Social Networking

Take social networking to the next level with your BlackBerry® smartphone. With almost anywhere access, you can enhance your personal and professional connections.

Use on-the-go access to social networking sites and services like Facebook® to help you share up-to-date information and photos, expand your circle of friends and associates and have a whole lot of fun.

With an easy-to-use keyboard and a large screen, BlackBerry smartphones are ideal for typing messages, exchanging thoughts and expressing yourself from virtually anywhere life takes you.

• Stay connected to your network with automatic notifications*
• Trade messages with your friends just like you would on your computer
• Share your pictures right after you take them. Simply upload from your BlackBerry smartphone’s camera and tag!*

Learn more about social networking for BlackBerry smartphones

• Facebook
• Flickr
• MySpace®

* Some features may not be available on your BlackBerry smartphone or your preferred social networking site. Please check with your service provider and/or the social networking site for availability.

Source: na.blacberry.com

Starfield for Papervision3D

Some PV3D sessions at Flash on the Beach inspired me to play with Papervision3D again and I sort of went for the “space” theme. And there’s certainly no space without stars!

There are several options how to approach this, for example, you can distribute a thousands of tiny 3d objects randomly in the space, you can use the built-in particle field – all these approaches will give you good results, but at the expense of valuable CPU resources. Alternative to real star particles is to use something called “skybox”. Sky box is simply a giant cube with all 6 sides textured with camera placed inside of this box.

Now, if you want to build starfield skybox manually, you have to go through several steps, you need to find appropriate 6 images with stars that can be seamlessly stitched together , import these images, set them as individual BitmapMaterials, make them double sided, add them to MaterialList, build a cube with that material, determine the right mesh subdivision amount and size and finally add the cube to scene.

Starfield component reduces all of the above to one line : scene.addChild(new Starfield());

That will give you a default Starfield, but there are several options that you can pass via constructor to configure your starfield

Starfield(nuStars, size,contentWidth,contentHeight)
nuStars - number of the stars to be visible per cube side
size - width/height/depth of the cube
contentWidth - width of the texture bitmap used on every side of the cube
contentHeight - height of the texture bitmap used on every side of the cube

 

With this approach you can have easily 10 000 - 100 000 stars in your scene without a noticeable CPU decrease. Also, no need to look for images from Hubble telescope as the texture is code generated. 

Though it’s quite important to correctly configure camera’s field of view and zoom to get the correct “feel” of the space. Otherwise you will end up with too much perspective distortion which will give away the trick. Also don’t forget that Skybox is just a backdrop to your starwars scene, not the main actor, so even if it feels slightly “fake” on its own, with the other scene elements, firing lasers and exploding spaceships … it will do!

Check out the demo and right click to view/download the source.

October 30th, 2008 by Slavomir Durej

 

 

 

Blackberry Storm Menjawab Keinginan Pasar

Setelah sekian lama rumor yang beredar, akhirnya terjawab juga. Blackberry akhirnya untuk pertama kalinya meluncurkan type layar sentuh- touchscreen, Blacberry Storm.

Dua operator ngetop dunia pun merangkulnya, Vodafone di Eropa dan  Verizon Wireless di Amerika Serikat. Operator di Canada, Telius, kabarnya bakal mengandalkan Blacberry Storm ini untuk pelanggannya.

Kemampuan ponsel ini tentu saja cukup disegani. Ponsel ini dapat dipacu di dual mode (Blackberry Storm 9530), atau dua jaringan yang berbeda, GSM dan CDMA.

Kelebihannya lagi tentu dapat diandalkan untuk jaringan 3G dan HSPA dan EV-DO. Dan dengan kemampuan kameranya 3,2 Mpix dengan lampu flash dan autofocus, seri layar sentuh Blackberry ini juga dilengkapi dengan petunjuk arah-GPS.

Memorynya lumayan handal hingga 8 GB dengan micro SDHC, serta memory internal 1 GB.

Ukuran Blackberry terkini ini sama dengan iPhone yang telah lebih dulu hadir atau T Mobile G1. Ukurannya cukup untuk dapat dikantongi.

Dengan julukan ’Incredible Power In Your Hands’ cukup tepat pada ponsel ini. Karena selain Internet browser, voice dan data, dilengkapi pula dengan music dan video streaming. Ini yang menjadikan Blackberry Storm dapat bersaing dengan Apple iPhone yang telah dulu menjajaki pasar ponsel dunia.

