home

For those who don't know RIM, the makers of Blackberries, have their own tablet series out called Blackberry Playbook.  They are in the process of releasing version 2.0 of their OS and it has one awesome feature.  The ability to run modified Android applications!  Yep, so users of the Playbook can run all their favorite Blackberry apps plus select Android apps that the developers modified and submitted.

Blackberry even upped the ante to get Android devlopers invovled by offering to send them a FREE Playbook if they submit their modified apps to the Blackberry Appworld.

I of course jumped on this and adding the tools needed to complete this modification was simple enough and then started to work on one of my more popular apps, the Monopoly Trade Evaluator.  There were a few things I had to do to meet the limitations of running Android apps on the Playbook.

One of the biggest was no back or menu button.  So I redid my entire layout to include all the menu options as actual buttons and also made sure I didn't rely on a back button at any point.  Besides that, editing my layout files to look good on the 7" 1200x600px screen was the only other hurdle coding wise.  I'll try and upload some screenshots so you can see the difference.  The other difference was AdMob did not work, I was orginally going to let Blackberry users enjoy my apps w/o any way for me to monetize.  But then I read on the forums that another service called MobFox works, which I hope will give me a better idea as to how much my app is being used as the RIM developer console is not as simple as the Android one to get statistics.  You need to run dated reports manually.


So any Blackberry Playbook 2.0 users, you should be able to find my app Monopoly Trade Evaluator on the Appworld.  Please let me know how you like it, I can't test it on an actual device until RIM follows through with their promise, which I've read reports they are!