I’m going to answer both – starting with BlackBerry 10. The short answer is no – there will be no Theme Studio product for BlackBerry 10 and there will be no theme support in the BlackBerry 10 OS. We’ve worked diligently over the last year and a half with our design team to create a new user interface – focused around the idea of “flow”. While there are some great themes built for the current BlackBerry OS, BlackBerry 10 is designed to provide users a unique experience that can be personalized in other ways, but will have a consistent look and feel in iconography and settings.

Our resources are focused on delivering a best in the industry developer experience and an astonishing end user experience. We’ve been wrestling with this decision for a while – but based on multiple factors, we’ve made the decision to not release Theme Studio 7. Once we looked at the final product, it was clear to us that it didn’t address theme developer needs or asks. In addition, feedback from our Theme Studio beta testers showed us that the quality of the tooling would not be acceptable.

Many theme developers have been using Theme Studio 6 to create themes for BlackBerry OS 7 and 7.1 devices. We even documented the process in a two-part series here on the blog. We encourage you to continue to explore the opportunities of BlackBerry 7 as our subscriber base has grown to 80 million globally.

What’s the silver lining? One word – Cascades. The work that you, our theme developers, have done in Theme Studio shows how amazing your creative talents are. We encourage you to unleash that creativity on BlackBerry 10 using Cascades to create stunning UI animations in apps. We have a number of resources on Cascades that can help you, and we encourage you to reach out for support from our dev relations team in our forums, on Twitter®, and at our events.

Most recently, here are sessions available from BlackBerry Jam Americas:

JAM65 – BlackBerry 10 Visual Style
JAM07 – Extreme Agile UX with Cascades
JAM09 – Fundamentals of the Cascades UI Framework
JAM04 – UI/UX: Finding your Flow

In addition, we have number of samples, help blogs, and webinars on Cascades, and we encourage you to look at the opportunities BlackBerry 10 app development offers. This includes our Built for BlackBerry and 10k Guarantee program.

This was not an easy decision to make and we know this isn’t easy for theme developers to hear, but we appreciate everything you’ve done – and are continuing to do – for the BlackBerry ecosystem. We hope you’ll join us in our new chapter as we’re committed to providing the most compelling mobile computing experience with the commercial launch of BlackBerry 10.

The first thing that needs to be done is to retrieve the pz_ directory and the pz_ properties file from the Windows temp directory after BlackBerry Theme Builder exports these files , but before the files can be deleted. Doing this manually would likely not work ; it happens very quickly, so you may need to apply permissions to the directory to prevent file deletion.

(Note: When changing any system permissions it is extremely important to fully understand the repercussions and only make changes at your own discretion.)

After you have these files saved to a safe place, such as your desktop of a common development directory, you can copy the pz_ properties file to the pz_ directory to keep them all in one place.

Next you will need to open the various SVG files in the directory you save and make manual changes to support the resolution and desired layout on the target device. For example, the main SVG wrapper element has width and height attributes; these can be set to the width and height of the target device’s resolution. For any other elements, the width, height, x and y values may need to be set. Here is a list of some elements which can be accessed and modified:

• xlink:href
  • CurrentDateTime
  • AlarmIndicator
  • BatteryLevel
  • Coverage
  • SystemStatus
  • GridIndicators
  • Roaming
  • SignalLevel
  • WLANSignalLevel
  • GPSMode
  • Image
  • OwnerInfo
  • ProfileIndicator

• Id
  • hs_profile_underlay
  • hs_profile_entry_icon
  • hs_profile_focus_entry_icon

• • Id
  • wifi_bullets

A forum post will be started where users can contribute additional elements and attributes in the BlackBerry® Themes & Animated Graphics board.

After you have modified all of the SVG files, you will need to compile the theme files into CODs that can be installed to your device.

First, you will need to modify the ThemeBundler.contentDir element of the pz_.properties file to point to the current directory. Then you can run the following two commands from a command prompt:

\bin\svgc.exe *.svg
\bin\tbbundle.exe pz_.properties


Make sure to watch the console for any errors when parsing the SVG. If all is successful then the theme CODs should be output to the directory specified in the ThemeBundler.outFileDir element of the pz_.properties file.

