In my previous entries, I’ve discussed a few things that caught me off guard while learning iPhone development. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve picked up an Android device to dig into that platform a bit and probably will spend less time playing with iPhone development. Before I move too far away from iPhone, I wanted to wrap up the remaining differences I found interesting between the iPhone and Java platforms.
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I’m continuing to make slow forward progress with my DAAP-based music player for the iPhone. My most recent changes have taken this in the direction of being much more like the standard music player functionality on the iPhone. In particular, I’ve switched over to using a tab view controller for the major perspectives of viewing the music database.
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Looking back to my last post way back in October it is pretty clear when things started getting crazy at work. The team survived and managed to finish another awesome version of mFoundry’s mBanking product. These days I’m doing more management and less coding, but I’m definitely still a geek. Given that iPhone applications are all the rage in the industry, I’ve been trying to learn my way around iPhone development. During the process of learning, I’ve noticed a few things that have caught me off guard compared to Java. I hope to post a few of those things in the days and weeks to come that may help other Java programmers. In the meantime, I thought I would share some about the project I’ve been playing with to learn.
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Looking back, it is hard to believe how long I’ve been a computer programming geek. Way back in February of 1984, I had my first game, Circus, published in Compute! magazine. Thanks to Kevin Savetz, you can now see my original article as well as many other classic computer magazine articles. These articles are back in the days before the internet, laptops and cell phones. The iPhone in my pockets has so much more power and storage, that it is hard to imagine programming as I did in those days.
Circus VIC-20
Looking back at this article publication, there are a couple of things that make it particularly interesting to me 20+ years later.
- My original program was written on the Commodore VIC-20 (5K of user memory!) and was rewritten for all of the other computers for the publication. This happened behind the scenes and I was unaware until publication. Not surprising, they also rewrote all of my descriptive text.
- This game was a clone of a game that was available in arcades and pizza places around that same time. Had I done this in present day, this game would very likely not have been published due to copyright or other legal issues.
20+ years later, I’m still a computer programmer (software engineer?). While I program less than I used to, it is cool that my hobby so many years ago has been able to be both a hobby and a source of income for so many years.
Along with the 3.5.1 release of the Eclipse platform earlier this week, the Eclipse Mobile Tools for Java project has released version 1.0.1. As you can see from the New and Noteworthy page, not only did the team fix more than 100 bugs since the 1.0 release but they also provided some cool new features. According to Gustavo Paula, this release features contributions from a variety of different contributors including:
- Motorola
- Nokia
- SonyEricsson
- Research in Motion
- Several individual contributors
This new MTJ release has been included in the first service release of the Eclipse Pulsar project. In addition, the Pulsar QuickInstall now includes an SDK from SonyEricsson.
Given Motorola’s push into the Android space, it comes as no surprise that they are trimming down the number of developers on the Eclipse Mobile Tools for Java project. MTJ project lead, Christian Kurzke, announced via the mailing list that three of the key “Motorola sponsored” developers have been reassigned to a different project and will no longer be sponsored to develop the Eclipse MTJ features. The good news is that Gustavo, Diego and David have expressed interest in continuing to be involved as individual contributors. In addition, Jon Deardon from Research In Motion will most likely be joining the list of official contributors very soon.
As Christian pointed out via his email, now would be an excellent time to consider getting involved in the Eclipse MTJ project. Even something as simple as being involved on the mailing list can help us out. If you are a mobile developer using Eclipse Mobile Tools for Java, consider contributing a patch to provide a cool new feature or to fix the bug that annoys you the most. Not a developer, but still want to contribute? We can always use help with documentation and project marketing. Pitch in and lend a hand!
I have just made available the first public release (version 0.5.0) of the ZBerry interactive fiction application. This release works pretty well, but is definitely rough around the edges. I hope people get some amusement despite any bugs. More details about installation and usage can be found on the ZBerry Documentation page.
ZBerry Game Play
Please take this for what it is worth… a silly little hobby project of mine that may or may not continue. If you really like this, feel free to comment. If you find bugs, source code patches are welcome, but complaints are not. My hope is that is that it is worth more than its price (FREE) but given that I’m making nothing from this I hope that everyone can understand there is absolutely no support implied or available.
I have been told that the replacement Macintosh BlackBerry PPPD is no longer necessary for systems that have Snow Leopard installed. In fact, it sounds like installing the patched pppd version can actually cause issues on Snow Leopard systems.
If you have Snow Leopard on your system, please do not install the patched version of PPPD.
I will keep the replacement package available for those like myself that are still running Leopard on their systems. In addition, there is a version built for Tiger.
Eric Cloninger of Motorola has started the process of combining Eclipse Mobile Tools for Java, Eclipse Tools for Mobile Linux and Eclipse Pulsar projects under one combined project. Although the specific name has not been decided yet, a leading candidate is simply the “Eclipse Mobile Tools” project. In Eric’s presentation to members of the various projects he mentions a number of compelling reasons for pulling these projects together: Read more…
Just a quick post to validate that the latest Leopard update (10.5.8) overwrites the changed pppd provided by my replacement package. I’ve also verified that installing the replacement package on top of 10.5.8 works just fine.