14 DAY TRIAL // Canadian mobile phone maker Research In Motion has performed a series of updates to its BlackBerry App World vendor portal, which is now available in a 2.0 version. According to the company, the new release introduces a wide range of new features for application publishers, so that they can distribute their software solutions for BlackBerry smartphones in an easier manner.
Among the key features now available for app developers, we can count a new vendor credit system, change request management, and enhanced application language management. “We want to ensure that BlackBerry App World provides developers with unique opportunities to successfully monetize applications created on the BlackBerry Application Platform. We hope that you are as excited as we are about these new enhancements,” a new post on the BlackBerry Developer's blog states.
With the new release of BlackBerry App World vendor portal, the management of vendor credits has been simplified, enabling developers view credits in their account, purchase new credits and see the full credit history. Moreover, all vendor credit accounts have been reset to 10 vendor credits. Additionally, developers are offered the possibility to view the status on change requests made for their applications, including distribution changes, name changes, additional releases, and more.
“Localization is a critical part of providing your application to the worldwide BlackBerry community. Using the new portal, developers can localize their application to all languages available on the BlackBerry smartphone and not just the languages supported within the BlackBerry App World client itself. The portal has also been enhanced to allow developers to provide specific language cod files onto the regions and countries where that makes sense minimizing the size of your overall application,” the said blog post notes.
In related news, we learn that RIM announced plans to purchase for cancellation 2 million shares, representing 0.36% of its common shares outstanding at April 5, 2010. The new shares will be repurchased via private agreements, and they add to 3,935,800 million shares repurchased since the beginning of April 2010, RIM stated. The new initiative should complete the US$1.2 billion share repurchase program the Blackberry maker announced back in November 5, 2009.