Let’s start with the very groovy BlackBerry keyboard. By now, you have seen (and may have experienced) the ease of using the keyboard. You have probably grown very fond of the predictive text and the ability to flip words into the text stream. But here are a couple of things about the keyboard you may not know.

Popup Letters. In default mode, when you press a key on the keyboard that key is momentarily highlighted to provide visual feedback of the key pressed. However, if you have large thumbs you may not be able to see that feedback. For some people, that’s not a problem as predictive text is their feedback. For others, they want a little more feedback. No worries, you can use the Settings app to turn on Popup Letters. To change this setting, swipe from the top bezel to drop the Settings menu, then click Settings, then Language and Input. In the middle you will find Text Input. Here, you click On-Screen Keyboard to change the options of the keyboard. Turning on Keypress Pop-up will make the keyboard pop-up the letter with each press.

Dropping Keyboard. The keyboard is one of the great features of BlackBerry 10, or in my opinion any smartphone. Sometimes you need to dismiss the keyboard. There are three easy ways to dismiss a keyboard. First, if you swipe down on the keyboard with two fingers, the keyboard disappears. You can also swipe up from the bottom bezel to close the keyboard. This action is actually a toggle. So if you have a situation where you don’t have a keyboard and need one, swipe up from the bottom bezel to bring the keyboard back. The final way, is to press and hold the space bar. This is my favorite way to dismiss the keyboard since I tend to use my BlackBerry Z10 with one hand. On the space bar you will see a little icon of the keyboard with a little down arrow. This is a reminder that holding the space bar will drop the keyboard.

Quick Setting Actions. By now you are probably pretty familiar with the quick settings menu: a swipe down from the top bezel while on the home screen or the active app screen brings down a quick settings menu. The groovy thing about this menu is it serves two functions. If you want to adjust a setting for say, Bluetooth, you click on the word Bluetooth and you are taken directly to the settings page for that feature. However, if all you want to do is turn Bluetooth off, click the icon to quickly toggle the feature. If the feature is on, clicking the icon turns it off and if the feature is off, a click of the icon turns it on. Really great for putting the BlackBerry Z10 into silent mode: just click the icon next to the Notifications label and all notifications are silenced!

Letting Someone Know Where You Are. So the other day, I was waiting for some friends in a restaurant in Amsterdam. It was a tricky little walk to find the restaurant and my friends got lost. Since I knew how to get there, I simply sent them a BBM and asked them to share their location. With that information, I could help them navigate to the restaurant. Since they were also on BlackBerry 10, they could easily send me their location. They clicked me in their BBM contact list. Then, they clicked the Attach icon at the bottom. This gives them options to attach pictures, voice note, contact, appointment, file, or even location. From there, they attached their current location. Once I got the BBM, I could then give them directions to the restaurant. Incredibly handy feature.

Quick Pane Navigation. As with any smartphone, after a while you learn which pane a specific or favorite application lives. Let’s say your favorite game is on pane number 4. One of the great things about BlackBerry 10 is you can navigate straight to pane number 4 by clicking the fourth dot at the bottom. This click jumps you straight to pane four and your favorite game. You can also quickly scroll by clicking and dragging on the dots at the bottom. A quick way to glance through each pane.

The thing is, I could go on for pages and pages about all the really cool things about BlackBerry 10, but what about you? Leave a comment with your favorite BlackBerry 10 feature, tip, or trick so we can all share in the richness of BlackBerry 10.

Nothing is more frustrating than putting countless hours of hard work into your BlackBerry® app, making sure every subroutine is perfect and every millisecond of performance squeezed, only to find out that users are displeased with some aspect of layout or interaction. Speaking from experience, I find that numerous times we all too often dive into architecting and developing the meat and potatoes of an app, leaving the user interface to get created ad hoc. Yet behind every good app there is a great user interface!

Now, you might be saying: “But Matt! I do think about layout and design – but I can’t design for every user’s tastes.” While we do typically put some thought into layout and design, I find we (as developers) rarely think about it from an end user’s perspective. We are too close to the project, and end up seeing aspects of the application from a specific view. Think of it this way – every parent thinks their baby is the cutest ever…but what do the rest of us think? What a good app developer/designer needs to do is take a step back and look at the design from others’ points of view and, better yet, gather points of view from others.

