Development tools (including JDE and Eclipse plugin) for the BlackBerry Storm announced back at the Developer Conference over the summer are now out of beta and ready for the public. Some of the new features include:
BlackBerry JDE v4.7 Feature Enhancements
- Contains the BlackBerry Storm smartphone simulator
- Touch Screen Support — Applications designed using the MIDP User Interface or BlackBerry User Interface will have built-in support for touch screen input. Any applications with custom User Interfaces will be able to receive the input events from taps, swipes, and gestures
- Orientation and Rotation Support — Applications can react to the changes in rotation of the smartphone, based on user movement. This support enables an application to re-draw its screens or do custom processing based on a rotation event
- Accelerometer Support — The Accelerometer Support in the BlackBerry JDE v4.7 enables support for motion above and beyond simple rotation. This feature allows full support for an application to query the accelerometer sensor and get data from the x, y and z axis to enable 360-degree motion sensing
- Virtual Keyboard API — The Virtual Keyboard API supports the ability of an application to show or hide the virtual keyboard on a per-screen basis. This allows applications to control when the virtual keyboard should or should not be visible
- Digital Rights Management (DRM) APIs — Applications can now install certificates on DRM protected content
- Set Theme Wallpaper — The Set Theme Wallpaper feature provides the ability for an application to set the homescreen wallpaper of a BlackBerry® smartphone
- Camera and Media Integration enhancements — New APIs enable the developer to take advantage of several media enhancements:
- Image Targeting — When an image is taken by the user in the camera application, one of the available actions allows the user to send the image to a specific target. The new image targeting integration allows an application to register as a handler of that image for the “send to” action
- Dynamic Menu Items — When a custom application is registered as a handler for a specific content type, that application will also receive a “send to:” menu item in the BlackBerry media application
- Video Recording — Customer applications now have the ability to invoke the video recorder application to enable video capture
New Examples
There are also new examples included with the BlackBerry JDE v4.7 Beta:
- Touch Action Demo
- Tilt Demo
- Accelerometer Demo
Technical Requirements
- Windows® 2000 SP1 or later, or Windows® XP
- Windows Vista™ (BlackBerry JDE v4.2.1 and higher)
- BlackBerry JDE v4.5+: Java SE JDK v6.0
- BlackBerry JDE v4.2.1 and v4.3.0: Java SE JDK v5.0 or v6.0
- BlackBerry JDE v4.1 and v4.2: Java SE JDK v5.0
- BlackBerry JDE v4.0 and v4.0.2: Java SE SDK v1.4
Any developers in the house will want to get downloading once they get back from their tropical holiday vacations.