Ada dua type yang segera diluncurkan yakni 9500 dan 9530. Perbedaan di dua type tersebut adalah 9530 dapat beroperasi di dua teknologi jaringan yang berbeda, 9530 dapat difungsikan tak hanya untuk internet kecepatan tinggi HSDPA 2100, tetapi dapat dipacu di internet kecepatan tingginya CDMA yakni 2100 1X EV-DO. Sedangkan Blackberry Storm 9500 cukup untuk internet kecepatan tinggi HSDPA 2100 saja.

Untuk harga, khabarnya tak terlalu mahal, di Eropa dan Amerika sana Blacberry Storm ini akan dibandrol dengan harga sekitar 199 USD atau sekitar 2 juta rupiah dengan kontrak selama dua tahun pemakaian.  Namun untuk harga di Indonesia diperkirakan bisa mencapai 4 kali lipatnya atau sekitar 8 juta rupiah. (R01)

FlyCast Goes Live On BlackBerry!

This folks is something I have been waiting for ever since Kevin mentioned it even before the BlackBerry Developer Conference. Now while the wait was a little bit of a killer for me personally, I’m finally able to say the wait is indeed now over and was well worth the it. FlyCast has come to your BlackBerry and has come bringing all of what it promised.

Never heard of FlyCast? You should read CrackBerry more! With over 1,000 channels of Music and entertainment, FlyCast stands and delivers an experience that I think BlackBerry users have been waiting for, with all this content being able to be streamed directly to your device for no charge to you, who can refuse. Content is king and FlyCast brings it to you.

FlyCast delivers a massive spectrum of content including news, talk, sports, traffic, weather and of course music. All this content is rolled up nicely in a very easy on the eyes GUI that fits in quite nicely with the Curves and Bolds out there and I’m sure will look great on the soon to be launched Storm. Sorry Pearl users, there’s no love for you on this one at the moment.

Now I have to admit not all was rosey with the launch of FlyCast but that has no real bearing on its uses and user experience at this point. The thing I’m referring to here is the set up process. Shortly after launch I was unable to register the application from my device (invalid USERID error), no big deal. I hit up the support forums and quickly found the answer I was needing. I headed to the online registration and was up and running in 2 mins.

First up, the user interface is right at home on your device – the controls are well laid out and easily identifiable as to what they are. The only complaint I can mention here was that often times I saw the clock (hour glass) spinning on my Bold, often causing a lttle bit of lag in the device, but not while outside the FlyCast application itself. It was only while in the app I saw this happening… it obviously is an app that takes up a lot of system resources.

Next we have content. With over 1,000 stations to choose from at this point, FlyCast has you covered! Wanna listen to oldies? Or maybe rap is your thing? No worries either way as it’s all there. Heck maybe talk radio is what you dig…FlyCast even has you covered there! This is probably the closest you will get to sattelite radio on your BlackBerry aside from XM Mobile. [ Note: Some channels are uncensored as well – at least that was the case with some of the ones I listened to. ]

Now comes the most mportant thing. Connectivity. How does FlyCast handle the situation with streaming? Is it like trying to watch an online video using dial up? No where near it actually (from my experience). I tested all options with this, from EDGE to 3G to WiFi. My experiences with EDGE was what I would call “sufficient.” It was not the BEST experience, with the odd buffering and stalling at times but of course all this is reliant upon coverage as well. If you are in a good EDGE area you can expect less of this happening. 3G on Rogers was rock solid for me as well as over WiFi. I guess this sort of performance should just be expected, but sometimes you can’t help but to expect the worst with these types of apps. One thing I did notice, that I have no real explanation for, is that the stations ran by AccuRadio always seemed to stream better then some of the others… maybe their services have more server power behind them?

With some enhanced features built into FlyCast such as something they refer to as SongSkip, which allows users to skip ahead to the next song over the streaming audio (impressive), right down to StreamSlip, which allows for listening to music/shows without an active connection, I see FlyCast making a big splash on BlackBerry devices.

For those interested in FlyCast you can pick it up at http://www.flycast.fm and if maybe FlyCast turns out to not be your thing, be sure to check out Nobex Radio Companion – they were the BlackBerryCool 15 winners sponsored by the BlackBerry Partners Fund and offer a fabulous service as well for streaming radio.