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:

Download new version from here or use these shortcuts:

• http://bit.ly/twim-jar
• http://bit.ly/twim-jad

• Don’t crash when exported file already exists. Display readable error
• Don’t export new line characters in notes as it invalidates the CSV

I also added few improvements as well:

• Don’t add duplicate items when importing items from CSV
• Very simple touch screen support (not tested on any device)

I hope that you like the new version! You can download the v1.4 from here. For anyone interested in the source code you can browse or checkout the code from here.

My first experiences ten years ago with JavaScript were limited only to simple functions like page refreshing or trivial actions when user pressed link or button. In the recent years I’ve been using more advanced features of JavaScript like AJAX. Modern JavaScript frameworks like jQuery have really boosted up the productivity on the UI development.

As a developer you might have read a good advice from Pragmatic Programmer to learn a new language each year. I might say that JavaScript could be my language for 2009 even though I’ve been writing JavaScript nearly a decade.

Game of Othello

As a last JavaScript exercise of 2009 I crafted a small game of Othello by using only JavaScript and small chunks of HTML and CSS. It includes a decent AI opponent which uses minmax algorithm to find a good move. You can find the game here. Let me know if the computer AI can beat you :)

It was a great year of 2009. Looking forward on the new gadgets and technologies of 2010!

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!

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.

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! :)

Last week I miraculously had few spare hours here and there and I was able to improve this app a little based on feedback written on the application page and based on Ewan’s review. Today I’m able to release the version 1.2 of the Mobile Task Manager with the following new features:

• You can prioritize todo items (none, low, normal, high)
• Priority shown as flags (none, green, yellow, red)
• Priority can be changed from item view (left/right key)
• …or straight from item list with ‘0′ shortcut key
• You can sort items by name, done-status or priority
• Import items from text file or CSV file
• FIX: pressing ‘3′ causes the item below the one highlighted to open up for editing
• FIX: “Delete selected” will not delete the last entry on a folder
• FIX: pressing ‘9′ does not work for quick note editing

Unfortunately I had to rename the JAR file in this release as it previously contained the version number so you can’t update your existing instance. From now on I’m keeping the same name (MobileGtd.jar) so future releases are going to update the existing installation. You can download the binaries (JAR/JAD files) from here.

Mobile Task Manager is still open source so if you like to check out the code you can do so in here.

I also added few options that you can configure via settings view. You can set Twim to automatically load the home screen tweets when application is started and you can also turn on the auto-refresh option that will automatically load new tweets in every 5 minutes. If new tweets are found then phone vibrates and plays a small beep sound. With this feature you won’t miss a single tweet again :)

New settings view

Full release notes:

• TwitrPix support
• Cancel option to media menu
• Initial auto-refresh option with alarming of new tweets
• Option to automatically load tweets on startup
• Tab names changed: “Recent”>”Home”, “Friends”>”Following”
• Fix for non-latin characters when posting photos (thanks Lexa!)

Have fun with the new Twim and download it from here. If you like the source code you can see that in here. Twim is still free as a free beer.

In case you didn’t know: Twim is a mobile Twitter client. I’m twittering with username @tlaukkanen.

The scrolling is implemented with the pointerDragged event. We store the current location of the canvas to variables verticalLoc and horizontalLoc. When finger (pointer) is dragged then location is changed according to the dragged amount. Variables are used on paint method to draw the area so that it is scrolled that correctly. You can also see from the sample code how you can draw background with repeatable pattern image.

Here is a video of running this demonstration app in Nokia N97 SDK emulator: