Monthly Archives: June 2006

Internet in a tablet, Nokia 770

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Nokia 770I have been using the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet for a few months and I’ll have to say that it is a fantastic piece of hardware. I was quite uncertain that I would keep using it after the “wow” effect but it has indeed become very handy device that I use daily for checking emails, reading news feeds and browsing the web. I have even watched some prerecorded TV episodes on it with very good results.

As a software oriented gadgeteer I was eager to start developing some software for it. To my unpleasant surpise it doesn’t have a Java runtime environment (yet). This seems to be because of some licensing issues between the Maemo OS and Sun’s Java Platform. Hopefully we will see Java in the 770 in the near future. Currently I’m able to use atleast C/C++, Python and even Mono for my applications. Time will tell if I’ll be able to develope some fun applications for this device.

Desktop Java application’s look and feel

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The NetBeans IDE‘s new GUI builder called Matisse have gotten my attention since until this editor I had lost the hope for decent desktop Java application development. Now the project Matisse have taken the GUI building to the same level as seen in recent Microsoft Visual Studios. I’m sure that we’ll see some interesting Java desktop applications in the near future thanks to Matisse.

One thing that is still slowing down the desktop app’s blooming is the Java’s native look and feel. As a newbie creates his first GUI with the Matisse and starts the application, he might be surprised as the application doesn’t look like the one he designed as it uses the default look and feel. This can be easily fixed by writing a single line of code for example to your main() method:

UIManager.setLookAndFeel( UIManager.getSystemLookAndFeelClassName() );

TrailViewer

This will set the application to use the system’s look and feel. Here is screenshot of my work-in-progress application, TrailExplorer, which is a desktop software for viewing trails that have been prerecorded with a mobile application using the bluetooth connection to a GPS device (mobile app is also in work-in-progress status). I’ll use this software to explore my recorded biking trails.