Putting info on BlackBerry homescreen

Question

We're developing some application and want to display some information on the device homescreen like Weather Plus application does.

Could you tell me how i can do the same thing? Thank you!

Answer 1

From what I've seen in the Weather Plus video demos, the app doesn't (or can't) paint on the current background image, but you can choose an image to be the homescreen background with all the weather info painted on it. It also doesn't need a custom theme, so I'm pretty sure they just use the HomeScreen.setBackgroundImage() method.

As far as the image generating is concerned, my best bet would be opening the background image picked by the user in a Bitmap object, passing it to a new Graphics object to do all the necessary rendering and creating a new .png file using the encode(Bitmap bitmap) method of PNGEncodedImage.

If you wanted the homescreen image to be for example animated you might want to try the Blackberry Theme Studio, but I don't think it offers the amount of interactivity (retrieving data, loading images) you are looking for, at least for now.