Your theme is now ready to be loaded for testing onto an actual BlackBerry smartphone!

However, this method of theme creation is not an exact science. The layout of all elements and items will take some time to get right and not all portions of the theme will be fully supported. It may take some time to get it right with several testing iterations:

while (theme != perfect)
modify SVG → compile code → load onto device → test thoroughly


It would be a good idea to progress with a small number of modifications until you reach the desired theme state. A few things to note:

1. There is a 5MB file size limit for themes on the smartphone , any themes greater than this will be rejected by the target device
2. All images exported by Theme Studio using this method will be of an incorrect size as you are targeting a different handheld. To optimize the user experience you will need to change each image to the size expected by the target device.

Once you are satisfied, you can then distribute your theme using your preferred distribution channels, including the BlackBerry App World storefront.

Have you had success creating themes this way? Let us know in the comments!

1. The first thing we need to do is modify the device_profiles.properties file to include information for the BlackBerry® smartphone model/series for which we will be creating a theme.

Example:
plazmic.device<NUM>.name=BlackBerry <Model> [Series]
plazmic.device<NUM>.shortName=<Model>
plazmic.device<NUM>.modelName=<ModelName>
plazmic.device<NUM>.file=blackberry/BB<Model>.properties
plazmic.device<NUM>.thumbnail=blackberry/images/BB<Model>_thumbnail.png

<NUM> Each device listed in this file is incremented in this element. Any new element added should be exactly one higher than the previous listed.

<Model> The smartphone model you will be creating the theme for (ie. BlackBerry® Bold™ 9900 smartphone)

[Series] If there are multiple smartphones with the same UI characteristics (ie BlackBerry Bold 9900 smartphone and BlackBerry® Bold™ 9930 smartphone) you can include “Series”

<ModelName> The commercial name for the smartphone (ie. Bold™, Curve™ or Torch™)

2. Next we need to create the BB<Model>.properties file referenced by the device_profiles.properties file. The easiest way to do this would be to copy an existing BB<Model>.properties of a BlackBerry® 6 device, then simply rename the file to reflect the target model and update the resolution (screen.size) with the resolution of the target device.

3. We also need to create some files to let BlackBerry Theme Builder know which theme types are supported for our new device. To do this, copy an existing device’s .properties file:

Example:
<ThemeStudio>\resources\theme\BlackBerry6_480x360\9780BlackBerry6.properties

From there, rename it to suit the model of device being targeted but keep it in the same directory.

4. Finally, open this file in a text editor and change the following values:
theme.name = <Model> BlackBerry®6 Custom
theme.device = <Model>
theme.base = BlackBerry®7_<Resolution>_b
theme.alternateBase = //Remove this line entirely from the file, it is not needed
theme.supportedHandheldOs = 6.0,7.0
theme.preferredHandheldOs = 7.0

<Resolution> – The resolution of the target device’s display

After this is done, you should be able to launch BlackBerry Theme Builder and select the model of device you have just added as well as the theme layout. If this works, then you have successfully modified BlackBerry Theme Builder!

(Note: Functionalities such as previewing on device and/or simulator will not work. Test themes need to be loaded outside of BlackBerry Theme Builder for testing using methods such as JavaLoader or BlackBerry® Desktop Software.)

Exporting the theme file at this time and trying to load it onto a device will cause some usability issues, as the theme has been created for a device with a different resolution from the target device. There is a bit more work that will go into customizing the theme before it can look and function properly. This will be covered in Part 3 – Manipulating Themes. Watch for this blog post soon!

Let us know if you have any questions so far!

Will Research In Motion (RIM®) let me modify BlackBerry Theme Studio to create themes for OS 7 devices?

Absolutely! Note that the method proposed in this workaround is by no means easy. It will require considerably more effort to get even basic themes working, but it can be used as a means to create themes until an official BlackBerry Theme Studio is released that supports BlackBerry 7 OS devices. Although these steps are being provided, this method of creating themes is essentially unsupported. Theme creation and stability will entirely be the responsibility of the developer; no bugs will be logged against this method of creating themes.

