored, then all of the dice can be re-rolled on the same turn.
The skill in this game comes from knowing how far to push your luck, and which scoring combinations to take, and when to re-roll.
The default game mode gives you 10 turns to score as many points as you can. The 10,000 point mode gives you unlimited turns to reach 10,000 points. The two competitive game modes both use the traditional format of racing to 10,000 points.
Xploding Boxes has been updated on the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha in order to fix a few of the issues that occurred due to using an early version of the beta sdk.
This update also allows the app to show off its use of active frames. To the best of my knowledge it is the first app in the store, to be written in ActionScript and to use active frames. Another one of my BlackBerry 10 games (Runaway Trains) will also be getting this feature by the end of the month.
The executives from RIM have talked about how they want to minimize the use of the homescreen, and try and get away the in-and-out pattern of launching apps. To this end the process of invoking another app’s card is brilliantly implemented, and when it makes sense will provide users with a seamless experience. But at times users are going to want to use the homescreen, and when they do they are going to be very disappointed.
The homescreen experience on BlackBerry 10 is absolutely terrible. There is practically no way to organize your installed apps. Even though I am only using my DevAlpha for developing and testing apps, I already have more apps than I can manage on the device. If this was the situation on my day to day phone, it would be the kind of annoyance that would lead to me downloading less apps, because I would not want to deal with managing them all. (And as an app developer, I clearly want people to download more and more applications).
What is worse, is that most of the limitations seem to be rather artificial. You can not have nested folders, you can’t have more than 16 apps on each page, you can not have more than 16 apps in a folder. So say you have four pages of apps, and just downloaded a new game, and wanted to place it in a folder on your first page of apps. (I think this is a rather reasonable scenario). You would navigate to the fourth page and grab the app, then move it to the third page. This would bump an app off of the third page and on to the fourth page. You would then drag your new game from the third page to the second page (bumping one of the second page apps to the third page), then you would drag your game to the first page (bumping the final first page app to the second page). You could then finally place the new game into the folder. If you then wanted to get back your icon that was bumped off of your first screen you would drag it over from the second screen, see that it was in the upper left corner (instead of the lower right corner where you had it a minute ago), dragging it to the lower right won’t work, so you would have to move it the second last icon, and then move the last icon over one place. (Repeat per page if you want to restore your previous pages to their starting look).
Nested Folders
I will admit that personally I am not too likely to want to place one folder inside another, but I see no reason why that shouldn’t be an option. Not everyone wants their apps in such a flat organizational layout. Some people would prefer to save their apps in a more strict hierarchy.
App limit per folder
Having a limit of 16 apps per folder makes them almost useless for organizational purposes. Of the four folders on my BlackBerry Bold, three of them have over 30 applications. (And despite its smaller screen, my Bold can display more than 16 icons at a time).
Folder navigation
I have to wonder if the gesture for exiting folders has had any usability testing at all. For power users, it is kindof neat, but if I were to hand a BlackBerry 10 phone to a complete stranger, I would guess that they would be unable to exit the folder. For those who don’t know how to exit folders on BB10, just know that swiping left, right, up, or down will not work, neither will tapping anywhere on the screen. If RIM doesn’t want to go with the corner x, that the PlayBook uses, I would suggest that the huge label on the bottom of the folder that looks like a button, should do something.
Orientation
Why does the homescreen not work in landscape orientation? Is there any reason for this at all? For all of its faults even OS 4.7.0.65 had no problem displaying the homescreen in landscape orientation. Remember how most of the pre-installed PlayBook apps only supported a single orientation, and we had to wait a year and a half for version 2.1 in order to mostly get that fixed? Lets not repeat that mistake.
Bezel swipe to unlock
The bezel swipe to unlock on the PlayBook is awesome. On the Dev Alpha, not so much. Unlike the ease of the PlayBook, BlackBerry 10 requires you to swipe twice, and furthermore the second swipe has to be in a predefined direction. It is the very nemesis of productivity, and I would much rather have access to my phone after a single swipe. Also the button on the top of the phone that look like the unlock button on the older BlackBerrys, instead does nothing useful.
Why limit the number of apps on each page
The 16 app per page limit is very annoying and was the root cause of most of the issues in my example in the beginning of this rant. The PlayBook already has a great system for handling this, just scroll down a bit on the page to see the rest that is there. I would be pretty happy to see that interface copied verbatim. The current implementation is very broken.
For my friends at RIM, the good news is that you still have 43 days to fix this. I don’t want to see BlackBerry 10 ship with an interface that is so frustratingly unusable.
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.
Devices 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
November saw the growth from October continue for another month. Use of OS 7 has increased to 30.2% of BlackBerry users, with 59.3% of users on OS 6.0 or higher.
This data was taken from downloads of the free BlackBerry strategy game Pixelated. Data shown on the chart is from the beginning of November 2011 through the end of November 2012.
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.
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.
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.
Beginning tonight, I will be at Startup Weekend Buffalo the next three days. Start-up weekend is a meeting of entrepreneurs interested in building and launching new products. For more details on the event see buffalo.startupweekend.org
I hope this weekend gives me a chance to meet some great people, and work on some great ideas.
