BlackBerry Developer SideShow

Today marks my third day at WES 2008 (arrived on Sunday) and despite the lack of sleep and inevitable jet-lag I don’t feel tired at all. It’s all too exciting. There have been a raft of interesting announcements such as the launch of the BlackBerry Bold, the announcement of the $150M BlackBerry Partners Fund, and the announcement of the BlackBerry Developer Conference in October, all of which have huge implications for developers.

Several brief thoughts I’ve had walking around and talking to people:

• More people than I thought read this blog! I’ve had a hard time introducing myself to most people in the BlackBerry development space without them asking about it.

• Despite talk about the growth in the consumer third-party software market, the majority of companies demonstrating their products at the Solutions Showcase are B2B oriented. This market is still not conducive enough to sustain a large consumer-oriented ISV with the kind of revenue sufficient to engage in mainstream sponsorship, marketing, etc. This needs to change.

• RIM employees are young, energetic, and extremely passionate about the product. Having a single product focus is going to pay huge dividends for RIM.

• Talking to many of the guys who run BlackBerry oriented websites (hung out with Kevin from CrackBerry last night downing a couple of beers) a clear picture is painted that a similar situation exists for them as what us developers have felt for years. RIM has failed to positively engage enthusiast websites for marketing or PR efforts. Rather than encourage the growth in community websites - which are hugely beneficial for users - RIM has a clear history of neglect. Extremely disappointing and spectacularly dumb from a marketing point of view. Can you imagine how much sites like CrackBerry have decreased support for carriers & RIM through their thriving “user help user” forums? Also think about how much BlackBerryCool, CrackBerry, and BerryReview have through product reviews driven sales of BlackBerry software and accessories so that RIM’s ISV’s can succeed. And yet, RIM does absolutely nothing to help these sites survive and grow. Heck, they don’t even send them free devices just to say “Thanks”. Sad.

• I’ve decided I’m not going to chase down any of the the $150M funding. For one, I don’t need it. Our business is successful right now and will be even more so when we launch some of the great applications we’ve been working on over the coming months. Secondly, I don’t want venture capital hooks in to my business. I’ve heard way too many founders discuss (off the record) how their biggest regret was ever getting involved with vulture-like VCs. I don’t need that. I’m not desperate.

• One thing that surprised me was the number of Australian companies at WES. Having said that, pretty much every one that I did meet was service-oriented and I didn’t see any with any real BlackBerry development power. Acting as “guns for hire” in the Australian market is a huge opportunity for us and one that I have been seriously investigating over the last couple of months, making many local contacts. WES provided me with the perfect opportunity to sit down with these companies, and what I’ve taken back from these meetings so far has been extremely positive.

That’s it for now…no doubt much more to come in what has already been an extremely exciting and informative experience.

Over the last couple of days threads have been popping up all over popular forums such as BlackBerryForums.com, Pinstack.com, and CrackBerry.com reporting problems with BBWeather, a popular free and open source piece of BlackBerry software for reporting weather information. BBToday similarly has the same problem with obtaining weather information. Turns out both applications had a bigger following than I realized.

The problem was ultimately caused by the closure of the external data service from weather.com who interestingly enough also launched their own mobile service which you can find at weather.com/mobile. Seems to me they would much rather drive people to use their own service. Fair enough, I suppose. Personally, I think that’s dumb marketing, because now applications that previously used the weather.com data feed will switch over to something else. So now weather.com will not even get a mention (like in the screenshot above) on what are potentially a lot of very popular applications out there. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

Recently I was contacted by a concerned BlackBerry community member and asked if I would be interested in taking on board the project of moving over BBWeather and BBToday to some new weather API. At BBSmart we’re far too busy to take on this project, so I thought I would put the word out to any open source BlackBerry developers that the people need you!

If you do read this and decide to take on the project, let me know!

Found myself today reading, in Steve Ballmer’s own words, how Microsoft has finally withdrawn their proposal to acquire Yahoo. At a time of wavering confidence in Windows (with the disaster that was Vista), growth of the Mac and Linux as viable alternative desktop OS’s, and in particular the significant interest in the smartphone market - spurred on in particular by innovations coming from Apple, Google, and RIM - I always wondered why Microsoft was (and probably still is) so enamored with the web. Certainly, there is some good potential synergies (and money!) to be gained there, but not at the expense of their other core markets which every day look more and more neglected.