If Liquid Graphics broke theme support, then how can themes be made?

For the most part, the anatomy of a theme has stayed relatively unchanged between OS releases. With the introduction of BlackBerry 7 OS, several screens now use a completely new mechanism to create the UI, known as Liquid Graphics. Because of this large change, some features and functionalities supported in previous OS themes may be unsupported. This would be a limitation of BlackBerryTheme Studio 6.0 not being aware of how themes are expected in BlackBerry 7 OS. For example, both the phone and home screens previously used SVG for layouts and actions; in BlackBerry 7 OS, the phone screens no longer use SVG at all, while the home screen only uses SVG for layout purposes. All animations on the home screen and the layout of the phone screens are handled by Liquid Graphics.

Understanding how BlackBerry Theme Builder works

For the sake of simplicity, I will be referring to the BlackBerry Theme Studio 6.0 installation directory (wherever you may have chosen to install it on your system) as <ThemeStudio>.

Once BlackBerry Theme Builder is launched, it starts off by determining which devices and theme types are supported by reading bundled property files:

1) <ThemeStudio>\resources\devices\device_profiles.properties
This file contains a list of information for all supported BlackBerry smartphone models, including a link to a file which describes the characteristics of each device and a thumbnail view of the device.

2) <ThemeStudio>\resources\devices\blackberry\BB<Model>.properties
One of these files is included for each device model/series supported by BlackBerry Theme Studio. It lets BlackBerry Theme Builder know information about the device, such as display resolution, supported fonts, et cetera.

3) <ThemeStudio>\resources\theme\<ThemeDir>\<Model><ThemeType>.properties
Once BlackBerry Theme Builder reads the list of supported devices (1) and determines their properties (2), the next step is to determine which themes are available for each device. All found theme types will be displayed in the splash screen’s Select Layout Type drop-down. These themes will be based off the .thm file located in the same directory as this file.

After BlackBerry Theme Builder launches, and you make your changes to the theme and export your created masterpiece, BlackBerry Theme Builder does the following:

1) Analyzes the theme for any changes from the base theme (the default theme loaded by BlackBerry Theme Builder before any modifications are made).

2) Any changes found results in certain files being created during the export process by BlackBerry Theme Builder.

• Layout changes: SVG and associated PME files are created.
• Image changes/additions: New image files are included.

The more modifications that are made, the more files that will be exported (one image file for each image that is added). The SVG files are used to specify the layout, behavior, and reference the appropriate image files for the various icons, backgrounds, and other UI components.

3) These files are exported to the current user’s Windows® temp directory in a folder named with the following format:
pz_<5-RandomLetters>

Also, a properties file will be exported to the temp directory in the following format:
pz_<5-RandomLetters>.properties

4) BlackBerry Theme Builder then compiles these files into the theme COD file and stores that COD in another folder in the Windows temp directory with the same naming format.

5) BlackBerry Theme Builder then copies the COD to the defined output directory along with the required installation files (JAD, ALX etc) and deletes the two directories created in Step 4 from the file system entirely.

By now you should have a good idea of how BlackBerry Theme Builder figures out which devices should be supported and what happens in the theme export process behind the scenes. This should serve as a good base for the next section where we go into how to actually interrupt the build process for BlackBerry Theme Studio to create themes for devices that are not originally supported. Stay tuned for part 2 of this blog post series!

Got any questions about building BlackBerry themes in the meantime? Let us know in the comments!

[UPDATE 1/18/2012]
We recently announced the introduction of a content rating and content filtering system to the BlackBerry App World™ storefront. Due to the complexity with introducing this system, we’re approaching the roll out in two phases. In the initial phase, we will be rolling out Mature & Adult rated apps that were submitted to BlackBerry App World prior to the availability of the content rating and content filtering system. All other Mature & Adult applications will be approved (pending review) by early February in our second phase.

We apologize for the delay in approving your Mature & Adult rated applications. Thank you for your dedication and support in creating amazing content for our BlackBerry users.

