RIM has updated the BlackBerry Traffic app with some new features to help you navigate to your final destination. For those who don’t know, the BlackBerry Traffic app helps you establish an ETA, and determine the conditions of your route such as whether a road is closed, or if there’s a faster way to get to your destination. You can then text or email whoever you’re visiting to let them know when you’re arriving. Updates to the app include:
Select between two routes to a destination, and can use a new traffic view that displays predicted traffic conditions for each route.
Pre-set destinations, such as work or home, or get an ETA to destinations from within their BlackBerry Contacts, enter an address manually, or find new places using the search feature.
Quickly share ETAs with contacts via SMS, email, or PIN message
BlackBerry Traffic also identifies the best time to leave and optimizes ETA, by using anonymously collected data, which is crowdsourced from users running the app as well as historical traffic data, to predict ETA with great accuracy.
It’s commonly understood in the software business that you don’t deploy on a Friday. The logic behind it is that if you deploy on a Friday and a bug makes it into the software, you don’t have anyone around on the weekend to deal with it. We’ve noticed that RIM tends to update its Featured category in App World on a Friday and it’s not clear why. The App World team at RIM, while they may have people working on the weekends, surely don’t have the same resources on a Saturday night as they would on a Tuesday morning. Also, a major implication of being featured is that your downloads will increase and there’s additional load on your servers if your app uses them. By deploying the featured apps on a Friday, you aren’t taking into consideration the companies that have to either pay overtime to have someone around to troubleshoot the server load, or answer the increase in support emails. Even if the company is just a one person shop, you’re potentially ruining weekends and that’s just not groovy.
Maybe this didn’t merit a post on its own but we’ve had a couple developers write in and ask that we put this up. Perhaps more developers are looking to the blogs to get changes made ever since that lone blogger garnered so much attention.
Adobe has announced a really cool Touch SDK that allows developers to create tablet apps that communicate directly with Photoshop CS5. The company is inviting developers to create tablet and mobile apps that interact with Photoshop CS5 and CS5 Extended software. The Photoshop Touch SDK allows Android, BlackBerry Tablet OS and iOS apps to interact with the desktop version of Photoshop for some interesting cross-platform potential. Continue reading ‘Adobe Announces Touch SDK for Tablet/Mobile Apps that Communicate with Photoshop CS5′
The Bold Touch looks like a really slick form factor with a Bold 9000 style keyboard but much thinner and modern looking. The above is a short video of the device that gives just a brief look at the homescreen and the About screen. There doesn’t seem to be anything all that new in 6.1 from a user perspective that we can see in this video, and from what we’re hearing OS 6.1 sounds like a lot of API and developer-side improvements. In any case, we’ll learn much more come BlackBerry World when the announcements are set to drop.
RIM has started rolling out the private beta for BlackBerry Enterprise Application Middleware (BEAM) 1.0. BEAM is middleware that simplifies the development of mobile enterprise applications for BlackBerry. BEAM includes the following features:
Mobilizes data sources inside or outside an enterprise
Gives developers easy access to back-end data systems via familiar interfaces
Empowers business end-users with real-time, seamless access to major application suite data
