BBDC was unexpectedly busy – hear how the devs feel about it all!

If you haven’t been following, the 2009 BlackBerry Developer Conference was the source of a lot of big announcements, like OpenGL support enabling some rich 3D graphics, an Adobe partnership that cements Flash on BlackBerry, and a long-overdue LinkedIn app. This episode of The Signal focuses a lot on themes, as we have the fine folks from BlackBerry Theme Park and themes4bb giving us our take on the new Theme Builder Studio. The winner of the BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) (NSDQ: RIMM) Partner’s Fund challenge, James Shannon from DevelopIQ, gives us some feedback from the app developer side, and how all of the various announcements impact the 7digital music store. No conference is complete without hooking up with some fellow bloggers – Ronen Halevy from BerryReview and Kevin Michaluk from CrackBerry weigh in on the show overall, and what RIM’s future with developers is looking like.

At points it’s a little technical, but if you’re into BlackBerry, development, or user interface stuff, this is the podcast for you. Hit the jump!

Sorry about the audio quality,  it was tricky finding a quiet spot to record.

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The BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) App World got some love at the Developer Conference keynote, with the announced inclusion of web-based widgets and themes. We had heard themes were coming down the pipe, and the widget SDK has been out there for a little over a month, but combined with the show’s focus on the new theme builder tools and OS 5.0, the devs here should feel good about diving right in to these new kinds of App World content.

BlackBerry widgets have generated a lot of talk here at BBDC, but there’s still a lot of contention about the name; most people think of tiny desktop applications, or Android home screen items, and that’s really not what BlackBerry widgets are like at all. It’s probably better to think of them as RIM’s answer to webOS – it essentially opens up the platform to those who are interested or simply more comfortable coding in web languages like CSS, HTML and XML. The presence of widgets in App World is going to be seamless, since they won’t be functionally different than the standard Java applications folks normally load up onto a BlackBerry.

As for themes, the new tools should give theme developers a little bit of extra fighting juice in a new, unified, and potentially competitive theme market. The internal testing process will likely be a little different, but I’ve been told it will be just as robust as that for apps and the submitting will be just as open to everyone.

Finally, carrier billing is something folks have been asking for, since PayPal has been the sole payment option since App World’s launch in the spring. With carrier billing, folks would just end up seeing all App World purchases right on their monthly wireless bill. Working directly with credit and debit cards would be sweet in the long run, but this is a good step in the right direction. In-app transactions will provide an added revenue stream for developers, but end-users need options on the payment front too. It’ll be interesting to see which carriers sign on for this kind of billing, and how long it takes to roll out internationally.

If you’ve got either a theme or widget that you want to get into App World, you can get submitting right now. Carrier billing won’t be around until next year, though.

It’s about time. At yesterday’s keynote, RIM announced a LinkedIn application for BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM), joining Facebook and MySpace as some of the platform’s pillars social networking pillars. BlackBerry was built from the ground up for professionals, so LinkedIn really is a perfect fit. All of the expected functionality is there, like notifications in the Messages folder, Address Book and Calendar integration, invitation handling, home screen notifications, and plenty more. Here are a few more screenshots, but you can keep an eye on the LinkedIn blog for more info leading up the public release before the end of the year.

Gaming on BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) has never been what you would call breathtaking – a few low-key casual games here and there and the preloaded Brickbreaker could handle the lion’s share of twitchy boredom. Well, the platform is taking a big jump as OpenGL ES support has gone official and is currently available in the beta BlackBerry JDE we had mentioned earlier.

The in-app purchacing sounded vaguely iPhone OS 3.0, and OpenGL even moreso, but between these multimedia improvements and BlackBerry’s existing expertise in productivity, the whole platform is feeling a lot more balanced. Shown here is Need for Speed, which we’ll have some hands-on footage of shortly, complete with gesture controls for brake and boosting, and accelerometer use for steering. There’s going to be at least one other big name game showing off what OpenGL on BlackBerry can do, and we’ll be sure to check it out.

More goodies from the BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) Developer Conference today: fresh location-detection options using cell site recognition, and push services for those who want to leverage RIM’s biggest advantage in mobile computing. First up, cell site recognition is a big one for location-based apps who want to keep battery drain down (GPS takes a significant toll). Anyone with 5.0 will automatically update the database of cell towers and their locations; a very cool use of crowdsourcing. There’s also new reverse geocoding that will tag specific coordinates with a proper street address – a nice addition that we’re already seeing in action in Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Maps for Mobile. On top of those two, RIM has introduced an API for estimated travel time within the U.S. and Canada; the time is generated based on aggregated traffic conditions and speed limits cross-referenced with distance.

Good stuff all around, but push services are probably bigger news for most developers. Push Services will enable apps to pull down up to 8 KB of data with all of the righteous immediacy that makes BlackBerry e-mail oh-so-very awesome. It’ll be interesting to see how this service will fare once it’s out in the wild and what developers use it for (push Twitter, anyone?); Web Signals have been testing the waters for a little bit with Alliance Members, but we’ll have to wait to see how much apps can really do with 8 KB. An added bonus, for devs who thought they might have to pay for it, is that Push Services will be available for free.