We’re very excited to bring a new feature to the BlackBerry App World™ storefront that is designed to make publishing and discovering amazing apps on the BlackBerry® platform much safer for everyone involved. On Wednesday November 30th, 2011 we will be performing a server upgrade that will bring content rating to the storefront. Our content rating system has been planned out based on input from our carrier, consumer, and developer partners to make sure we’ve implemented a content rating system that helps parents control what types of content their children have access to.

After the upgrade is complete, all applications and themes in the BlackBerry App World storefront will receive a default rating. The majority of apps will be rated G (General). If your app or theme is in one of the categories listed below, it’ll receive a rating of T (Teen).

In addition to these categories, apps and themes with descriptions that contain the terms “BBM™”, “Facebook®”, “Twitter®”, “chat”, “dating”, “social networking” and “message” will also receive a default rating of T (Teen).

On the BlackBerry smartphone side, we’ll be launching a client update on December 15th, 2011 that will enable consumers to set a rating filter. Once the filter is set, only content of the specified ratings will be displayed to the consumer when they browse or search the BlackBerry App World catalog.

The default rating filter in BlackBerry App World is set to “Adult” – which is all content in the BlackBerry App World storefront. This means that when consumers upgrade, they’ll still see your apps and themes – nothing to worry about.

When consumers upgrade to BlackBerry App World 3.1, they’ll be able to change their rating filter. Starting on November 30th, 2011 developers will have 15 days to log into the Vendor Portal and update your Content Rating questions if you believe your app or theme should have a different rating. All new apps being submitted that day will require that the Content Rating questions be answered.

As you answer the Content Rating questions, your content rating will be presented to you. Any app that includes “Social networking, community or other User Generated Content” will automatically be given a “Teen” rating. Once done, your content rating is updated in the system.

Got any questions about the new Content Rating system? Let us know in the comments!

We are pleased to announce the gold release of BlackBerry® Theme Studio 6, and want to thank all of the developers who helped improve the product by providing feedback from the beta releases.

If you haven’t been using our beta, here’s an overview of some of the new features:

• Support for the latest BlackBerry devices, including the BlackBerry® Torch™ 9800 and BlackBerry® Style™ 9670 handsets, and BlackBerry® 6.
• Support for theming BlackBerry 6 features such as graphic popup menus, plus the addition of BlackBerry® Messenger (BBM™), Facebook®, and Twitter® feeds to Today screens.
• New productivity features allow you to batch update all of the graphics in a theme automatically. You can also change fonts across multiple phone screens automatically. Also, BlackBerry Theme Studio continues to be compatible with popular graphic design tools such as Adobe Photoshop® and Corel® Paint Shop Pro.
• A Background Wizard makes it easy to add dynamic wallpapers to your theme. Options include date-based or time-based changes (to highlight a special holiday or change images by the time of day), and slideshow backgrounds (to cycle through your favorite photos).
• A new user interface lets you click on any item on the preview and directly edit its settings. This allows faster editing and a shorter learning curve, plus you can select multiple items to change them all at once.
• A new export option makes it easier to offer themes through BlackBerry App World™. The export packages all of the correct files and settings into a single zip file, ready for upload to BlackBerry App World.

You’ll find BlackBerry Theme Studio 6 to be easy-to-use, yet a powerful tool for designing compelling themes with unique graphics, animations, sound effects, applications and navigation. The new release can be downloaded from here for personal use, and from here for commercial use.

We look forward to hearing about your impressions and seeing your cool new themes!

The new BlackBerry® Theme Studio 6 Public Beta 2 is now available for download on BlackBerry® Developer Zone, providing extensive support for new (and upgraded) BlackBerry® smartphones with BlackBerry 6 OS, as well as robust import functionality for theme projects created using previous versions of BlackBerry Theme Studio.

This beta release supports theme development for all BlackBerry smartphones running BlackBerry 6, that are currently in-market, as well as simplified theme export for BlackBerry App World™ in order to quickly submit your BlackBerry 6 themes.

