BlackBerry® Theme Studio 6 is here, it’s free and easier to use than ever before! It enables one of the great features of the BlackBerry platform – the ability to personalize your phone by creating and loading your very own custom themes.

BlackBerry Theme Studio is a suite of tools including Theme Builder, for creating themes, and BlackBerry® Composer, for creating animations and graphics to use in themes. With these tools, you can customize virtually everything in your theme, including backgrounds, sound effects and ringtones, icons, menus and fonts. You can even add animations and screen transitions.

BlackBerry Theme Studio has also empowered professional theme designers. Their creations are available on sites like the BlackBerry App World™ storefront. In fact, themes make up over 20% of the titles in BlackBerry App World, and themes are the second-largest category of titles. To learn more about using BlackBerry Theme Studio, check out these great Inside BlackBerry blog posts:

• BlackBerry Theme Studio – Build your own BlackBerry Theme!
• BlackBerry Theme Studio – Build your own BlackBerry Theme! (Part Two)
• BlackBerry Theme Studio Tips: Using Adobe Photoshop

Now, this new release of BlackBerry Theme Studio makes it even easier to create a custom theme. Some of the exciting features of the new Version 6 include:

• A new user interface for BlackBerry Theme Builder that lets you click on any item on the preview screen and directly edit its settings. This allows for faster editing and a shorter learning curve. Plus, you can select multiple items to change all at once.
• The Background Wizard makes it easy to add dynamic wallpapers to your theme. Options include date-based or time-based changes (to highlight a special holiday or change images by the time of day), and slideshow backgrounds (to cycle through your favorite photos).
• New productivity features allow you to batch update all of the graphics in a theme automatically. You can also change fonts across multiple phone screens automatically. Also, BlackBerry Theme Studio continues to be compatible with popular graphic design tools such as Adobe Photoshop® and Corel® Paint Shop Pro.
• For our professional theme designers, a new “export” option makes it simple to offer themes through BlackBerry App World. The “export” option is designed to package all of the selected files and settings into a single zip file, ready for upload to BlackBerry App World.
• Last but not least, the new version supports the latest BlackBerry smartphone devices and software, including the new BlackBerry® Torch™ 9800 and BlackBerry® Style™ 9670 handsets, as well as new BlackBerry® 6 UI elements like the graphic content menus.

Whether you want to personalize your own phone, create unique themes to share with friends, or join the ranks of commercial theme designers on BlackBerry App World, I encourage you to try this new release.

• Download BlackBerry Theme Studio 6 for personal use
• Download BlackBerry Theme Studio 6 for commercial use

The new BlackBerry® Theme Studio 6 Public Beta 2 is now available for download on BlackBerry® Developer Zone, providing extensive support for new (and upgraded) BlackBerry® smartphones with BlackBerry 6 OS, as well as robust import functionality for theme projects created using previous versions of BlackBerry Theme Studio.

This beta release supports theme development for all BlackBerry smartphones running BlackBerry 6, that are currently in-market, as well as simplified theme export for BlackBerry App World™ in order to quickly submit your BlackBerry 6 themes.

In addition, the Import feature has been expanded to allow for importing previous theme projects that targeted devices running versions of BlackBerry Device Software prior to BlackBerry 6. For instance, if a theme project was created in BlackBerry Theme Studio 5.0 targetting the BlackBerry® Bold™ 9700 smartphone series, you can follow three simple steps to import your theme settings from that project (such as icons, menu/dialog background patterns, fonts, and so on) to a BlackBerry Bold 9700 smartphone series project in BlackBerry Theme Studio 6:

Read more at the Inside BlackBerry Developer’s Blog »