New Blackberry Developer Tools from RIM

At the BlackBerry Developer Conference yesterday, Research in Motion announced several improvements to the Blackberry platform's toolset for developers. The new APIs and graphics support will make life better not just for third party software developers, but for Blackberry owners as well.

New APIs will be available to developers in the first half of 2010, and the biggest API news is probably the opening up to third party developers of BlackBerry's Push Service API, previously only for use on core applications. Push notifications from services can be embedded in apps as a badge, sent to a user’s ibox, or as alerts on the home screen. An improved payment and advertising service will also be welcomed by users, who will now be able to use in-app payments for subscriptions or gaming level unlocking, as well as payment for apps through carrier billing, thus consolidating all their Blackberry expenditures into one single bill.

Non GPS Location Based Services

Three new location-based services are added. Cell site geo-location calculates a phone's location using on transmission tower triangulation in case of a GPS failure or dropout The handset's location is translated to a physical address on a map by Reverse geo-coding. The third new service is a location to location travel time estimate, a feature which comes in handy when using a phone for driving directions.

OpenGL ES is supported in the most recent BlackBerry Java SDK 5.0 beta. OpenGL ES is a graphics API supporting 3D gaming. Expect more gaming apps to make their way to the Blackberry platform next year. BlackBerry Theme Studio 5.00 will allow developers to import Adobe Photoshop format files to BlackBerry’s Theme builder; soon richer graphics will show up in third party themes and widgets.

In devices running on Blackberry OS 5.0 and above, ringtones and screen transistions such as fades and zooms can be built in to themes as well. Bit by bit, RIM is improving the Blackberry platform to keep up with the competition and show developers there is a future in the Blackberry App Store.