If I was a Microsoft investor (I’m not), right now I would be pressuring them to heavily invest back into both the OS and smartphone markets. Windows Mobile’s flaws badly need to be addressed from a usability point of view (from a developer point of view WM is fantastic but we all know that only drives a small percentage of new activations). After trying to use some WM devices recently, one of the fundamental flaws I see with the overall package is still email. Even without the push infrastructure that RIM offers (No Microsoft, sorry, offering push with Exchange only is just not the same) they could still significantly boost the appeal of their devices as “email machines” if they did some work on their woeful email client. Heck, acquire WebIS (makers of the excellent product FlexMail). Just do something.

While Microsoft has been off chasing guys like Yahoo to gain some sort of parity with Google, the silent performer RIM has been bringing in billions of dollars in revenue. At its peak, Microsoft was willing to offer Yahoo $47.5 billion ($33/share). Just imagine what that sort of money invested back into their core business could do…Stupid Microsoft.

Under the guidance of Steve, they are the jack of all trades, master of none (with the masters like RIM left to reap all the real money in the market). And with despicable business practices that would make a grown man cry (take a look at the documented cases of ISO corruption in order to push through the flawed, patent-encumbered, and completely unnecessary OOXML) I can’t help but think they’re getting exactly what they deserve.

Having said that, competition is good for RIM. I think more and more however it will be Google and Apple throwing down the gauntlet, while Microsoft continues to float about trying to grab a slice of everybody’s pie but ultimately failing because their heart isn’t really in it. If there was one accolade you could give RIM, it’s that they’ve got focus. That’s the right way to do it. Good onya RIM.

Today I found myself reading about another interesting application to hit the BlackBerry market: BlackBerry Battery Booster, which claims to provide a software only solution to “boost your battery’s current runtime“. Hmmm…Whenever I read about applications like this I cannot help but wonder what RIM’s policy on revoking developer signing licenses is and whether it has ever been put into effect before. Is anybody from RIM actively policing the BlackBerry software market hunting down scamware?

Or, could I have it all wrong and this application does actually yield some benefit? Try as I might to believe, my good judgment always comes up with “No”.

“6 months from now the way we develop BlackBerry applications could be dramatically different“

The above sounds crazy, but I think it could well be true. Starting from the beginning, follow me on a path of what I think are a series of logical assumptions which led me make this statement.

It all started with Simprit

In my previous post I uploaded a video showing an interesting new media player called MiuTunes which is going to be released by the guys from Simprit. When I first watched this video I had deja vu (you know, like the kitty cat in The Matrix). After some digging around on the Internet, I found out why: I have seen it before. Well, almost…Take a look at this:

And this…

Now, go back and watch the video in my previous post…Look familiar?

It’s called TWUIK

Yes, what we have actually just seen in action in the above videos is called TWUIK. It’s a cross-platform set of UI libraries with some visual bang and evidently the guys from Simprit have licensed this technology to make MiuTunes. As far as I’m aware Simprit is the first commercial BlackBerry software vendor to go down this road. They’re setting an interesting precedent, but I think this could have some unintended consequences for the entire market.

From Point A to Point D

• My first assumption I had to make to reach my original statement was that MiuTunes is going to sell well when it is released. I think that’s a reasonable assumption to make. Flipside sells well. MiuTunes is Flipside but with 10x more sex. People buy Flipside for the sex. Ergo, MiuTunes will sell well.

• My second assumption is that it would be prohibitively expensive and extremely complex to compete with MiuTunes without resorting to using TWUIK. Critically, and I’m going to refer back to this later too, this is because doing anything UI intensive on the BlackBerry is a humiliatingly humbling and painful experience. Unless you want your application to look exactly like RIM’s horrible looking applications, be prepared to enter a world of pain. The RIM engineers who wrote the UI framework for the BlackBerry that us developers have to use I firmly believe hate us. Simply stated, my second assumption is that to make an application look like MiuTunes with your bare hands using only what RIM makes available would be prohibitively time-consuming and expensive. I think that’s a reasonable assumption.

• My third assumption is that when many developers see that TWUIK based applications enhance their product appeal tremendously it will be rapidly adopted in what is fast becoming an extremely competitive market (I talked about this in my previous article). At this point, everybody is looking for the edge over their competitors and one of the most obvious arms race going on right now is being played out on a visual battlefield. So, as long as the TWUIK licensing agreement is not the type that asks for your first-born, when developers start seeing guys like Simprit touting MiuTunes, they will hunt down a TWUIK license with gusto to gain that same edge over their competitors.

