Category Archives: MIDlet

Twim 1.18 – Countdown to Twitter’s OAuth Switch

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Twitter is going to disable the basic authentication method from their API. This means that the old versions of Twim will stop working. Most likely there are quite a few client apps out there which will stop working when that happens. Check the countdown site for remaining days: countdowntooauth.com

In the future Twitter will support OAuth authentication and luckily there is also xAuth support too which is simplified version of OAuth. xAuth works great for non-desktop apps like Twim. I just implemented xAuth support to Twim.

When you post a new status from Twim you’ll see that the status was posted from TwimGo app. This is because there was already another app register with Twim name. I might do a MeeGo version of the app so then the new name matches the platform well :)

This version also has support for Twitter Lists.

You can download the latest version of Twim from these links:

Twim with Posterous and Themes Support

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I’ve been coding few new features to Twim like Posterous integration. Now you can post your photos to Posterous and it publishes the status with link on your Twitter feed. Check out for example my Posterous site so you’ll see how easy it is to create awesome looking blog with their service.

New version also includes small themes feature so you can select from three themes: Default, Gray and Night. Gray theme is more traditional list style view to your Twitter feeds as shown here:

IMG_6929

Download new version from here or use these shortcuts:

Babel Fish for Twitter – New Twim Release

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Google Translator is a great translator tool which has a very simple AJAX API that can be easily used from mobile apps. Compared to other translator tools it has one feature which other services don’t have, the auto detection of language.

The API is really easy to use. All you need to do is to pass three parameters to the API call:

  1. Version, v=1.0
  2. Translated text, q=Hei maailma!
  3. Language pair (if source is empty then language is automatically identified), langpair=|en

In the end you end up with the following URL:

http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/language/translate?v=1.0&langpair=|en&q=Hei+maailma!

And if you click the link you’ll see that it returns the translated text in JSON format which is pretty easy to parse.

{ "responseData": {
"translatedText":"Hello world!",
"detectedSourceLanguage":"fi" },
"responseDetails": null,
"responseStatus": 200}

This made it pretty easy to integrate the API call to Twim. So now in Twim 1.6 you can select a tweet from status list and select “Translate to English” from status menu and Twim will display the translation to you in seconds. Pretty handy if you are following people from other countries in Twitter. Go ahead and download the latest Twim to your mobile phone from here.

…and by the way, new feature also has the “paging” feature for home screen and search results as a bonus! Happy Twittering!

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LWUIT 1.1 for Java ME Developers

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One of the problems with Java ME applications containing more advanced UI components have been that it is really painful to have it rendered consistently across different platforms and devices. I’ve used to implement my own set of practices on displaying lists of tweets in Twim or todo lists in Mobile Task Manager. Now I came across a nice looking UI library for Java ME called LWUIT.

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LWUIT supports such nice things like theming, transitions and animation. It also includes new UI components like TabbedPane and Dialogs.

I just got a new book to review, LWUIT 1.1 for Java ME Developers, written by Biswajit Sarkar. If you think that LWUIT could scratch your itch then I’d recommend on having this book on your desk as it works pretty nicely as a reference as well as good introduction to the whole library.

Book contains lots of emulator screenshots which help to understand the concepts very well. This combined with lots of sample code makes it really easy to learn all features of LWUIT library. Only one oddity is that it’s referencing to Sprint SDK where it could as well be the Sun’s original WTK but that doesn’t really have any affect on code samples.

Book’s first chapter is a good introduction to the library. The following chapters explain the default components and then there is one chapter on how to create a custom component. Last chapters dig into resources, LWUIT designer, themes, animations and transitions, painters, effects and logging. The index is also very complete which makes the book work well as a good resource in the bookshelf even after the first reading.

Check out the publisher site for more information about the book.

New Release, Mobile Task Manager v1.3

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I just uploaded the latest binaries (JAR and JAD) of Mobile Task Manager to Google Code download page. The previous version (v1.2) was already downloaded over 1700 times in less then a month so there seems to be a need for a good GTD / Task Manager application :)

This version fixes the issues with the export and import. Now you can export data to CSV file correctly and you can import that file either to root folder or to the folder that is currently selected.

This version also improves the startup time significantly. Application is ready to use in about three seconds after the launch on my Nokia E71.

Have fun while Getting Things Done with the Mobile Task Manager! :)