Redesign Your Resources

Allot has changed in the LWUIT Designer in the last few months, the changes might not be immediately obvious in the new drop at first glance but those who have been using the tool for quite a while should look forward to one of the strongest releases yet.
A public beta of the LWUIT Designer now be tested via Java Web Start by clicking here, we intend to update the JWS version more regularly than we do the LWUIT released in the future. This in itself is a huge improvement since it will allow the LWUIT designer to track current LWUIT development closely.

So what is new? Too much to mention but I'll try to give out some highlights.

We now have a new resource file format (which is documented within our drops docs directory), this will require modification to existing resource files and recreation of fonts however the benefits are huge!

• Export to Ant script - includes generating the files representing the entries within the resource file. This was often requested, however impossible with the previous file format.
• The code of the Ant task (ResourceBuilder) is now unified with the resource editor increasing portability and reducing potential bugs in both. In fact we found quite a few bugs in both as a result...
• When adding images to the resource editor they won't be reencoded as PNG anymore, this will allow you to shrink your images with existing tools or even use JPEG's.
• A major animation bug was fixed, this should now reduce the size of animated GIF's considerably (they should be added again to see the difference).
• The Selected/Unselected/Pressed styles allow simplified and far more powerful themeing of LWUIT code.
• Gradient background support allows for very powerful UI's without much overhead.
• Memory overhead estimate provides some ballpark figure regarding the amount of RAM a given theme should occupy for the current screen.
• Fonts are now far more elaborate and easier to manipulate. They should work better on additional platforms as well and you can disable bitmap fonts on a specific platform by using a boolean flag in Font.
• Image alignment and background type behavior allow further background customization.

For the next drop we plan to add SVG support that will allow keeping a bitmap fallback for every image thus provide full portability for devices with weak/problematic SVG support with a single binary.

Chat Demo Source Code Now Live

Despite working hard on a new drop I found a couple of minutes to publish the code from JavaOne into the LWUIT incubator. The code is in the SVN there and you can just check it out from SVN using your standard java.net user name and password.

This code demonstrates several things which I hope to get into more in future posts if I have the time... However for now check out the presentation that Chen and myself gave at JavaOne, slightly modified in terms of themes.

BiDi In LWUIT The Full Story

Ofir just published the full details and a video of bidi in LWUIT.
Head over to his post to read all the fine details in his post covering the subject.
And thanks again to Telmap for this often requested contribution.

Talk With LWUIT - Our JavaOne Demo

Our JavaOne demo is now finally up on youtube in the video to your right. You can also try the live version by going with your phone to http://lwuitchat.appspot.com/ however the demo might not work for all devices since we have some network related bugs we just can't track down.

I will try to publish the source code some time next week to allow you to review how exactly we did that. We would also like to place the slides for the presentation so you guys can follow the path of the application creation outlined in the presentation...

In other news we attended the local Java tech day the other day where Ofir Leitner had a cool demo for the Java tech day of the bidi stuff he has developed sponsored by Telmap. He showed off lots of things so I will try not to "steal" his announcement, the cool thing is that Telmap is contributing the code back to LWUIT and we will integrate it as part of LWUIT.

Preparing For A New Drop And JavaOne Demo

A few months before JavaOne everyone in our team is busy preparing for JavaOne related project milestones, a few weeks after JavaOne everyone is still on vacation or coming back from vacation. So we didn't have much of a QA team before/after JavaOne...
That is my personal excuse for not making our JavaOne deadline for the next LWUIT drop, I hope we can make the drop soon enough though.

We also have a video

JavaOne is finally over but I'm still stuck in SF

Here in an interview I did on the J1 pavilion show floor. We had a session and a BoF and I hope to post more about both of these when I get the time.
Right now I'm somwhat upset since I missed my flight back home due to misreading my e-ticket (how stupid is that...). In the meantime everyone in our team is taking some time off so going ahead with the new release for JavaOne is a no go for now. I hope we can have a drop in the next couple of weeks, there are quite a few bugs in the new LWUIT designer but at least I have a new Lenovo instead of my highly problematic Mac so I can get some work done faster...

Just for a general information for those of you who couldn't attend, we demoed a chat client which we "pimped" to the extreme and we intend to release the full source code and quite a bit of explanation on how exactly we did it via this blog. Now I need to start preparing for Java Developer Days...

Just Arrived At JavaOne

Make sure to sign up to Chen and my sessions TS-3895 if you attend JavaOne, this session is a more detailed "Pimp My LWUIT" sort of session and we guarantee some amusing special effects. We have a new demo made specifically for this talk which will hopefully redefine (again) what people do and attempt to do in LWUIT.
You can also meet and talk with Chen and myself in BOF-4551 that very night which will be less formal and give you time to ask us any questions you might have on your mind.

You can also come and talk to us or other guys within the Java Utopia/java.net areas in the pavillion. Its a great opertunity to meet lots of other guys working on mobile, embedded and open source within Sun right now.