Comments on: Designing J2ME MIDP Navigation

By: Thomas Landspurg

Thomas Landspurg — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 12:22:04 +0000

Agree with the view… I liked the intial spirit of the LCDUI toolkit, and the good level of abstraction. However, most of the implementation failed to use this at their advantage: instead of mapping the Java UI component to phone UI components, they used the ugly Sun RI implementation, and that’s why most of the app looked so bad. This forced many developers to use alternate solution

Things are a little bit better now, but it’s probably too late….

By: Robert Virkus

Robert Virkus — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 12:45:32 +0000

You are of course right to critize this behavior of J2ME Polish, but please take into account that the current version has resolved this: http://www.j2mepolish.org/downloads/j2mepolish-1.3-beta4.jar

Now the menu is placed depending on vendor’s default settings, e.g. it is named “Menu” on Sony Ericsson and placed on the right side. However, some of our customers have disabled this, because they want to have a common UI (and only one manual) for all devices. Since we know whether the target device has a native “return” key (as most Sony Ericsson do have), we can also map any “back” command to that key. There are several more possible improvements in that area, but we are moving in the right direction, I guess.

Apart from that you have realized that you can use J2ME Polish with native commands as well. In that respect you have all the functionality and mappings like using only native widgets. So depending on the specific use case, that might also be an option.

All the best,
Robert

By: Barbara

Barbara — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 13:43:40 +0000

Absolutely.

By: C. Enrique Ortiz

C. Enrique Ortiz — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 06:28:57 +0000

“Sun recognized that at any given moment”

MIDP was developed by the JCP – many companies and individuals, not Sun alone…

ceo