Tuesday 18 December 2012

Making BlackBerry Apps

People think that making BlackBerry apps is hard. It's not.

There are loads of helpful resources over at the BlackBerry Developer site. You can download the SDKs, sample code and all sorts of useful resources. But what if you're not a developer? What is you don't know your difference between Object Oriented and Spaghetti Code? Fear not. Help is at hand.

If you have an RSS feed on your website. That that can easily become an App thanks to the BlackBerry App Generator.

Register on the site and click Create App. You will be asked for various bits of information, such as the obvious ones like the RSS feed itself. You can include up to 4 feeds in your app. You can then upload a banner, an application icon and set all the necessary colours etc. You can even give it a price and then submit it straight into App World. In true Blue Peter fashion, here's one I made earlier.

(NB. This is a sample app only. The content of the site does not belong to me so I cannot submit it. However since I am an admin on the site, I can get download previews of my apps to be able to show them to people.)

This app is based off the excellent photo site JungleDragon.

Photos here are shown in blocks. However you can change the layout to include text. All you need to do is give the app generator your RSS feeds. These then become selectable options...

Simply click on a photo to open up the actual page with the title and description...

You can even share the items with social media...

I pinched some graphics off the site to use as the Banner headline, and as the icon for the app itself...

Of course this is only a sample app. It took all of about 5 mins to create - and most of that was stealing the graphics off the site. If this really were to be made public then Ferdy will have to register and do all the work himself.



1 comment:

  1. That's some pretty cool technology, Dragon! And thanks of course for using JungleDragon as an example!

    ReplyDelete