Biswajit Sarkar wrote an interesting article for java.net about themeing and styling LWUIT. The article features helpful diagrams and illustrations to explain some of the UI concepts behind LWUIT themeing.
Performance is one of the main points of focus when working on small devices, speed and memory size are remarkably important and often contradictory requirements. Its very hard to deal with customer complaints of performance since this sort of behavior is very subjective to perception and hard to quantify, often devices would slow down during networking operations (since they grant the native network thread higher priority and ignore Java's thread priorities). On many occasions we would get complaints relating to a specific device performance and it would be very hard for us to see what specifically is taking time to perform on the given device.
Inspiration is powerful stuff, Kirill's blog often inspires and educates me (highly recommended even for non-Swing developers his blog is very informative on all things GUI). This past week he featured an excellent series covering the subject of creating a UI from a photoshop mockup, this is a remarkably common task with very little coverage especially when considering the amount of times we get asked to perform this task.
Unlike Kirill's series which deals with replicating 1 to 1 the photoshop design, this series is geared towards adapting an existing design used in applications or websites in order to move it to the cellular environment. I will write more about this in the next post and explain some of what I did but for now enjoy the teasers, a screenshot of the cookbook UI in LWUIT and the original cookbook image.
This series is intends for hackers who wish to port LWUIT itself, not for developers wishing to port applications written in LWUIT. LWUIT is portable on two fronts, the first allows us to run applications developed in LWUIT in many platforms. The second allows us to adapt LWUIT to additional platforms such as CDC, Android etc...class FocusAnimation extends Form {
private Component futureFocus;
private Motion focusMotionX;
private Motion focusMotionY;
private Motion focusMotionWidth;
private Motion focusMotionHeight;
public FocusAnimation() {
super("Focus Animation");
for(int iter = 1 ; iter < 5 ; iter++) {
addComponent(new Button("Button " + iter));
}
addComponent(new TextArea("Multi-line text\nwith several\ndifferent lines", 3, 20));
addComponent(new List(new Object[] {"Entry 1", "Entry 2", "Entry 3"}));
addComponent(new ComboBox(new Object[] {"Entry 1", "Entry 2", "Entry 3"}));
}
public void setFocused(Component c) {
Component current = getFocused();
if(current != null && current != c) {
futureFocus = c;
focusMotionX = Motion.createSplineMotion(current.getAbsoluteX(), futureFocus.getAbsoluteX(), 300);
focusMotionY = Motion.createSplineMotion(current.getAbsoluteY(), futureFocus.getAbsoluteY(), 300);
focusMotionWidth = Motion.createSplineMotion(current.getWidth(), futureFocus.getWidth(), 300);
focusMotionHeight = Motion.createSplineMotion(current.getHeight(), futureFocus.getHeight(), 300);
focusMotionX.start();
focusMotionY.start();
focusMotionWidth.start();
focusMotionHeight.start();
super.setFocused(null);
} else {
super.setFocused(c);
}
}
public void paint(Graphics g) {
super.paint(g);
if(futureFocus != null) {
g.setColor(futureFocus.getStyle().getBgSelectionColor());
g.fillRect(focusMotionX.getValue(), focusMotionY.getValue(),
focusMotionWidth.getValue(), focusMotionHeight.getValue(),
(byte)140);
}
}
public boolean animate() {
boolean val = super.animate();
if(futureFocus != null && focusMotionX.isFinished()) {
super.setFocused(futureFocus);
futureFocus = null;
focusMotionX = null;
focusMotionY = null;
focusMotionWidth = null;
focusMotionHeight = null;
}
return val || futureFocus != null;
}
}
One of the cool surprises we get is when someone just releases a LWUIT application out of the blue. A couple of such applications came out recently that seem very cool and attractive, first is Pader Sync File Manager which has been around for quite some time. They decided to overhaul their UI using LWUIT and are prompting this as one of the main features of their new release.