RIM Officially Changes App Icons in BlackBerry 10

Canadian mobile phone maker Research In Motion has performed some new changes to its BlackBerry 10 operating system, updating the app icons throughout the platform.

The company was said before to plan making this change, and it has finally gone official with it, while also detailing the move.

Since the icon is the most viewed part of an application, it also represents an important aspect in a developer or company’s brand, RIM notes.

The icon size has been changed from 150×150 to 114×114 in BlackBerry 10, and developers are encouraged to take note of that and to make sure to update the icons of their apps in accordance to the new aesthetics guidelines.

“If you’re migrating your app from the BlackBerry PlayBook to BlackBerry 10 smartphones, you’ll want to pay even more attention to your icons: you’re moving from an 86×86 icon size up to 114×114,” the mobile phone maker notes in a recent blog post.

“Scaling up your images is definitely a much worse experience than scaling down – pixilation looks cheap and to the user, your app will stand out on their application screen as ‘one of these things is not like the others,’ but for all the wrong reasons.”

Research In Motion has also updated the BlackBerry UI Guidelines document, providing all the necessary details on the new size, as well as tips for design considerations for software icons.

Developers are also encouraged to have a look at the entire document RIM published for them, with useful tips for making apps look and feel as they should on the new BlackBerry 10 operating system.

Application builders who have a BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha testing device in their hands will encounter these changes in the November beta OS update, the company says.

Earlier this week, RIM also announced that it would release the BlackBerry 10 SDK in a gold flavor in December. The BlackBerry 10 operating system will be officially launched on January 30.