misanthropic nonsense

The BlackBerry SDK doesn’t come out of the box with much in the area of user interface controls. There’s enough to get started, but should you need to build something of actual value, you’ll soon find yourself craving something a bit more than a dry edit field or a boring old square button.

Aside from our games, our BlackBerry applications are utilities, and, as such, we’ve always prioritized functionality over eye-candy, especially since there aren’t many off-the-shelf user interface libraries that one can use to spruce up a BlackBerry application (there are, in fact, none, at last check).

Still … every once in a while we put aside a bit of time to improve our user interface library.

So here’s a quick comparison.

The first screenshot is the primary screen from version 2.0.3 of our BlackBerry Call Screener application. The controls used here are fairly standard, with only a bit of customization to make the default UI act a bit better in the context of what the application needs.

By comparison, the second screenshot is from our upcoming BlackBerry E-Mail Auto-Responder application. Almost every control on this screen is custom-built. The screen is split into three areas, with a menu bar at the top, a status bar at the bottom, and a middle portion containing the contents of the screen. The screen navigation is designed specifically for the BlackBerry trackwheel or trackball, depending on the model, and each portion of the screen acts within the context of the active content area — making the user interface navigation much more intuitive, and delivering contextual help to the user as needed without breaking the workflow.

And it looks better as well …