Category Archives: Java

Nokia E71 and new Twitter client

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I finally upgraded my phone from N80 to E71. The new Nokia E71 is a really nice. Even the Symbian S60 feels much better now that the phone has enough memory to run it. Operating system still has not changed that much compared to my first smart phone, Nokia 7650 which I had in 2002. This phone is still the best one I have ever had. Even Joel Spolsky is using it.

Twim on Nokia E71

Twitter Client Twim running on Nokia E71

The new phone got me inspired to improve my Twitter client, Twim. I fixed a few bugs like showing the replies feed. I also added a new feature for displaying public feed in own tab. You can download the JAR and JAD files from the Twim page or directly from these links:

Twim v1.2: Twim.jar and Twim.jad

Mobile Trail Explorer v1.12 Released

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It’s only handful of days since last release, but I decided to release the v1.12 so soon as the v1.11 contained few bugs that were blocking few critical features, like adding a new waypoint and changing display settings.

You can download the new release from here or here. New version also contains a new languages, French and Dutch. You can now also change the language if you want to use other then phone default language. Thanks for the contributions and test reports reported on Google Groups discussions.

Mobile Trail Explorer v1.11

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Here it is, a new release of Mobile Trail Explorer. Here are the release notes for this release:

  • Renamed “Waypoints” to “Places” (Issue 92)
  • Filename uses datestamp with seconds
  • User can add audio-markers
  • Configurable action keys (# and * keys)
  • New speedometer screen (Issue 112)
  • Support different grid formats (Contributed by Kaspar Mösinger)
  • Encoding problems with KML import (Issue 120, Contribution from Bastian)
  • Translations to German, (partial) Finnish and default English (Thanks to Patrick)
  • …Plus tens of bug fixes and smaller features

Trail Explorer v1.11

Big thanks goes to all contributors and the “core” dev team as well.

You can download the latest binaries either from Google Code project page or from the Trail Explorer page, here. Report any bugs or ideas on the Google Group.

Drawing scalable numbers with J2ME

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One of the users suggested that Mobile Trail Explorer (MTE) should have a speedometer screen which shows current speed with large numbers so that it could be used as a normal speedometer while driving a bike. One of the challenges is that MTE runs on different devices and therefore on different screen resolutions. For example my Nokia N80 has a very large resolution of 352 x 416 while latest N series devices are usually running with 240 x 320 and older devices are using smaller 176 x 208 resolution.

Using the bitmap fonts would have been a solution but that would require us to store bitmaps for every resolution and that would eat up a lot of valuable memory. I have used bitmaps fonts on SubOthello game. I think that it suits really well for mobile games which are targeted and built separately for different devices.

Trail Explorer Speedometer

To solve this more generic way, I created a NumberArea class for, which This is used to draw an area into Canvas where numbers such as speed and distance are rendered with basic Graphic methods such as fillRect(…) and fillRoundRect(…). If you are interested you can take a look into a source code.

On a side note: We are now on feature freeze with MTE so that we can release the v1.11 within a week or so.

Thanks Atlassian

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It was a nice suprise to find Atlassian’s Codegeist T-shirt from my mailbox the other day. This year I was only able to code a small plugin for JIRA called NetBeans JIRA Plugin. I got the idea for this plugin as I was reading a book, Rich Client Programming, which has a great value when you are programming rich desktop apps or plugins for NetBeans platform.

Atlassian Codegeist T-Shirt

The plugin uses JIRA’s Web Service API to search, view and edit issues straight from the IDE. This is especially handy when you are writing a code to a specific issue and want to check some details or log work done for the issue.

The Atlassian Codegeist is a competition where everyone can write plugins for Atlassian products, such as JIRA, Bamboo, Confluence, FishEye, Crucible etc. I use those tools daily at work and I can truly say that they really improve the daily development process signifigantly.