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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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!
In my last post, I was pretty negative about the available BlackBerry user interface controls. While that fact hasn’t changed, I didn’t want to leave the impression that the BlackBerry API’s provide nothing to developers. The API’s provide lots of interesting functions including the ability to extend menus within other applications. Take a look at the following from the default messaging application on a 4.5 device.
Before Facebook Installation
This shows the menu in this application before installing the Facebook application. After installation, you can see that the Facebook application has added a new menu item to this application.
After Facebook Installation
This is a pretty nice feature of the API. Although I don’t have actual code to show for this, my assumption is that this is provided by using:
API’s like this allow for incredible integration with the rest of the applications on the device, opening up many very interesting opportunities.
The Eclipse Project has released version 3.5 of the Eclipse platform as part of the Galileo Release Train. There are announcements and discussions all over the place, like here, here and here. The question is where is the love for the Mobile Tools for Java? The Galileo release marks the graduation of the Mobile Tools for Java project from incubation, providing a solid set of tools for JavaME development in Eclipse. The involvement from the various member companies has been excellent during the development of MTJ and transition from EclipseME. I have to admit that I’m a bit disappointed at the lack of coverage of the release. Pass the word that MTJ is the way to develop for JavaME.
The Pulsar project also saw an initial early release with Galileo. I will provide some background on this project in an upcoming post.
I’ve decided to dub this little hobby project ZBerry (BlackBerry Z-Machine Interpreter). I made some progress this weekend allowing stories to be selected from the file system via a new “library” view.
ZBerry Library Selection
I need to add some suspend/resume support before this thing becomes really very usable on a phone, but some progress anyway…
I was recently struggling to understand how to text alignment works with the BlackBerry Graphics drawText function. Having developed for MIDP on JavaME for a number of years, I found that the way the BlackBerry API works is a bit counter-intuitive until you understand how it works. I expected that this code would work, based on JavaME:
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