Daniel Rocha's Forum Nokia Blog - Want a sexy UI in your Java MIDlet? It's now possible with LWTUI! (with video)

hello

tahco — 2008-10-11T11:52:36Z

i whant theme creator for make theme n95
thanks.

Re: Want a sexy UI in your Java MIDlet? It's now possible with LWTUI! (with video)

Larry101 — 2008-06-02T11:59:10Z

Just came across this by accident and can't believe I haven't noticed it before. JavaMe has been crying out for something like this for ages. I've just spent ages writing Canvas code and my own components to get a decent looking UI and it was a painful experience. Memory usage looks pretty good on the demo (between 2 and 3 MB it seems). It seems to hand the CPU a bit of a beating though. And I especially like the fonts and transitions. Pity about the speed. Would be interested to see how it performs in a slightly less ambitious example.

bbeaulant — 2008-05-20T06:05:07Z

I'm happy to see this excitement arround JavaMe UI toolkits. I recently post my own UI toolkit based on XML and CSS approach : Kuix (http://www.kalmeo.org/projects/kuix) and it could be very interesting for the community to be able to choose the toolkit according to its needs.

I took a look at the demo, and it seems to be promising, but very slow at the moment event on the wtk emulator. The part I'd prefer are the 3D transitions.

WebSeed — 2008-05-16T08:18:02Z

I've just tried LWUIT. Lots of promise, but too slow on S60 to be useful at the moment. If this can be sorted out, I'll definitely look to use it in the future. As for 3D cube transitions etc. (using M3G) this seems a bit gimmicky in my opinion - would prefer to see basic functionality speeded up. Whenever I see an interesting feature my first thoughts turn to how this is going to break compatility with certain phone platforms etc.

@matbal: Yes, I've tried Polish in the past and even used it for one or two projects and yes, you're right, it uses CSS to define look and feel. However, there seemed to be some implementation problems with the platform - for instance, I could crash my phone using the example applications by rapidly going to/from certain screens. I kind of felt like too much emphasis was placed on the development of new stuff, whilst the base functionality was still slightly buggy (I've not tried it within last 6 months so might be better now).

matbal — 2008-05-16T07:38:37Z

Thanks for pointing out LWUIT!

@WebSeed: Did you already try the mentioned J2ME Polish? It uses CSS for defining layouts and formats.

@mapesteguia: Unfortunately, I'm quite sure that there's no way to modify system menus using J2ME.

mapesteguia — 2008-05-15T19:40:07Z

Hi Daniel, we have a demo project running on j2me polish and we'll try to switch it to LWUIT, however my question is more basic. Is there any way using J2ME to "customize" menues for s40 platform devices? this means to add options for instance in the address book in order to have the ability to lauch a middlet from it?. Imagine an http chat app. developed in a middlet that can be launched directly from the address book of an s40 device adding an extra option in the menu bar.

Thanks in advance. Martín.

LWUIT Supported Devices

vprise — 2008-05-15T17:38:55Z

Hi Daniel,
thanks for the great writeup and video ;-)

A few points raised in your comments article:
1. Its LWUIT = Lightweight UI Toolkit not LWTUI.

2. We don't require JSR 184, this is purely for the 3D transitions. The LWUITDemo works on MIDP 2.0 CLDC 1.1 devices and if 184 is unsupported the transition options for 3D won't appear.

3. We had success with reasonable devices from Motorola, Nokia, SE etc. Blackberry is currently broken but will get fixed in the next drop. Some Samsung, LG, WinMo etc. devices work with odd performance.

4. For some reason S60 devices are slower than they should be (even slower than S40 devices for some tasks). We are investigating the S60 performance issues and hope to resolve them soon.

5. We have a CSS like themeing engine that allows you to download a theme OTA and install it on the fly. We supply a designer oriented tool that allows your UI developers to customize the look and feel of your application.

The library will be open source this summer, please feel free to ask questions and join the mailing list in our java.net project.

Thanks.
Shai.

WebSeed — 2008-05-15T14:22:31Z

Thanks for this info Daniel. J2ME had been crying out for a decent UI library. Native UI components are very poor and feature-poor. Other libraries I've tried invariably suffer from fragmentation issues, or they concentrate on gimmicky eye candy rather than building a solid GUI foundation.

I actually really like the approach taken by WidSets whereby you can define the look of the UI components using CSS - just wish it was a available also as a 3rd party library for J2ME developers.

Anyway, will try LWUIT out now...

All with JSR 184

dcrocha — 2008-05-15T13:38:34Z

Hi Njzk2, I didn't see a table of supported devices either, but as they say "cross-device" and the library is pure Java, I assume it runs on every device, which is great. I for example tested with success in N95, E61i, E61, 6131 (!) and many others, be them S40 or S60. How great is that?

supported devices ?

njzk2 — 2008-05-15T08:44:51Z

Hi Daniel, thanks for the tip.
Do you have infos on the supported devices, i couldn't find specific informations on the site ?