Hartti Suomela's Blog

Java Mobile and Embedded Developer Days is only 6 weeks away... The event will be again held in Santa Clara, on January 21st and 22nd.

The agenda is now fixed and it seems to contain a number of highly interesting talks and looks like one of my proposals was accepted as well (to provide the other end of the spectrum of presentation quality :-)

I know what slides I am working on over the xmas break...

All Forum Nokia Web sites are down on Tuesday, November 25th between 5 am and 8 am GMT for site updates.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

My notes from the 20 tips and tricks session (attendance about 50 people) by Alessandro P (biskero), Darren O, Scott J, and Dale R.  I expect the slides to be available somewhere, sometime... as these notes are not always very clear :-)

• Make the app work first (before making it pretty) - remember to also add Exit button 
• Stay below 70% memory
• Remote Data and Flash Lite - remember data costs, name-value pairs are still powerful, remember getURL, 3gp for video and aac for audio, for FL 3 use flv, avoid using XML whenever possible for large amounts of data, SWX
• A challenge with Flash Lite and firmware updates, as there are differences between FL2 qand FL3 - WURFL (as you would need to know about which FL version you are running on)
• Optimize your loops - negative while-loops are fastest of all, avoid function calls in loop condition (instead run it once before loop if value does not change)
• Join the deprecation appreciation society - even though the some old FL1.1 functions are deprecated, they might still be faster than the new replacements from AS2
• Use the keypad on the phone for navigation (an remap your numeric keypad on the PC to "simulate" phone keypad, which is reversed, meaning 2 is up and not down... this means both device central and PC's Web browser)
• Test automation through Device Central- create a device set, and run the same test on all devices (you could also take a screenshot of every test run for examination)
• Remote on-device testing - leverage Nokia RDA and Mobile Complete by Device Anywhere
• Device profiling - test the devices with FPS monitors or use the Device Central profiling features
• Extending Flash Lite (will be available Adobe MAX) - possibilities: KuneriLite, Janus, Flyer, Sony-Ericsso's Capuchin, SWF2Go, there is also an article
• Business tip #1: Know where your content is going to end up,  regional differences, differences between manufacturers, etc.
• Business tip #2: Know the market - what kind of content is popular in your target markets?
• Business tip #3: Grab your customer in less than 60 seconds - spend time in making sure you get the customer to download your content, it has to stand out from the competition
• Business tip #4: Use Flash for its strengths
• Business tip #5: Becoming a mobile millionaire takes time

The Adobe MAX Keynote this morning was again very interesting with lots of cool guest presenters. Even the First Lady of California, Maria Shriver, was on the stage talking about the California Legacy Trails project. Other guests included representatives from New York Times, Salseforce.com, Disney Interactive, Google (Andy Rubin) etc. (BTW, the best quote of the keynote came from Salesforce.com representative, who started his talk describing how everyone sees enterprise applications pretty boring: "The enterprise software has been where innovation has gone to die."

I am not going to mention all the bits and pieces which were mentioned during the 2-hour event (as I am sure, there are multiple, minute-by-minute write-ups available on the net), but I'll pick a few highlights.

Project (RED) seems like a great initiative to help fighting AIDS in Africa.

Tour de Flex "is a desktop application for exploring Flex capabilities and resources, including the core Flex components, Adobe AIR and data integration, as well as a variety of third-party components, effects, skins, and more." Apparently there are more than 200 examples with code already...

Hot from the enginering oven: Flash 10 was shown playing in a couple of mobile devices (N85, Win Mobile, Android) inside browser. There was also a teaser note about iPhone, but nothing concrete yet.

As noted before, all Forum Nokia web sites will be unavailable this coming weekend (November 8th and 9th). We apologize for the inconvenience!

On another note, the performance fix I wrote about earlier was taken into use today for Discussion Boards as well. The statistics show significant performance improvement for people accessing the site especially outside Europe. And in my personal opinion, the discussion boards are really working faster for me here in U.S.

A colleague of mine just pointed me to the new Developing on S60 -blog ("new" is of course a relative term in here :-) on S60.com, where Aleksi Uotila from S60 Java team has written quite a few informative entries on S60 Java implementation. The latest one is about security prompting - a chronically hot topic on Forum Nokia discussions to say the least.

The good news is that there are improvements coming:

• A new kind of runtime security prompt which allows user to directly change the security setting for the application (pictured here)
• A set of security policy changes allowing user more control on the settings levels for untrusted and trusted 3rd party

The bad news is that the improvements will not be available on all existing S60 phones:

"The enhanced prompts will be added to upcoming 3rd edition FP 2 (and later) devices but we are seeking to get this enhancement also as a correction to some existing products via Nokia SW update."

Check also Aleksi's detailed posts on touch support for MIDlets on S60 5th Edition devices in the same blog...