Both the new geolocation and push services are available specifically in devices with OS 5.0 and up, and will be available in the first half of 2010. You can try out some of these new options in the beta 5 Java Development Environment that was just released today. For more information on the upcoming push service, check out RIM’s page.

One of the many announcements made at the BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) Developer Conference is a new ad partner program that allows app creators to monetize their apps right away. The BlackBery Advertising Service will plug in ads from Jumptap, Lat49, Millennial Media, Navteq, 1020 Placecast, Quattro Wireless and Sympatico.ca – an impressive initial list, but I’m wondering where Google Mobile ads stand, and if their own program stands on its own just fine for BlackBerry devs. Ads offered through this program can do all sorts of stuff, like click-to-call, launching the address book or browser, or find a program in App World.

A related update on the transaction front are in-app purchases. That means you can buy new levels for a game you’re really digging, or buy songs from on-device music stores (7digital comes to mind), and similar kinds of microtransactions. Yeah, it sounds suspiciously familiar to the iPhone 3.0 announcement, but it offers BlackBerry developers some added flexibility in how they make their money.

The new ad service and in-app purchacing goes live in 2010, complete with SDKs. Keep an eye on the newly redesigned Developer Zone for more info.

While Adobe might be taking potshots at Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) for not providing the footholds to get Flash on the iPhone, RIM has announced that upcoming versions of Creative Suite 5 will allow developers to import Flash content in a BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM)-friendly format through the Eclipse JDE plug-in. So, yeah, Flash on BlackBerry. We had heard this was coming, and it’s great to see something good and official, though we’ll only really understand the scope of this announcement once we see developers do something with it (similar to the Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Gears and widget support in OS 5.0).

Adobe’s participation extends to all of their popular tools, like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator at first, Fireworks, and plenty of other popular apps already being used by web developers will be available later; AIR is in the works. This all elaborates on the Open Screen Project Adobe was talking about not too long ago, and has the potential to make the BlackBerry experience a heck of a lot more enjoyable. Flash-enabled widgets are a great weapon against Android and webOS who have had the benefit of creating a smooth user interface from the ground up; RIM is shackled to their old OS, and as we all know, it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. Well, BlackBerry, prove us wrong – let’s see some new tricks.

Creative Suite 5 should be coming out in 2010, along with all of this BlackBerry support, but you can find more details on RIM’s Adobe tools here. Stick around for more announcements and news from the BlackBerry Developer Conference!

UPDATE: Quick clip of the simulator running Flash video after the jump. Sure, it’s not a real device, but it’s a pretty solid step.

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I took the morning to check out a contest RIM and Rogers (NYSE: RCI) were holding at the University of Ottawa called CampusChase, where teams of two run around town like headless chickens on a scavenger hunt for big prizes. Rogers wasn’t quite ready to show off the Bold 9700 just yet (all of the promos were for the Curve 8520), but it was still a ton of fun hanging out with the BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) mascots for awhile. Here are a few pictures of the booths, contestants, and the warm-up just prior to the race. One of my favourites is of the two Bolds getting a little friendly. CityChase goes all over, so be sure to check out their schedule to see if it’ll be happening in your city any time soon.

Gallery after the jump!

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After getting a demo of some of the cool vector map capabilities on the N900 at CTIA, I prodded a Nokia (NYSE: NOK) rep about what they’ve been working on with augmented reality (since zooming down to street level on the map to check out the 3D rendering of a stadium was awfully close). He mentioned that there’s an project in alpha within Nokia that involves OCR character recognition that would effectively translate text seen through the camera into other languages. Sounds like a logical extension of Point and Find. Camera quality is a bottleneck, but now that phones are getting into the 8-12 megapixel range and optics are continually improving, picking up small text is becoming less of an issue. Given, this program will probably produce the garden variety hilarity of Google (NSDQ: GOOG) translations, it’s all you would need to get by in a foreign country.

And let’s face it: you know you’re living in the freaking future when you can point your phone at a bunch of alien characters and have them magically make sense. Combined with something like Sakhr’s voice translation software, one could be well-armed to handle some pretty exotic locales.

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Ever wanted to use an iPhone for work, but got stuck with the standard issue BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM)? Well, Good Technology has made progress on their iPhone application, the back-end management for which was announced in the spring, and was showing it off at CTIA. The app has all the usual fixings, like e-mail (complete with push notifications and tomato splat on the home screen), contacts, and calendar items, all synced up to your enterprise Exchange or Domino server. The Good app uses enterprise standards for encryption like AES, and through a web-based management console, IT admins can manage employee mobility. I’m still dubious on whether or not Good’s admin side is as robust as RIM’s, but even if it’s not, I’m sure it will offer a reasonable suite of tools to work with. No word on pricing just yet, but it should be available in the App Store in the next couple of weeks. For a closer look, check out their data sheet or sign up for availability notifications.