BlackBerry Conference Application

Posted: September 28, 2010 | | Categories: BlackBerry

At the BlackBerry Developer conference this year Research In Motion waited until the very last minute to announce availability of the conference application for this year's conference. Last year's application was written by Sweet Caesar and, while functional, it was hard to use – they'd tried too hard to build in all sorts of screen effects and because of it the application was unusable. I wrote about it in my 'What were they thinking series'.

Anyway, for this year's conference Research In Motion hired Pyxis Mobile to build the application. It's based on Pyxis Mobile Enterprise Application Platform which allows a company to build one application and run it on multiple mobile platforms.
When Pyxis built the application, they didn't go overboard with the screen transitions, they just built a simple application that got the job done. Just what was needed. Here's a screen shot of the application – the only issue I have with it so far is that there's not enough space between the menu items – on a touch screen device it's hard to select the right menu item, I always seem to select the one I don't want.

In every session today they reminded everyone to fill out their session evaluations – either on the conference's web site or using the mobile application. Interestingly enough, if you look at the screen shot below, you'll see that apparently Pyxis didn't actually include that feature in their application.

Because of the way the Pyxis platform works, it's very easy for them to add the feature to the application tonight and automatically deploy it to all of us tomorrow morning. When the application starts, it checks on the server for an updated version of the application and downloads it as needed.

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Header image: Photo by Randy Lu on Unsplash.