Archive for April, 2012

Create your own device simulator skin using Gimp

Codename One has made it super easy to create your own device simulator, and I’ll demonstrate here using Gimp, the popular Open Source image editing software.

Creating a Device Simulator Skin for a QWERTY Symbian Device

Read more…

Finding device key codes

Just a quick post to demonstrate listening for key presses on a physical device and determining the keycode generated by that keypress. This is a non-GUI Builder app, and will display the keycode values to the screen when keys are pressed, released, and long-pressed. It will also display gamefire key values.  When running the app, to enable the exit button, press the game fire button to go to passthrough mode, then press it again to go back to monitor mode. Read more…

Zerg Rush

Google it.  <end of entry>

Gadget Review: Blackberry Bold 9790

About a month ago, I had a nice surprise call from my wireless service provider (Rogers Communications). They offered me a free, no questions asked, no commitments, BlackBerry Bold 9790 smartphone. Of course I accepted it, and I’ll give it a quick review here. I should make note that I am unable to give the phone a complete review from the software side, because of limitations set by my service provider (they couldn’t enable the BlackBerry service along with my current 6G data plan, I’m not sure why). That said, I am able to utilize the majority of the phone’s features, which I’ll try to focus on here. Read more…

Re-Tweet, Tweet – OAuth1 and Twitter API – another enhancement to the Infinite List demo

The newly introduced Vase project contains full OAuth1 support for authentication and authorization in Java/J2ME.

The primary motivation for adding this feature was to provide Sign In With Twitter support to my apps, but it can do much more than that.  For example, you can now add a Share on Twitter button to your app, or access the services of any of these OAuth1 service providers: Read more…

Introducing Vase API 1.0

I’ve decided to maintain a project intended to supplement Codename One, which I’ve named Vase API (Value Added SErvices).  The project will contain code that I feel would be useful to many Codename One based projects, but not necessarily suitable for contributing to Codename One itself.

• Any code included in Vase will either be licensed under GPLv2 with Classpath Exception, or a will have a compatible license (ie Bouncy Castle license).
• Any code I produce that is more suitable to be included in Codename One, I will contribute the code there instead first, and if not accepted, will move it to Vase.
• As Codename One evolves, any reduntant functionality found in Vase will be removed.

At the time of this writing, Vase includes sorting/searching utilities, Form State handling utilities, OAuth1 and Twitter API support, and some component adaptations.  As new code is added, I’ll try to document use cases here on the blog. Read more…

Sharing code between Codename One projects

At the time of this writing, Codename One does not support third party libraries.  This is a limitation that will be resolved in the near future.  In the meantime, I’ll like to present a strategy for sharing code between multiple Codename One based projects without having to copy code all over the place.  The significance of the method presented here is that it will work when sending builds to the build server as well (where simply linking projects through the project properties as presented in a previous blog post will only work on the simulator). Read more…

Brother Laser Printer – how to override “Toner Life End” shutdown

I’ve had a lot of success with Brother Laser printers over the years, and the HL-2170W has performed reliably over the last year, but suddenly stopped printing abruptly, with the Toner light solidly on.  I logged into the built-in print server (enter the printers IP address in your browser, default login is: admin/access), and a message of Toner Life End is displayed on main screen and maintenance Read more…

Tweet, Tweet

I’m adding some social functions to one of my projects, and just wanted to show off some progress in this post. I will document the code later.  In short, I used Bouncy Castle to help with an oauth1 authorization flow in Codename One, adding ‘Sign In with Twitter’ to the app.  (Twitter is hugely popular in the sport of MMA.  Facebook is not so much).

Multi-Select List Box

I saw a posting on the Codename One Discussion Group today, asking how to implement a Multi-Select List Box.  Shai responded to the post promptly, as always, and I thought it was a good topic for a blog post, so here goes.

The key points for the Multi-Select List Box implementation are:

• List Renderer, renders checkboxes on each list item.  In this demo, we’ll use the GUI builder to create our renderer and assign it to a standard List component.  Codename One will automatically assign a GenericListCellRenderer to the list.
• List Model, keeps track of the selection state of each list item.  In this demo, we’ll internally use a vector to store the selection states.  Each element of the vector is a Hashtable.  The GenericListCellRenderer understands this structure, and will  automatically set the selection state of the Checkbox components during initialization.
• List Action Event, we don’t need to handle this, because the GenericListCellRenderer automatically installs an ActionListener to the List , which updates the model with the new state of the Checkbox when clicked. Read more…