Another year, another developer conference – hard to believe that BlackBerry® DEVCON 2010 is coming up so quickly! Looking over this year’s session catalog, I couldn’t be more excited. The community has really stepped it up this year, and I can’t wait to see some of these sessions. With so much co-presentation between Research In Motion® and members of the development community, attendees should be prepared for some really solid content. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the sessions that I believe consumer app developers should put on their radar:

COM06: Free Versus Paid Business Models: Marketing Applications in BlackBerry App World™
When developing an app, it’s so easy to focus on features and functionality. But if you forget about the business side of things, you’re going to have a hard time making it in mobile. The good folks at Nobex Radio break it down for you and share some of the lessons they’ve learned about how to take both free and paid apps to market. Couple that with the information they’ll be sharing around user trends for both free and paid apps, and this session is a can’t miss for anyone who’s about to roll out an app.

COM21: Mobile Multimedia: Leverage Video Streaming on BlackBerry Smartphones
DEV02: Streaming Encrypted Media on BlackBerry Smartphones
DEV04: Get the Most from Your Multimedia Application
With the outpouring of really solid music and video apps coming out recently, I’m going to list a trio of sessions here, as COM21, DEV02, and DEV04 are all unique, but at the same time quite complimentary. If you’re developing an app and streaming media is key to your success, then these three sessions will save you a lot of time and effort. They’ll teach you the right way to architect your solution from day one. The knowledge that comes from these three sessions literally caps off almost three years of hard work – others have lived the trials and tribulations of having pushed the limits of the platform, and now’s your opportunity to see how it’s done.

DEV15: Introduction to BlackBerry® Theme Studio
DEV30: Advanced Theme Development Techniques
If you’ve browsed through some of the featured content in BlackBerry App World over the past few months, I’m sure that you’ve noticed the ever-growing presence of themes – it’s one of the biggest app categories in the BlackBerry App World storefront! So whether you’re interested in dabbling with themes or you’re looking at creating themes to create a serious stream of revenue, these two sessions have a lot to offer. When it comes to themes, many developers overlook the fact that through their normal app development, they’ve already created all the graphical assets. Creating a simple theme to accompany your app doesn’t take very long, is very easy to do, and allows you to re-use those graphical assets. It also might be a great way of promoting your app and potentially giving you your download numbers a boost – extending your reach through themes is especially pertinent to game vendors, content vendors, and big brands. If you haven’t thought about themes before, maybe it’s time.

Post a comment and let me know which sessions you’re most excited to see. Hope to see you there!

In part one of this series, we discussed some of the physical features of BlackBerry® smartphones and how you should handle them.  Today, we’ll focus more on how users interact with BlackBerry smartphones.

Tip 4: Use the features of the BlackBerry smartphone!

A) BlackBerry smartphone owners are used to interacting with the device in specific ways.

For trackball and trackpad BlackBerry smartphones, owners will expect to use the trackball or trackpad for just about everything in their games – the keyboard is typically used mainly for typing.  Only power users will use the more advanced keyboard features for navigating the device (such as pressing the ‘M’ key to launch the Messages application or to use the ‘T’ key to jump to the top of a list).

DO NOT rely on the keyboard for game play.  Leverage the trackball or trackpad as much as possible.  If the keyboard absolutely must be used, be sure that the key mappings you select make sense.  For example, on a BlackBerry smartphone with a full QWERTY keyboard, DO NOT use the number pad; all number keys are found on the left-hand side of the keyboard. Using these keys would cramp the user’s hands into one small region of the keyboard and they would not be able to effectively play the game, nor would they want to for very long. Conversely, for BlackBerry smartphones with a SureType keyboard, the number pad might make an excellent choice.  Know your target smartphone, know your keyboard, and make a good choice. Ideally, if you’re using the keyboard at all, you will allow the user the option to map the keys any way they like.  Better still would be to provide a hybrid approach where the user can use the trackball or trackpad for all movement related activities and just use the keyboard for special functions or special moves.

B) Many of the newer BlackBerry smartphones feature high resolution screens at 480 x 360.

Use as much as the display area as possible.  Porting can often be a long process, but avoid using “filler” as much as possible.  I’ve seen many games that only use a small portion of the available display and fill in the rest of the display with a border.  You wouldn’t tolerate a game on your PC that wasted screen real estate, so why would you expect anything different on your smartphone?

C) Touch screen BlackBerry smartphones feature accelerometer and multiple orientation support.

If you can use the accelerometer as a game play mechanic, do it.  This simple mechanism offers a lot of wow factor and provides a unique gaming experience.

If your game only supports one orientation, you’ll need to inform the user. For example, some BlackBerry smartphone games have taken the approach of displaying a message when the user attempts to change orientations indicating that the game doesn’t support that orientation.

Tip 5:  Aim for fifteen minutes of fame.

BlackBerry smartphone users often engage their smartphones in bursts and you may want to consider this when designing your game.  The title of this tip is actually a bit misleading, since fifteen minutes is probably the absolute maximum block of time that you’re going to be able to keep a smartphone user’s attention.  It’s much more likely that they’ll discreetly play for a few minutes at a time, and then put their smartphone down.

A) When launching the game, the sound should be off by default.

