Monday, January 31, 2011

New Resource Editor (change your URL's) & Kenai updates

We are trying to get up to speed with Kenai, allot of the functionality is lost or very different so we currently don't have many of the things we used to have like the customized home page or the featured apps page. But at least we now have the new version of the resource editor launchable again.
Since the SVN changed (make sure to update to the new LWUIT SVN!!!!), the URL's for the resource editor webstart application have also changed and we can no longer deliver updates on the old URL. Please use the following button to launch the new resource editor:




If you are experiencing troubles with the above link (e.g. if you disabled Java in your browser) you can use the jnlp directly.

Friday, January 28, 2011

New LWUIT website in project Kenai now live

The Java.net migration is nearly complete and LWUIT now has a new home page at http://lwuit.java.net/. In the future the current http://lwuit.dev.java.net/ address will redirect to the new location but right now it still leads to the old outdated site!

Upcoming commits and information will all be in the new site, thanks for your patience.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Location Based Cross Platform Game In LWUIT

I have been negligent in posting about cool new LWUIT app's mostly because I have so much to do, however Chen insisted I post about Tourality and I agree it is different. Its a location based game written for all platforms with LWUIT, it runs on Android, Blackberry & J2ME. The upcoming iPhone version probably won't be based on LWUIT though ;-)
In the words of its author: "Tourality is a location based scavenger hunt game. Reach geographic spots in different challenges in your vicinities. Collect gold to outsmart your co-players with gadgets but beware of thieves. Play alone or with others in multiplayer games with up to 40 players. Choose from various game sets in your city. Discover the action-packed outdoor GPS game and register for free at www.tourality.com. Supported smartphone platforms include Android, BlackBerry, Nokia, iPhone (in development)."
 

Monday, January 24, 2011

LWUIT Resource Editor PSD Tutorial Part 2: Converting To LWUIT


The second part of the tutorial covers the creation of the first UI skeleton before building the actual application. There are still some missing refinements in this version e.g. I forgot to make the title area transparent which would allow the background texture to peek through.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

LWUIT Resource Editor PSD Tutorial Part 1: Introduction


I'm starting here a new mini tutorial on taking a PSD and converting it to a LWUIT application, this is a very useful talent for a developer since graphics artists would often produce a Photoshop PSD and expect you to develop from it.
Its also useful since there are many free PSD resources on the web from which you can pick up existing designs, even designs originally designed for web which is exactly what I did... I picked a design from this site whichI found here. There are MANY free design resources you can find and leverage over the web and many Photoshop tutorials, by combining your technical skills with very minimal access to these UI tools you can produce remarkable UI's.

Monday, January 10, 2011

LWUIT Resource Editor Tutorial Part 10: Taking The Lead


In this part of the resource editor tutorial covers the Lead Component feature of LWUIT/resource editor which allows creating some elaborate composite components. A composite component is a single component that is assembled of multiple distinct components of its own. E.g. a multiline button, checkbox etc.
In the tutorial I go over a couple of different strategies eventually settling on the lead component strategy.

Monday, January 3, 2011

LWUIT Resource Editor Tutorial Part 9: A Splash of Timeline


This time in the resource editor tutorial series I go into the details of creating the simple timeline animation from the previous part. Here I animate the spoon swinging effect to create a compelling (yet cheap in terms of RAM/CPU) effect that's useful for splash screens and form backgrounds.