• My final assumption is that the TWUIK framework can be used to enhance the appeal of a diverse range of applications. After watching some of the TWUIK videos and reading about the technology, it’s evident that the framework is particularly powerful and could be applied to many different types of applications. In other words, you can take this framework and use it to make an incredibly appealing application that will sell well in almost any domain.

Putting A, B, C, and D together what are left with is the conclusion that TWUIK has the potential to be massively adopted by BlackBerry developers in a visual arms race. In other words, in a short timeframe - say, 6 months - in order to stay competitive in this marketplace we could all be using TWUIK. The way we develop BlackBerry applications would be dramatically different.

RIM must share the majority of the blame

If this situation does eventuate, I think RIM must share the majority of the blame. If this were any other platform, one of the assumptions would not hold and the tower of logic would collapse. Which assumption would fold? Lock in B thanks Eddie. On most other mobile platforms, creating visually appealing applications is not so hard. This is particularly true with the big up-and-comers like Android and the iPhone which both support OpenGL ES. So, even if TWUIK were available for these platforms it would not be so hard to compete with a company that has licensed it, and it most certainly would be possible to do it with your bare hands.

RIM’s neglect of BlackBerry developers and their failure to provide us with the tools we need to quickly build powerful, functional, and visually appealing applications has created a massive power vacuum. And now, because of that, we could all be beholden to TWUIK if we want to stay competitive in this marketplace. Simprit has opened the door, but I can guarantee you they will not be the only BlackBerry software vendor to walk through it.

There is probably going to be some disagreement to this post, but I ask that those who do disagree ask yourself the following: If you wanted to launch a competing product to MiuTunes, what would you do? I know the developer of Flipside frequents this site. Maybe he can tell you?

In his shoes, I’d license TWUIK as well and get busy. This is the visual arms race that could suck us all in.

The powder keg, unlit

For a good number of years now I’ve been watching the BlackBerry third-party software marketplace and developer ecosystem. It was roughly a year ago I decided to finally jump in with my own offering, BBSmart, and since then there have been ups and downs, the market has coughed - even sneezed occasionally - but mostly it has been business as usual. While the third-party software marketplace has been challenged by some newcomers, the old hats in this industry have remained steadfast, continuing to do as they always do.

Despite the BlackBerry developer ecosystem and marketplace remaining relatively tranquil, its partner in crime, the BlackBerry, has been causing ripples. It has become the ubiquitous device not just for business professionals but teenagers, mums and dads, and maybe even your uncle. If there was one word you could use to sum up what’s going on in BlackBerry land, it would have to be “growth”. Without mincing words, the device has become mainstream.

In this growth, mobile developers have seen opportunity. The BlackBerry is well known for it’s dearth of third-party applications. Developers hear the words “no competition, no software, big market,” and dollar signs briefly flash in their eyes. It sounds like an ideal marketplace. Despite platforms like Android and the iPhone finally breaking their way through, right here, right now, I don’t think there is any mobile software market that is as appealing and ready for prime-time as the BlackBerry market.

Right now we are already starting to see the signs of an increasingly competitive market. Much more than any other year I have been watching the market, I think ‘08 is going to bring around dramatic, and in some cases, violent change. Old hats are going to be ousted with gusto. Applications will do more, look better and be cheaper. Consumers will win, while developers will have to work harder and faster to earn their keep. Developers will demand more from RIM and RIM, in turn, must step up their efforts to keep pace them.

What you see really is what you get

One of the most evident manifestations of this increased competition is the lengths developers are now willing to go to to capture attention. It’s no longer suitable for your application to be purely utilitarian while forsaking looks. This became obvious to me prior to the launch of our new application BBSmart Alarms Pro which we invested a lot of time in purely on the UI side. The concept, multiple alarms, wasn’t new. What was new was that we undercut everybody on price and produced an application with some real visual appeal. Hello competition.

And it’s payed dividends. Everybody has commented on how nice the application looks, and I know that in no small way is contributing to its success.

Last night I found myself looking around at some of the upcoming BlackBerry applications and I was blown away by their visual appeal. I found myself watching the video for an application that is currently in beta called MiuTunes which will make you forget about Flipside in an instant. Hello competition.

I also found myself looking at some of the applications on offer from a company called e-mobile. They’ve got a PocketDay (old hat) killer primed and ready for market:

In terms of functionality, what they offer above and beyond PocketDay is not a lot from what I can see. But it sure does look pretty. Hello competition.

