Blackberry Development Articles

Blackberry Programming: Alter Bitmap Color on the Fly {02-21-2010}

While working on my current Blackberry game, I ran into a situation where I needed to change the color of of a bitmap. Specifically, I wanted to signify an object was “hit” by temporarily tinting it red – i.e. I wanted to keep the original bitmap color pattern, but wanted to increase the red portion [...]

Creating a Blackberry GPS Tracker {01-26-2009}

As I mentioned in my article about Creating a Blackberry Game, I love this mobile phone and writing programs for it. The device has a serious amount of untapped potential. That’s not to say the phone isn’t already a great tool for its intended purposes (I don’t think I could make it without mine these [...]

Creating a Blackberry Game – Part 6 {05-03-2008}

Looking for part 5? Let’s Hear It! Our game is almost done – the only part left is the sound (and vibration) processing. This is a fairly simple class as well – again, most of the low level processing is done already by the Blackberry. However – you may want to play with the methods [...]

Creating a Blackberry Game – Part 5 {05-03-2008}

Looking for part 4? Let’s See Our Game Now that our logic is done, we have a few holes in the program where calls are made to graphics and sound processing. By isolating (for the most part, as much as our program allows) graphics and sound processing from the rest of the program, it offers [...]

Creating a Blackberry Game – Part 4 {05-03-2008}

Looking for part 3? Cue the Objects Just like Object is the root for all classes in Java, OBJ is the root class for all of our classes in our game that represent sprites on the screen. This is where object oriented programming really shines through for game creation. By setting up a parent class, [...]

Creating a Blackberry Game – Part 3 {05-03-2008}

Looking for part 2? Gameplay Now that our initial menu switches control to the Gameplay class (by putting an instance of it on the screen stack – [gameplay extends FullScreen]), we need to actually define it! Gameplay takes care of high level game functionality by multitasking actions via threads. One thread, “Refresher”, takes care of [...]

Creating a Blackberry Game – Part 2 {05-03-2008}

GalacticBlast.java package com.synthdreams.GalacticBlast; import net.rim.device.api.ui.UiApplication; /** * Initial main class that starts the ball rolling * UiApplication is extended to provide Blackberry * functionality, specifically the Event Dispatcher * and Screen pusher */ public class GalacticBlast extends UiApplication { public static void main(String[] args) { GalacticBlast GalacticBlast = new GalacticBlast(); // The Blackberry's message pump, [...]

Creating a Blackberry Game – Part 1 {05-03-2008}

Introduction I’ve used a number of cell phones, and without a doubt RIM’s Blackberry continues to be my favorite by far. Blackberry users will know what I’m talking about – it’s just a fantastic communications device. One of its few shortcomings, though, is its lack of a large game library. Historically, the Blackberry has been [...]