As our servers are going to be physically moved to a new hosting center over the second weekend on November (November 8th-9th), the Forum Nokia web site will be unavailable over that weekend. So no discussion boards, wiki, blogs nor the main Forum Nokia Web site is going to be available on that Saturday and Sunday. The break will start on Saturday at 6am EEST and will be over on Sunday at 10pm EEST.

Yes, there is still a couple weeks until the service break, and most of you will forget this announcement by then, so we will remind you of this break also closer to that date :-)

We have been painfully aware of the fact that Forum Nokia online community sites (discussion boards, wiki and blogs) appear sluggish in certain markets. In Europe he situation is pretty good, but everywhere else the pages take long to download and render - the worst region in this respect being Asia.

Recently we (or more specifically the company maintaining these services for us - hats off to them) came up with a mechanism to speed up the sites considerably (basically we are starting to serve most of or static content including JavaScript scripts using distribution networks). Today we took that solution in to use for Wiki. Blogs have been using this solution already for a while and discussion boards are next in line to go through this transformation.

If you are based in Europe, there is not probably much difference in Wiki performance. But people in other continents and regions should really see an improvement in the Wiki rendering speed. Do you?

It has been again a few months since my last post. A few months? Really??? (Time flies, I have to agree...)

Anyhow, it has been even longer, way longer, since I did anything on the Web development side. My old pet project (national team statistics for Ultimate Frisbee... maybe more about that in a later post) has been suffering with crappy coding (naturally by yours truly) for years, and especially there has been no data updates for about 2 years (even though there has been quite a few games played within that period).

Last week I finally got some statistics updated online, and this week I started tinkering with my old code (undocumented of course... painful...). My first task was to find a way to sort HTML tables with JavaScript, so the users do not always need to wait for sorted data retireval from the server. The first script I bumped into was sorttable by Stuart Langridge. With this nifty script it was extremly easy to change the tables to use JavaScript based sorting: I just included the JavaScript code on the pages and added class="sortable" attribute in my HTML tables. (Ok. Ok. I also removed the old sorting links from the table header row and added some style definitions in the site's css-file, but that's it). Lo and behold, the table sorting worked. Very powerful and easy!

Unfortunately for me, the script lacked one important feature. It turned out to be impossible to create a header column for the data rows, which would not be sorted (row headers / row numbering). And off I went for some more googling.

After a few disappointments, I finally found a useful JavaScript library which solved my problem: Google Visualization API. Man, that API is powerful. It provided a very good solution for me for my table sorting problem (although it means a little more work for me, as I am forced to some more coding to change my direct HTML table code to use the JavaScript-based tables that the API uses), but it also contains very cool visualization tools (check for example Motion Chart and Annotated Time Line in the Gallery). Sure, I have not yet checked the licencing rights, which are likely a little stricter that what sorttable has, but I do not think this will cause any problems for my hobby project. And no, I have not yet taken this into use - that's the task for tomorrow I guess :-)

This is sort of old news, but I realized I have not written about this before... Tira Wirless has a free version of its modd mobile device database available on the net (there is also for-fee Standard and Enterprise Editions). The database covers quite a nice number of manufacturers and handsets (did not see any major player missing from there, that's for sure...)

You need to register to Tira Go Mobile Community to be able to access the database, which contains information about the devices as well as the Java implementations. The free version lists basic form factor information, Java API support and general Java VM stuff (JAR size, heap, RMS, performance index, etc.)

The for-fee standard edition adds many, many more bits of information: system properties, browser & WAP characteristics, protocol support, Java system event behavior, key codes and other detailed Java API information. It might be worthwhile for Java-developers to check this out...

Last week Nokia announced four new Series 40 devices:

• Supernova 7210
• Supernova 7310
• Supernova 7510
• Supernova 7610

After Bill Perry from Adobe asked me about the details of the new 7210 and 7610 devices, I realized that our devices specs are missing that information. As I do not know exactly when that information is going to be inserted on our site (this week is a "holiday" week after all) I thought I need to chip in with some facts before also biskero starts harrassing me...

Both 7210 and 7610 are Series 40 5th Edition FP1 devices (which means that for Java specs, check the table in here) and they have Flash Lite 3.0. As I am not as used to dig out this information as a couple of my colleagues, I cannot guarantee the facts, but I am pretty sure I got this right.

Unless I am totally mistaken, one of our Forum Nokia Champions, Mika Raento, has just won the award for the best doctoral thesis/dissertation in computer science for 2007 in Finland from the Finnish Information Processing Association (strictly speaking, I guess the award is granted by a research foundation, which is part of FIPA). His dissertation was titled "Exploring privacy for ubiquitous computing: Tools, methods and experiments".

Here is a link to a news short in English and here a longer news article in Finnish.

Congrats, Mika!

They should. At least my browsing experience got much better a couple hours ago as we got a software update for the servers especially targeted for improving the performance of the services. (and yes, and there was some login issues yesterday on Forum Nokia platform in general which slowed things down even more)

Feel free to complain if you do not see any improvement in the response times (in that case please tell your browser and approximate location - like country - as well)