RIM needs to catch up to us

And thus, with RIM making almost no ground at all with improving the quality of the APIs and documentation they offer, increased market competition will drive development times up and more people will begin to probe the existing APIs to breaking points. Nobody will use stock UI components anymore because of their horrible dated look and inflexibility (ButtonField? Ha! You think I used that to make the buttons work the way they do with BBSmart Alarms Pro? Not likely!) Instead, in order to stay competitive we’re all going to have to push the boundaries and develop our own custom UI components and frameworks. For any company that wants to stay competitive, a graphics artist on the team is a must. At a time when the market is pushing hard to drive innovation and bring great products to users, the infuriating limitations with the RIM OS and painfully limiting native UI framework is the greatest barrier of them all.

Big things are coming

Big things are coming for the BlackBerry and they are sure to give the existing marketplace a good shakeup. In this increasingly competitive market, developers will pull out all the stops to grab your attention, and in the end consumers will win with a wide variety of powerful, appealing and cheap applications to choose from. Mark my words: ‘08 will see a dramatic upheaval of old hats…And if you don’t think so, well, you haven’t seen our product lineup!

BGR has gone and done it again with another exclusive. This time they’ve got their hands on some pictures of the BlackBerry Kickstart, a clamshell flip-phone rumored to be in RIM’s ‘08 product line-up.

As a third-party application developer, I’m going to rain down fury upon RIM if they don’t:

A) Provide us with a means to detect if the phone is open or closed; and

B) Provide us with a way to completely override what is shown on the faceplate screen.

If they opened this functionality up to us, I can already foresee some really interesting things I could do with this new hardware.

A little while back I talked about the NetBeans Innovators Grant and how somebody should enter in to the competition and submit the idea of a BlackBerry development plugin for NetBeans. I actually found out shortly thereafter that a person did take on this idea, which I thought was fantastic news!

Yesterday the NetBeans Innovator Grant winners were announced and I was disappointed to find out that this project did not win. What I found particularly annoying however was not that the BlackBerry project didn’t win; I’d be OK with that if the winning projects were more worthy than it. However, I think there are a number of winners in there that aren’t more worthy. When I see projects like “Scala Support” winning, I think I know what we’ve got a case of here and why the BlackBerry project didn’t win.

It’s called basement-itis and it’s what happens to technical people who spend too much time living in a basement using obscure languages like Scala and don’t get up to the surface to get some fresh air and realize that the BlackBerry is everywhere.

What follows is my point-by-point breakdown of why the BlackBerry plugin should have won a grant.

First, before I launch in to that I do however want to point out that I didn’t submit the project, so I’m not playing the sore loser role here. I didn’t submit it and I also would have had zero time to be involved with it. I also use and love Eclipse and would not switch to using NetBeans even if it had a good BlackBerry development plugin. In other words, whether this project won or not is relatively inconsequential to me.

Alright, down to my reasons:

• The RIM JDE is horrible and no professional BlackBerry developer uses it. RIM also stuffed up the Eclipse plugin they released. A good plugin is sorely needed and would be adopted instantly by a huge number of BlackBerry developers, even those who have never used NetBeans before.

• RIM has shown their willingness to throw support behind Eclipse and gold-plate a plugin. The NetBeans team can either choose to compete, and support those developers who like using NetBeans - like well known BlackBerry developer Jonathan - or fade off completely from this domain.

• The number of BlackBerry developers is going to swell enormously as the device continues to gain more and more traction. The BlackBerry right now is mainstream. The number of developers is going to grow to be massive and unless there is a good NetBeans plugin it’s going to get exactly 0% of that action. Sun has an early chance right now to get in to the hearts and minds of BlackBerry developers with a rocking NetBeans plugin and they’re ignoring it. That’s dumb.

In this post I nailed Scala pretty hard and it’s not because I’m some ignorant .Net newbie either. I’ve used Scala. I’ve used Groovy too. I’m also good with Python and Ruby. I like Open Source software and I worked on the Amiga Research Operating System (AROS) project. I definitely dabble with things on the fringe.

But I also don’t live in the basement. I live in the real world. And in the real world I see a huge demand for a good BlackBerry development plugin for a powerful IDE and nothing on the table. The aim of this initiative ultimately for the NetBeans team is to drive adoption. I think a good BlackBerry development NetBeans plugin would drive use of NetBeans more than most of the projects on the grant winners list.

Through the power of Google, a couple of the people who picked the grant winners might even make it to this post. Good! Can you guys do something for me? Open up your favorite job search site. It can be any site, I honestly don’t care. Search for “Scala” jobs.

Welcome to the real world

I wonder how many other interesting and cool plugin proposals were rejected also because they were from a domain that nobody on the “Dream Team” understands?

