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Product Tour:
Here you can see the home screen for AppleBerry with Stacks. In keeping with a high usability factor, the time and date are both very large and easy to read, as are the signal and battery indicators. This time around, I've included custom notifications for all events, which you can see bunched together there. They are very crisp, clean, and easy to see at a glance - perfect for when you're trying to check your BlackBerry quickly. I have left ample room for multiple notifications on the top bar, you should never run into a situation where you have more notifications than you have room for.
You can see the icons sit on top of the classic Apple dock. They bounce and light up white when selected, along with a nice blue ring that follows your cursor. On the right of the dock you will see a "drawer" of icons - this is part of the Stacks feature. The icons in the drawer that you see are representative of what will actually appear when you open the Stack, they're mini icons and this feature even supports all third party icons too.
When you open the Stack drawer by clicking down on it with the cursor you will reveal six additional icons in the popular "Grid" view. These icons are easy to navigate and when selected they light up white and have the popular mouse cursor to indicate where you are in the Stack. (no more getting lost) The code for Stacks has been reduced by 25% from previous iterations of it, and it works flawlessly without a bit of memory loss.
The home screen has two keyboard shortcuts. If you press the "Space" key on your keyboard it will launch QuickLaunch (sold separately), if you press the "$" key it will launch SMS/MMS.
When you enter the Application Menu, you get a good view of all your icons. You will notice the icons are a good size, definitely big, but not too big as to overwhelm you. These icons are incredibly vibrant and absolutely "pop" on the beautiful BlackBerry displays. The popular mouse cursor follows you around indicating where you are. The folder icons are all individually skinned and are fairly self explanatory. As usual, AppleBerry skins icons that most developers skip over, such as Brick Breaker and Word Mole.
Here you can see a few of the other icons that are included with AppleBerry, all of which were designed to be immediately recognizable to new users. Nobody wants to guess when they're trying to find an icon.
Inside the "Contacts" application, you can get a feel for the light blue gradient I've used for highlighting messages and contacts. It is very easy on the eyes and good for long term use. The traditional Mac dialogue boxes with famous "Aqua" buttons are present here as well, most of these were created pixel by pixel to make them as "crisp" as possible.
The menus slide up from the bottom of the screen (quickly) and reveal a subtle pinstripe effect with the blue highlight. The pinstripes have always been a signature of AppleBerry and I made sure to include it with the new version. Font sizes were selected to appeal to the masses, and are neither too big nor too small. You will also notice at the top right of the screen that I have skinned the "123" keyboard status indicator, not shown are the skinned "multitap", "capslock" and "alt" buttons.
Oh, cool - Steve Jobs is calling again. Here you can see a very clean "Incoming Call" screen. Large clean fonts so that you can see who is calling, no squinting required.
On the phone with Steve, you get a good look at the new call screen. I wanted to organize the different aspects of the call screen, so all the vital call information is free floating, and all call status and volume meters are located in clean edged boxes. The volume indicators are also fully skinned.
The lockscreen is classic AppleBerry. A great big lock sitting on top of a nice reflective dock.
---------------------------------Last edited by hastings; 03-20-10 at 06:33 PM.
03-20-10 06:25 PM - Prepare to be semi-shocked. Vodafone U.K. has the right settings, but after download it still only gave me two options in the language & text imput screen, English or English U.S. That option is being blocked, either by BB or AT&T. Way too much "big brother" for me. When my contract is up, it's hello IPhone4. I've had enough
Thanks for all your help.10-11-10 08:48 PM - Hmm...Prepare to be semi-shocked. Vodafone U.K. has the right settings, but after download it still only gave me two options in the language & text imput screen, English or English U.S. That option is being blocked, either by BB or AT&T. Way too much "big brother" for me. When my contract is up, it's hello IPhone4. I've had enough Thanks for all your help.
Have you tried loading the language manually like I suggested earlier using the Desktop Manager software? It could be your device telling the OS installer not to bother since the default language is already loaded.
Heck, I can load Japanese on my device using Desktop Manager.10-11-10 08:54 PM