It’s easy to imagine BlackBerry smartphone users playing games in a public place, be it at work, on public transit, or while waiting in line.  If they’re blasted by music every time they run the game, they’ll probably avoid playing it for fear of drawing attention to themselves.  The best approach is to have the sound off when the game is launched and provide an option for the user to turn it on.

B) The game state should allow for pausing and saving for future use.

If you’re not automatically saving game state at regular intervals, you should do so any time the app is backgrounded.  As discussed in Tip 1, applications are not explicitly suspended when it receives the MIDlet.pauseApp() event, as background processing is permitted by the platform.  You can use this feature to your advantage.

C)Users might not have the patience for long animations.

Whether it’s a speech bubble or an animation for advancing the storyline of the game, always offer the user a way to skip and/or speed it along.

Tip 6: UI Guidelines

The tips above provide a pretty good summary of the UI guidelines applicable to BlackBerry game developers, but a more comprehensive guide does exist.  This guide includes screen sizes across all models of BlackBerry smartphones, recommendations for icon design, etc.  This document is easy to navigate and contains a ton of useful information.  It can be found here:

BlackBerry Smartphone UI Guidelines

Hopefully the tips provided here offer you that extra little bit of guidance needed to take your game from a two star rating on BlackBerry App World™ to a four star rating.  Remember, there’s no substitute for knowing the target smartphone and knowing what your customers expect from you.

First things first: it’s important to note that unless you use a BlackBerry smartphone regularly, you’re unlikely to understand how your users are accustomed to interacting with applications on the smartphone.  In this two-part post, I’ll try to help you understand the nature of the BlackBerry smartphone user and the impact that has on your game development.

Tip 1:  Physical Device Keys

There are certain keys on BlackBerry smartphones that users will always expect to perform specific actions.

A)  The Send key. This key will always cause the phone screen to be displayed.  No special handling required here; the platform will perform this task automatically.

B)  The End/Power key. This key will either end the current call, or if no call is in progress, will send the currently foregrounded application to the background.  The backgrounding is handled automatically by the platform, but it’s important to note that the BlackBerry platform supports applications running in the background.  This feature means that just because you’ve received a MIDlet.pauseApp() event, there’s nothing in the platform that explicitly suspends execution of the game; it’s your responsibility to go dormant when in the background.

C)  The Menu key. In most applications for BlackBerry smartphones, this will bring up a menu with the default look and feel.  Since many games have implemented their own in-game menu system, you should use this key as a trigger to display your menu.  If you do not capture this key, the default menu will be displayed.   The expected design pattern here is that you will implement a KeyListener, capture this key, using it as a trigger to pause the game and display your menu.  If you wish to use the default menu system of the device, you can add menu items via CommandActions.

D)  The Escape key. This key should always have the following behavior:

Tip 2:  No Soft Keys

The concept of soft keys does not apply to BlackBerry smartphones.  That is, you should not use any of the display area at the bottom of the screen for attempting to infer different meaning onto the keys listed in Tip 1.  Those keys should always produce the behaviour listed in Tip 1.

Tip 3: Navigation

There are three primary input types particular to BlackBerry smartphones: the trackball, trackpad, and  touch screen.  Older BlackBerry smartphones supported a trackwheel on the right-hand side of the device, but that input mechanism will not be discussed here.

For game developers, the trackball and trackpad can effectively be treated as the same input mechanism: 4-way navigation (up/down/left/right) that will click / fire when pressed.  This input mechanism is similar to the D-pad featured on many MIDP phones, making it pretty straight-forward and easy to work with; the aforementioned events are mapped to Canvas.UP, Canvas.DOWN, Canvas.LEFT, Canvas.RIGHT, and Canvas.FIRE.

BlackBerry smartphones with touch screens are different than the typical touch interface seen on other smartphones in that the screen is clickable, allowing for differentiation between the touching of the screen and clicking the screen.  To ignore the clickable interface is in most cases a mistake.  I.e. based on the learning the user has from all other applications on the smartphone, if your application responds to tap events instead of click events, the user will be confused.

Today we covered the basics of interaction and navigation.  In part two of this post, we’ll dig a little deeper into the nature of the BlackBerry user and reveal the expectations they’re going to have for your game.

In case you missed it, the new BlackBerry App World™ web store launched last week and we’ve been very pleased with the positive response from BlackBerry® users. And I think BlackBerry developers should be even more excited about what this means for promotion of their apps in BlackBerry App World!

Here are just a few ways that the new web store makes apps easier to find and download:

• Prominent placement of Featured, Top Free, Top Paid, and Newest Applications.
• ‘Get it Today’ option lets users send direct download links to their BlackBerry smartphones – and to friends!
• Fast navigation of app reviews and large screenshots makes the download decision even easier.
• New ways to immediately share app discoveries: by email, Facebook®, MySpace®, Twitter®, Stumble Upon® and Digg®!
• Clear listing of supported devices, countries, and carriers.
• Subscribe to BlackBerry App World RSS feeds and never miss out on a new app! My personal favorites are New Applications and Featured Applications.

Are you doing everything you can to promote your application in BlackBerry App World? Check out this article entitled “How To – Invoke BlackBerry App World from a Web Page” to help spread the good word.

Don’t forget to join us in San Francisco November 9-12 for the BlackBerry Developer Conference, where we’ll be discussing how to drive success on BlackBerry App World. The BlackBerry Developer Conference website has all the registration details!

Happy Selling!