LWUIT for Series 40 out of beta

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Great news for those of you wanting to deliver superior UIs in your Series 40 apps— Lightweight UI Toolkit (LWUIT) for Series 40 has graduated from beta to a full initial release.

LWUIT is an open source Java ME toolkit that supports a comprehensive range of visual UI components, and other user interface elements such as theming, transitions, and animation among others. It helps you create applications with appealing UIs that closely follow the native Series 40 UIs. It also helps speed up development by significantly reducing the need to create custom UI components, which might be needed when creating an app’s UI using LCDUI. LWUIT for Series 40 can be used in combination with selected Nokia UI APIs and all the JSR APIs available on the platform.

Since the last LWUIT for Series 40 release made available in the Nokia SDK 2.0 for Java, development of the toolkit has been continuing at a rapid pace. A number of new APIs have been introduced, including PopUpChoiceGroup, ContextMenu, NokiaListCellRenderer, theme selection, and full-screen mode. There have also been significant improvements in performance, particularly in lists, themes loading, and HTMLComponent. Compatibility with the native full-touch UI has been fine-tuned and many bugs fixed, particularly in command handling and text input.

Lightweight UI Toolkit image 2 Lightweight UI Toolkit image 1
PopupChoiceGroup and ContextMenu

The toolkit also includes all the new examples created since the last release. These include code examples that provide demonstrations of the Category bar, gestures, and lists. There are also new application examples for birthdays, showing use of the calendar component and PIM API; a slide puzzle; tourist attractions, showing the use of HERE maps and in-app purchasing APIs; and a Reddit client showing the use of a custom theme and JSON. In addition, updated version of two of the original LWUIT examples applications, LWUITDemo and LWUITBrowser, are also included.

The final component in the full release of LWUIT for Series 40 is the inclusion of comprehensive documentation in the toolkit. This is based on the LWUIT Developer’s Library, a library consisting of:

  • Developer’s Guide, which is based on the original LWUIT Developer Guide and provides technical information about using the LWUIT components
  • LWUIT UX overview, which is a new section providing a guide to designing app UIs with LWUIT for Series 40 components

If you have the Nokia SDK 2.0 for Java installed, you will receive an automatic notification of the availability of LWUIT for Series 40 1.0. You can then simply follow the instructions to install the update. If you are using LWUIT with the Nokia SDK 1.1 for Java, you can download the update from LWUIT for Series 40 project.

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