In addition, the Import feature has been expanded to allow for importing previous theme projects that targeted devices running versions of BlackBerry Device Software prior to BlackBerry 6. For instance, if a theme project was created in BlackBerry Theme Studio 5.0 targetting the BlackBerry® Bold™ 9700 smartphone series, you can follow three simple steps to import your theme settings from that project (such as icons, menu/dialog background patterns, fonts, and so on) to a BlackBerry Bold 9700 smartphone series project in BlackBerry Theme Studio 6:

1. Create a new project in BlackBerry Theme Studio 6:

2. Import the old project (created using BlackBerry Theme Studio 5.0):

3. Export the project for the applicable BlackBerry smartphone:

Due to many changes to the base themes in the BlackBerry 6 OS, the Import feature can significantly reduce your effort by leveraging all previous settings that apply to the BlackBerry 6 theme. There are a notable set of theme items that are unique to BlackBerry 6, such as home screen banner, notification and application trays, and calendar icon (digits now appear in the calendar icon based on system date) that will still require configuration after the import, but the import capability gives you a big head start.

For best results during an import operation in BlackBerry Theme Studio , the most important consideration is the device screen size of the source theme project. For example, you can import a theme project targetting the BlackBerry® Tour™ 9600 smartphone series to a theme project targetting the BlackBerry Bold 9700 smartphone series, due to similar screen sizes. The easiest way to determine this by using View > Change Face Plate menu command.

Finally, the user interface for Theme Builder has been refined even more with intuitive views, tabs and icons used throughout the tool in BlackBerry Theme Studio 6.0 Public Beta 2. Also, the Background Wizard has been enhanced, making it easier than ever to create things like date-based wallpaper changes:

If you haven’t installed BlackBerry Theme Studio Public Beta 1, you can read about the many other new features on the beta page, including a redesigned user interface, easy Background Wizard, and batch import of graphics.

As we approach our final release candidate for BlackBerry Theme Studio 6, we would love to hear your feedback on your theme development experiences so far. Please provide us any bug reports or feature suggestions for BlackBerry Theme Studio 6 using the “Report Issue” option in the Help menu. Download the BlackBerry Theme Studio 6.0 Public Beta 2 now, and happy theming!

If you haven’t already heard about the newly announced BlackBerry® Theme Studio 6.0 Public Beta at DEVCON 2010, we are excited to cover all the details here in this post. The number of published themes on BlackBerry App World™ has grown tremendously since the introduction of the Themes category last year. To showcase this popular category, the latest BlackBerry App World 2.0 client features the top 25 downloaded BlackBerry® smartphone themes. So if you are looking to get your theme up on the list for BlackBerry 6 devices, I hope your BlackBerry Theme Studio 6.0 public beta tool and BlackBerry® Torch™ 9800 simulator are already installed!

Let’s dive into the newly added features in BlackBerry Theme Studio 6.0 Public Beta.

Theme support for BlackBerry 6.0 OS devices

Using BlackBerry Theme Builder 6.0, theme developers can now create themes for the BlackBerry Torch 9800 device and publish them on BlackBerry App World. There are several new components that can be themed on BlackBerry 6, such as the new notification bar, popup context menu, and application icon tray. BlackBerry Theme Builder allows you to customize all these new components using the ‘BlackBerry 6′ layout.

The ‘custom’ layout provides a subset of those theme features similar to the custom layout in BlackBerry 5.0 touch screen devices like the BlackBerry® Storm2™ smartphone. However, there are some new additions to allow social feed notifications (BlackBerry® Messenger, Twitter®, Facebook®) and organizational items (Tasks, Memos) to now appear on the home screen as well!

Dynamic wallpaper designs

If you are looking to add some pizzazz to the home screen wallpaper, there are new options now available through the Background Wizard (accessed under the Home Screen tab). You can select a range of images to be cycled as the home screen wallpaper, scheduled periodically or at specific times. I can just sense some great dynamic seasonal themes coming my way this year!

BlackBerry Theme Builder user interface enhancements

We have been listening closely to the great community feedback and improved our tool UI a great deal in this release. If you have already used BlackBerry Theme Studio 5.0, the first thing you will notice is the streamlined user-interface, with the Inspector panel hidden by default.

