Don’s Mobile Blog

I’ve added a new category for camera phone pictures. This is where I will post humorous or interesting pictures I’ve taken with my camera phone. More will be added as I acquire them. These were all taken using a Sanyo PM-8200.

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Vendor-specific APIs are useful when you need to take advantage of functionality not available in the core MIDP APIs, and you don’t mind locking your application into a single platform. I happen to have a Sprint cell phone, so we will use this as our vendor-specific example in this tutorial. First, we will learn how to use the Sprint Wireless Toolkit 3.0 platform and emulators in NetBeans IDE. Then, we will then use the Sprint MIDP 1.0 Extensions to create a MIDlet that plays sound on a Sprint PCS cell phone with only MIDP 1.0 support and no MMAPI support.

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Any MIDlet, in order to be useful, will need to accept some form of input from the user. In this article, we will look at a common form of input for MIDlets, commands. We’ll also create a sample MIDlet that responds to the corresponding events.

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In this tutorial we will look at using threads in a Java MIDlet. We will create a run() method that implements some simple background logic, create a thread for that logic, and control the thread in the life cycle methods of the MIDlet.

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An updated version of Simple Game Map Editor was released today. Simple Game Map Editor is a cross-platform desktop application for editing tile map data, specifically written with game programming in mind. It includes an easy-to-use extension API which can be used to generate map data for your Java ME games. This is the tool that was used to generate the maps for Sinfah’s Lair. For more information, visit the Simple Game Map Editor home page.

MIDlets are intended to run on devices with limited memory and relatively slow wireless internet connections. Therefore, it is important that your MIDlet be as small as possible. Keeping your MIDlet small will help conserve space on the device, and reduce the time it takes to download your application. We will look at several means of reducing MIDlet size, including image optimization, code obfuscation, and custom data compression techniques.

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