Over the last couple of months, I’ve watched as several really innovative BlackBerry themes have appeared on the market and then disappear shortly thereafter. I even remember speaking to a theme developer a couple of months ago actually and I believe he was one of the first to come out with a set of “next gen” themes that went on to sell really well. Not long after, all his themes disappeared from his website and I could never get a solid response from him as to why, though the term “legal” was mentioned a few times. He maintained that he had done nothing wrong, yet apparently someone else thought otherwise and there’s a good chance that someone had big legal clout, so, wisely, he backed down.

Ronen over on BerryReview today is reporting that even the big guys are running afoul of this trouble. In this case, bPlay has had to remove their popular Crossbar theme. When even the big guys like bPlay, who maintain a tight relationship with RIM, are running in to problems you know something funny is going on here.

I know very little about theme development, but from what I’ve heard these next gen themes are all being created with the as yet unreleased Plazmic Theme Builder 4.3. How did these theme developers get their hands on it?

If some developers got their hands on an internal release of PTB 4.3 and are using that to release commercial themes, I can see how that would be a problem as it gives them a decidedly unfair competitive advantage. However, if the internal release of PTB 4.3 does not throw up any information to notify developers that they cannot use it to produce commercial themes, I can also see how some might feel like they have done nothing wrong.

Irrespective, it has obviously not been made clear to developers what the limitations are with using this unreleased software and this has no doubt been a bitter experience for them and users.

What we can all learn from this

What we can all learn from this is that internal releases of software can and will be leaked and it’s important to prepare for that. So, from now on all internal releases of Plazmic software should have a dialog which comes up when you start the program:

“This is an internal release intended for evaluation only. If you use it to make commercial themes we will run you down with a car”

Similarly, RIM can learn something from this also because internal beta versions of OS 4.5 have been leaked everywhere and already we’re getting customers who expect us to support it. It’s not been made clear to them that the OS they’re running is internal and that it’s impossible for us to support them. When you start the BlackBerry with this internal OS release installed it should throw up a dialog:

“This is an internal release and may not be reliable. If you lose your contacts, miss emails, or drop calls then that’s your own fault for installing beta software!”

Understanding your user

When developing an application for the BlackBerry you’ve got a couple of different options available for how you choose to handle fonts.

For one, you can inherit the native font choice and use that throughout your app. This approach has a lot of merit. For example, if a user has poor vision they have likely picked a font size and face that maximizes readability for them. If you then go and make your application use some other font size and face that negatively impacts readability for them, you’ve just lost yourself a customer. This is particularly important when you consider the age demographic of BlackBerry users, which though I don’t have any firm figures on, must be older than your typical Nokia or Samsung user due to the “executive” focus (I remember reading a little while back that the average age for a BlackBerry user is 44 though this seems too high). Also, I imagine the average age of a BlackBerry user is older than the average age of a BlackBerry developer, so chances are that even if everything looks readable for you, your users might not think so. Something to definitely keep in mind.

However, there are many instances in which this isn’t the ideal approach. For example, if you use fixed-size images and need to overlay text on that, and the user has chosen a font that is above average in size, your application looks stupid and messy when things that should line up don’t. You can try auto-scaling images and fancily re-arranging fields but things quickly become complex and from what I’ve seen of the BlackBerry software market, nobody does this.

What we do

So what do most developers end up doing? From what I’ve seen, they pick a font face and size ahead of time and the user has no option to change this. In some rare cases, those developers that are most receptive to feedback will add in the option to change the font size but that’s as far as it goes.

With this approach, picking the right font size and face by default is all important. Most developers probably think they know the preferred font size and face of users, they think they understand their market well; at least, I know that’s how I feel. So I was quite surprised to see the results of a recent survey run on Pinstack which asked “What font are you using?” The results are below:

I learned something

These results genuinely surprised me. BBCasual? I think that’s a horrible looking font! That’s not an insignificant sample size too, with 555 votes already taken. Of course, the sample is inevitably biased, taken from a BlackBerry enthusiast website however this probably does point to some deeper set trend as well.

I wonder what most people use as their font size? I think the results of a survey on this could be of significant benefit to developers. Hey RIM, any chance of a UI design guide in the future for third-party app developers?

Right now on my primary BlackBerry I use BBMilbank Tall, with a font size of 8 and Bold and it’s how I test all my applications because I’ve always just implicitly assumed that everybody is using this also, or something very similar. Seeing these results has certainly given me pause and I’ll be paying more attention to fonts in the future. When such a simple thing to change could potentially be losing you many sales, you’d be silly not to.