In its place is the Quick Edit palette at the top of the workspace, which displays the options for the currently-selected element. The new Toolbar on the left side of the workspace lets you switch between Select Mode (where you click on any element to edit it) and Pan Mode (which moves the screen image, as in previous versions). You can also right-click on various components to set new image items or reset them to default.

Veteran theme developers will note that this effectively replaces the Inspector tab with an elegant “click-and-edit” context-sensitive interface. If you prefer the traditional Inspector palette, it can be shown by clicking in the lower right.

Also, in order to jumpstart your theme development, we have provided the ability to set fonts and images across all screens through easy-to-use dialogs, accessed under the Edit menu.

For example, you can apply the same font attributes to multiple screens using the new Change Fonts option.

Another convenient feature added is the ability to replace multiple images on different screens using Theme Studio. In order to do this, you simply create a nested folder structure containing all the images to be replaced, and import the one folder into the theme using the Edit > Change Images option. This is a quick way to initially import all your graphical assets into your theme before tweaking each image. It is essential to maintain the same directory structure and filenames as the base theme; the complete set of correctly sized and named icons can be found in the ‘samples\Themes\Images\BlackBerry6_360x480′ folder of your Theme Studio install folder (by default located in ‘Program Files\Research In Motion\BlackBerry Theme Studio 6.0’).

Theme publishing

Finally, commercial theme developers can go to market faster by using the Publish to BlackBerry App World option in the Export wizard, which prepares the theme as an application package ready for upload on the BlackBerry App World Vendor Portal. You can even use it to easily upgrade the same theme to a newer version on BlackBerry App World through the Vendor Portal.

We would love to hear your feedback for on our Developer Issue Tracker and Community Forums!

At WES 2010, a lot of attendees expressed interest in deploying themes on enterprise devices. Themes can provide great value in their ability to apply corporate messaging and branding across all devices within an organization. IT departments can also help reduce support calls by placing links to key Java® and web applications on the home screen within enterprise themes. The freely-downloadable BlackBerry® Theme Studio 5.0 can be used to create and package enterprise themes, which are ready to deploy on BlackBerry® Enterprise Servers just like Java applications.

In addition to the brand-messaging benefit of themes, there are some practical uses for themes as well. For instance, enterprise themes can display corporate hotline information for misplaced phones on the security lock screen, which can double as an animated corporate-branded screensaver. Theme developers can create an animated company-branded lock screen in four easy steps:

1. Create two images using your favorite image editor – one with your company logo, and other with the misplaced phone hotline information.
2. Use the BlackBerry Composer tool to create an animation that transitions between the company logo and the hotline information, and export to a SVG file.
3. Launch the BlackBerry Theme Builder tool and set the animation SVG file as the background image on the Lock Screen.
4. Use the export option in Theme Builder to generate a COD and ALX file, which can be deployed on corporate devices.

Let us know about your enterprise theme development experiences, and feel free to ask us any questions you may have!

In addition to soccer fever in South Africa and blockbuster movies piquing your interest this summer, it is time to demonstrate your creative inclinations by crafting themes for the latest BlackBerry® smartphones – the BlackBerry® Pearl™ 3G smartphone and the BlackBerry® Bold™ 9650 smartphone.

At Dev Con 2009, our theme product teams unleashed the new, rebranded BlackBerry® Theme Studio 5.0. We are psyched to see the amazing uptake on this robust set of creative tools within the development community. The quality of themes available on BlackBerry® App World™ proves that developers are well aware of the opportunity to bring the best franchises and creative skins to market to millions of BlackBerry smartphone users.

So grab the latest BlackBerry Theme Studio 5.0 Service Pack 1 – which adds support for the latest BlackBerry smartphones – and get theming! If you are just getting started with theme development, you can dive into the developer video for learning the ropes, as well as these Inside BlackBerry posts on theme development:

BlackBerry Theme Studio v5.0 – Build your own BlackBerry Theme!
BlackBerry Theme Studio – Build your own BlackBerry Theme! (Part Two)
BlackBerry Theme Studio Tips: Using Adobe Photoshop

Have fun! Let us know about your latest creative brainstorms in the comments.