Monday, December 29, 2008

LWUIT Makeover Demo Running on Samsung F480

The makeover demo running on the Samsung F480 touch screen device. Ideally the UI should be padded for to be more accessible to finger navigation but I didn't have much time to work on this.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

New LWUIT Drop Available Now

Chen and myself have been a bit slow with the drops lately, we have been remarkably busy with all the different goings on in LWUIT that we just didn't have the time to stabilize and run through the process of a binary drop.
Well, we made some time this past week and that drop is now out notable changes can be seen in Chen's announcement to the list. One of the nicer things in this drop is the incorporation of the LWUIT makeover demo as part of the drop, it has one major difference from the one Terrence and myself have been showing off which is the lack of icons. I just had to remove them since licensing and rights in Sun is a long and complicated process and I didn't want to go through it just to add some "zaz". You can add them yourselves through the silk icons set which has an amazing set of highly recommended icons.

Other than that Thorsten Schemm has contributed his excellent BlackBerry native port of LWUIT and placed it in the incubator! If you are serious about BlackBerry development you should check it out and collaborate on improving the LWUIT BlackBerry support.

Friday, December 19, 2008

Charting Components For LWUIT


My google alerts page poped up this article which I can only read using google translate... The animated gif on the page looks very and it did bring my attention to the fact that java4less now has LWUIT support in their chart components which seem like a very useful tool.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Meet Chen & Jonathan Next Month

Chen Fishbein & Jonathan Knudsen will be leading a half day LWUIT tutorial event in Santa Clara on January 23rd, this would be a great opportunity to meet both of them and get into the inside track of LWUIT.

Jonathan is a great teacher/speaker and Chen's understanding of LWUIT and its architecture is second to none, I'm sure this tutorial would be a very rewarding and worthwhile event!
There is more information and registration details in the LWUIT project page.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Theres Something About LWUIT

A new Java.net project is aiming to get LWUIT onto TV set top boxes, its something we have been working on for quite some time and includes quite a bit of the DTV experience our center developed in recent years.
I don't know how much information can be discussed in public and right now the source code is still going through the long process at Sun but hopefully we will be able to show off this additional LWUIT platform.

The screenshot to the right is pretty much how the application looks, keep in mind that this is LWUIT running in true HD TV.

Thursday, December 4, 2008

Confusing LWUIT Mapping Application

A while back one of the comments to a blog post I wrote pointed to a mapping application claiming it was done in LWUIT, I mostly ignored it because it just didn't seem informed and didn't provide any evidence to the use of LWUIT (the name of the application and its look made it seem like it wasn't using LWUIT)...

I often discount things too quickly without looking into them properly, its a bad trait which I try to avoid but there is just so much noise I need to constantly filter... So Guidebee please take this as an apology, Chen actually did look into that and tried the application and it is a LWUIT application. Thats really cool since it looks very different from many of the LWUIT applications we use all the time. You can try it here and you can watch Guidebees youtube videos page for more videos. Their home page is probably this but I'm not really sure...

As a final note I have to say that the application looks great and such 3rd party applications suddenly coming out of nowhere is one of the best surprises a framework developer can get! Both Chen and I are completely blown away by some of the things you guys have been doing with LWUIT, lots of the stuff we see isn't public yet but the innovation and excitement is real and keeps us going. Thanks.

Monday, December 1, 2008

Redirecting output on S60 devices

Sometimes you are so used to something that you don't remember to check for changes... This is what happened to me now with S60 debugging, I have some issues that only occur on my battered device and they are impossible to reproduce on an emulator.
Sure I can use the Log but what I get is an exception from an unclear source, I always invoke printStackTrace so I know the trace is there... With SE devices I would just plugin a cable and see the stack but with the Nokia I have been at this bug for days. In desperation I searched the internet for ways to get at the system output for S60 with no result... I found a tool from SE called Redirect.SYS but its only for their flavor of Symbian.
Then I ran into this which I immediately discarded since its a Java JAR so naturally it won't have access to the System output... Should have paid more attention! Turns out Nokia has an undocumented API (it is now documented obviously) to access the stream of the output/error stream from Java! It works on my E61 which is making my debugging experience that much better.

I'm blogging about this because if I didn't know about it, I bet most of you guys don't either and the results for System.out printStackTrace and S60 Symbian Nokia are somewhat problematic (hopefully this will help).