SevenClick! Mobile Technology Evangelists

In the previous post of this series, we talked about out motivations for using J2ME Polish and some issues about licensing. Now we are going to look at all the features included in the J2ME Polish bundle, as it is actually a whole collection of different tools for MIDP developers.

The tools range from standard build tools for compiling, preverifying and packaging the applications to a sophisticated optional GUI which can be designed with simple CSS textfiles. These are the tools included:

Read the rest of this entry »

When we started developing our firsts JME projects, we had to deal with “the UI issue”. This is none other than when to make use of native JME UI or to develop a custom UI from basic drawing primitives.

Both options have its pros and cons, and if you are about to make such a decision, maybe this post, where Simon Judge recently made good considerations about this issue, could help you.

The fact is that we wanted to provide our users with a richer UI experience than native JME does today. Then, we have two options: developing our own UI framework, or… leveraging an existing one. And we decided to use J2ME Polish.

J2ME Polish is an open source project developed by Enough Software, a company based in Bremen, Germany and founded by the end of 2004. J2ME Polish is distributed under the GNU General Public License as well as commercial licenses. This way, when the source code of your mobile applications should not be published under the GNU GPL license - that is the usual case for many ISVs -, you can use one of the commercial licenses.

But J2ME is not only a GUI framework. It is an application framework where the set of functionality includes, besides GUI-related stuff, other things such as serialization, persistence, logging, localization, a game engine,…

We will cover some of this stuff in successive more in-depth posts.

Link J2MEPolish

One year after Opera Mini 3.0 was released, we have now an Opera Mini 4.0 without a ‘beta’ postscript.

In the new release, Opera has added some new features:

• Landscape mode.
• Virtual mouse.
• Optimized for Blackberry.
• Enhanced small screen rendering.
• Opera Link.

Good set of features, specially the Opera Link service, which allows users to synchronize links from desktop browser and mobile browser.

We recommend you to have a look at Opera Mini website for further information.

Via XatakaMovil
Link Opera

Motorola has finally launched the 1.0 version of MOTODEV Studio for JAVA ME. No more Betas, no more testing. A final release at last. Little by little every phone manufacturer is launching IDEs (Integrated Development Environment) adapted to work with the manufacturer’s device list. This tendency was started by Nokia (who else?) with the Carbide series. Later on, Sony Ericsson joined the group. The last ones to follow the leader have been Motorola and Samsung.

Considering the existing fragmentation in JAVA ME market,these IDEs are very helpful because it allows you to test applications in a higher number of phone models. The official the SDK provided by SUN is not bad at all, but the emulators are far from being perfect. Read the rest of this entry »

At Sun Developer Network, we have found a very interesting session of its ‘Ask the Experts’ events, that took place at August 20, 2007.

In this session, Mikhail Gorshenev, Sun’s lead for the JSR 248 Technology Conformance Kit (TCK), E-Ming Saung, Product Line Manager in the Java ME Marketing group, and Hinkmond Wong, one of the current project owners of the phoneME open source project, answered a variety of questions about MSA.

Quite interesting for clarigying some points about MSA. Don’t miss the link!!

Link SunDeveloperNetwork

Sony Ericsson has included P1 in the list of phones available in Virtual Lab service. The P1 is a Symbian 9.1 UIQ 3 smartphone including WiFi connectivity, JME CLDC 1.1 and CDC 1.0, accelerated 3D graphics, etc..

The most important point in this announce is that this is the first Symbian based smartphone added to Sony Ericsson’s Virtual Lab. This way, both JME and Symbian developers will be able to test their applications virtually.  Sony Ericsson has simulated stylus interaction with the touch screen using mouse clicks (obvious) and WiFi connectivity with a virtual WiFi network included in the Virtual Lab.

Great news for Sony Ericsson developers.

Link Sony Ericsson Press Note