Tuesday, December 15, 2009

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.

20 comments:

  1. What a great news!!! Congratulations for such great library!! i'm lwuit user since the 2008 version and thanks to thorsten for the bb implementation!

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  2. Thanks for the 1.3 update Shai!

    But I'm planing to start studying "LWUIT 1.1 for Java ME Developers" by Biswajit Sarkar.
    Please enumerate which chapters are outdated in view to version 1.3 so that my study time is not wasted.

    cheers!

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  3. great news!
    It's the same release of the last svn version?
    Thanks so much for this work!
    marco

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  4. Hi,

    I don't know where i can ask for help about LWUIT, so I'll ask here :)

    I'm facing some problems using the theme editor... when I change the SoftButton's margin, the commandbar changes ok, however when I access the menu from command bar the margin is gone! Does anyone know how can I fix this?

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  5. Actually how can I personalize the SoftButton during the menu... :)

    Thanks,

    Daniel

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  6. @jhoravi: Biswajit's book is mostly accurate for the current LWUIT obviously ignoring newer features. The only major difference is the multiple styles per component architecture of current LWUIT in comparison to the old selected/unselected color approach.

    @Marco: I placed a 1.3 tag in SVN

    @danielvmacedo: I don't quite understand the question. But I think there was a minor regression with softbutton margin/padding for the 1.3 version. It is fixed in SVN

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  7. You did great job guys.
    i replaced the old version with 1.3, it looks fine.
    i got few bugs where i can report them?

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  8. Hi Shai, I've noticed slower runtime performance when i build my MIDLET with obfuscation, compared to without obfuscation, when it should be opposite, haven't compared with older release, but is this normal behavior ?

    Thanks and congratulations for a great library.

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  9. This is really great news. I'm glad to see things moving fast in the LWUIT world!

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  10. I have a couple questions:
    1. does LWUIT have a solution to handle the portrait/landscape orientation change?

    2. How to use the phone's native textfield? Because different phone has different implementations, some have full keypad, can LWUIT reuse the native textfield in place?

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  11. Hi,
    i'm trying to display hebrew with setrtl to true but i got reverse string , and when i have a word with a number it got mix.
    i understand that telmap fix this issue.
    how can i implement hebrew?

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  12. @baki: that's device specific when using system fonts. For bitmap fonts this should use the telmap algorithm

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  13. You need to use system fonts for Arabic

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  14. Nice to use a great Libray LWUIT for mobile application..........

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  15. For Arabic, it does the conversion of direction, but arabic words normally contains joint characters. Is this supported, (joining the characters)? or the RTL supports only changes the visual to be right to left?

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  16. Hi,Shai.
    I have got some problems in using the Tree of lwuit 1.3. Could you plz show me a simple example?

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  17. Hello , Please can you specify system fonts and how to use it ?
    i need to enter arabic in the direct input textfield

    Thanks

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  18. hi
    i am using resource editor. i want to change the size of hebrew font in my application. when i use bitmap font "Arial" i can not see hebrew text but it prints english correctly with correct size.it there any solution........

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