Nothing helps guide a design better than real world feedback. Take your design and layouts and talk to your peers, your mother, your granddad, or even your future end users (basically anyone that will talk to you.) You can even solicit feedback from a limited beta of your app or use various online solutions such as getsatisfaction.com. Ask your users what they like, what they don’t like, how they would expect things to flow, and so on. Taking this feedback and integrating it into your app will help ensure users are happy – and happy users mean good BlackBerry App World™ storefront ratings!

If you cannot easily gather end user feedback on the design and flow of your app, here are some other points to keep in mind at the beginning of your project:

• Keep the user interface and design as simple as possible. Your app should require a user to have little to no instructions in order to get started.
• For touch screen devices, ensure proper spacing of objects that a user will interact with. Nothing will frustrate your users more if their touch events are misread.
• The layout of the screen should be well used, but not too cluttered. For objects in groups, space them evenly for a clean look.
• Make use of menus when required. Menus are great when there are additional options or settings that you want a user to have access to, but don’t want to have them always displayed on screen.
• Lastly, remember to keep your app consistent. Every screen within the app should offer a similar user experience in layout, theme and flow. A user should know this is your app regardless of the screen they are looking at.

Hopefully you have found these tips useful. If you have your own, please share them in the comments section below or head on over to the BlackBerry Developer Support forums and post them there.

The topic of battery management on BlackBerry® smartphones seems to come up time and time again. I decided to take some time and write this blog post on the topic to share some of the tips, tricks and best practices which will make your BlackBerry application a good citizen on the BlackBerry smartphone. Hopefully, you’ll learn some simple techniques to improve battery life and to get some vital stats about the cost of certain actions in an application.

Generally, there are three main states that your BlackBerry application will go through in the device:

1. App is in the foreground, backlight is on, and device is unlocked (i.e. user is in theory interacting with the app)
2. App is in the foreground, and either the backlight is off or the device is locked (i.e. user was using the app but has since let the device go dormant)
3. App is running in the background (backlight and device lock state don’t matter)

We will not worry too much about the first state, since your application can use as much as battery power it needs, but we will focus on the second and third states, looking at possible ways to prevent the battery from draining too quickly. Here are some of the tips that you can use to make your application be a good citizen on the device.

Tip #1: If your application is running in the background, then only run what needs to be run. For example, when your application is in the background, threads such as UI, animation and media should be paused. Your application should treat itself as being in the background when the backlight is out or the lock screen is up. One way of identifying whether device is locked or not, is to use the net.rim.device.api.system.ApplicationManager. IsSystemLocked () method. You can also use the net.rim.device.api.ui.UiApplication.getUiApplication ().isForeground () method to determine if the application is in the foreground or not.

Finally, you can use net.rim.device.api.system.Display.getProperties () & Display.DISPLAY_PROPERTY_REQUIRES_BACKLIGHT to see whether the backlight is on or not.

Tip #2: Use the Profiler in the BlackBerry Java IDE to confirm that you contribute as close to 0% extra CPU usage when in the background. Every few % CPU used equals about 5 mA above device idle. Read more information about the Profiler and its usage.

Tip #3: Watch the repaint () operations, regardless of whether application is in the background or foreground, repaint the screen only if and when needed. Especially, if you are rendering OpenGL, it is very battery intensive.

Tip #4: Retrieving an autonomous GPS (aGPS) fix is one of the most expensive battery operations on the device. Alternatively, you can use BlackBerry Criteria to specify the type of fix you need and also you can choose the level of accuracy you need. The details on this subject can be found here.

Tip #5: If you detect low battery, consider notifying the user or stopping battery intensive functions such as LBS, excessive logging, active cellular radio and garbage collection.

For logging, you can the log level to minimum in the Event Logger. This can be achieved using net.rim.device.api.system.EventLogger. getMinimumLevel ().

For cellular radio, you can use push instead of poll. Pushing is vastly more efficient than polling. Whenever you see your application polling regularly for data you should seriously consider implementing the BlackBerry Push service.

For garbage collection, you can use the BB JDE’s Memory Stats or Objects tools to monitor your garbage.

I hope you found these tips useful. If you have your own, I’d like to see them – please share in the comments section below.