Notices

So, if you've done some research on the topic, you'll find out that BBM is a pretty well secured protocol. Reverse engineering to run without a BlackBerry is likely almost impossible (due to the way they assign PINs, etc).

Compounding that, even if you do have a BlackBerry, there is no API exposed that allows you to send / receive BBM messages. This effectively rules out something like writing an application that interfaces with BBM on once side, and provides a simple interface over the network or Bluetooth or something.

Now that all the pretty ideas have been ruled out, what I propose is infinitely more kludgy and hacky. But hey, why not?

BlackBerries support Bluetooth keyboards, and BlueZ has the ability to act as one (see BlueMaemo, for example); giving us input ability. Then, there is a program called "barry", which provides "bjavaloader".

"bjavaloader" allows us to get screenshots from the device when it's attached via USB. (You should see where I'm going with this...)

Now, the BBM screen is pretty well defined, I guess you could say. (See http://i.imgur.com/3Kxu8.png). What I'm proposing is to write a program (in Python that takes a screen grab, filters out the chat window into its components, performs OCR on the text - you can set the font to monospace and larger in settings - compares all the emoticons and matches them up, and lastly reads the message status (the tick, tick + delivered, tick + read).

In a few tests, it seems like setting the BB's font to monospace, with a fairly large font size, resulted in 100% accuracy with GOCR.

Thoughts anyone?