Nuux LWUIT Nightlife Social Application

Ben just posted to the LWUIT mailing list about the nuux application entering beta.

Nuux is a nightlife jukebox with social networking features. For more details you can visit nuux.net or try out the application on m.nuux.net.

LWUIT 1.3 Released

With great pleasure, the LWUIT team is announcing the GA release of Lightweight UI Toolkit (LWUIT) 1.3.

LWUIT is a UI library that is bundled together with applications and helps content developers create compelling and consistent Java ME applications. LWUIT supports visual components and other UI goodies such as theming, transitions, animation and more.

Key features for the current release:

• Bidi support (contributed by Telmap) - allows using LWUIT with Right To Left languages such as Arabic, Hebrew
• Lightweight Virtual keyboard support - allowing for customizable touch screen input
• Pixel based scrolling - allowing scroll to work as expected even when components/containers exceed screen bounds and not just for focusable components
• Table layout and table component - allowing complex tabular UI's including support for features such as spanning rows/columns
• Tree component - supporting nested elements and expanding
• Spinner component for date, time and numeric input within a range
• Reimplementation of the ComboBox widget
• SVG Support integrated into the Theme Creator (formerly LWUIT Designer/Resource Editor)
• Touch device improvements: button menus, improved kinetic scrolling, tactile touch (vibration on touch)
• Resource file specification
• Redesigned the list renderer "rendering" logic so that it paints the backgrounds of the renderers first, and then the selection and foreground.

Please visit http://java.sun.com/javame/technology/lwuit/ for more information


On a related note, Thorsten just published further detailed instructions for using LWUIT on the blackberry and Android in his website.

Spinning It Round And Round

Spinner is a component we have been postponing since before the 1.0 release of LWUIT, this delay has finally come to an end with the new release of the Spinner component into SVN joining the Tree/Table who are all major features for the 1.3 release.
The Spinner is mostly interesting because it is a composite component that mashes together a list and a text field to create a very unique input method that has some of both. It allows users to select from what is possibly a huge list (not infinite but still pretty huge), of numbers, dates or times. It allows users to type parts of the values or the entire values into the UI for fast searches within the list similar to the searchable list I recently blogged about.

The Spinner achieves such huge lists by creating its own ListModel and using a formula to calculate values on the fly, a renderer is used to display the list as a user would expect it to appear (date/time). The text field is painted in the appropriate location for the date/time input and its values are directly parsed into place.

The source code of the Spinner can be a great starting place to understand how to deeply manipulate such LWUIT components.

The video to the right was created with the four basic spinners. Notice that a spinner normally accepts min, max, current and step size values. For date these are in milliseconds since epoc and for time it it in seconds since midnight.

Form form = new Form("Spinners");
Spinner integerSpinner = Spinner.create(0, 1000, 100, 10);
Spinner decimalSpinner = Spinner.create(0.0, 100.0, 17.75, 0.05);
Spinner timeSpinner = Spinner.createTime(0, 24 * 60 * 60, 10 * 60 * 60, 60, true, false);
Spinner dateSpinner = Spinner.createDate(System.currentTimeMillis() - 1000 * DAY,
       System.currentTimeMillis() + 1000 * DAY, System.currentTimeMillis(),
       '-', Spinner.DATE_FORMAT_MM_DD_YYYY);

form.setLayout(new TableLayout(4, 2));
form.addComponent(new Label("Integer"));
form.addComponent(integerSpinner);
form.addComponent(new Label("Decimal"));
form.addComponent(decimalSpinner);
form.addComponent(new Label("Time"));
form.addComponent(timeSpinner);
form.addComponent(new Label("Date"));
form.addComponent(dateSpinner);
form.show();