Blackberry theme creation

I've been quite busy with BlackBerry stuff lately. Not being happy with any of the BlackBerry themes I found, I decided to create my own. I've been using the BlackBerry Theme Builder, which takes a bit of getting into, but I think I have the hang of it now. The biggest problem was a lack of suitable icons for the BlackBerry. Current BlackBerrys come with a theme called "Precision" which has dull, outline-style icons. I couldn't find any icons sets for BlackBerrys on the net - in fact, there are surprisingly few resources for casual developers. However, some digging revealed a free-use icon set called "Crystal" on Wikimedia Commons, with icons in 256x256. I grabbed that, and a bunch of other icons I found on the net (including some Mac-look ones), and over the last few weeks, have turned that into a set of 80x80 and 52x52 icons, with the help of Melancthe, who resized them, edited and created (in some cases) them, and wrote scripts to do the appropriate resizing.

So with a decent icon set, I created the theme, and called it Silver Fox. I have versions of it suitable for the BlackBerry 8520, 8900, 9000 and 9700. I thought that seeing as I'd gone to all the trouble of creating the themes, I'd put them on BlackBerry AppWorld (for free), so that others who wanted a wallpaper-friendly theme could have one to try out. Much to my surprise, when I started the sign-up process to become an AppWorld contributor, I discovered that one needs to pay $200 for every 10 submissions! Screw that! I now understand why there are comparatively few apps in AppWorld, compared to the Android and iPhone marketplaces. I have created my own BlackBerry site on Blogspot, and I'll make my themes, wallpapers, icons etc. available there.

Here's what Silver Fox looks like on my BlackBerry: