Wednesday, January 06, 2010

New Antenna release

Today I released version 1.2.1 of Antenna. The new version includes both bug fixes and new features.

I made a mistake in the 1.2.0 release, which leads to a Null Pointer Exception if the Wireless Toolkit can not be detected. Antenna can detect a lot of toolkit's, but not all, so this has given users some poblems. A patch has been in the repository for a whil, but now it is in a release also.

When the 1.2.0 release was made, ther was no Java ME SDK for Mac available, but now there is. Unfortunately the file we used in 1.2.0 to detect Java ME SDK 3.0 is not included in the Mac version, so toolkit detection fails. This is fixed in the 1.2.1 release, which should work with Java ME SDK for Mac ( I haven't tested it myself, since I don't have a mac).

The realease also includes som contributed patches:
- obfusactor arguments can now be passed to WtkPackage
- Key stor type can be set in WtkSign
- WtkRapc can build libraries

More info on antenna and the release is available here.

Friday, January 01, 2010

Supporting BlackBerry touch devices

Our BlackBerry application is built using BlackBerry software version 4.5. Unfortunately this means that we can not handle touch events, since they are only supported from version 4.7. Since most of our users have 4.5 or 4.6 this is not an option. Up til now the application has had very limited functionality on touch devices like BlackBerry Storm, running in the so called *compatibility mode' with the virtual keyboard displayed all the time and only about half the screen available for our application.

But now we have made a few changes:
We upgraded the Storm device software (to version 4.7.0.181). This solved the problem with the virtual keyboard, which now can be displayed only when needed.

We revised our application. The main problem is our custom object, which did not work well. This seems to be because the navigationMovement method is not called on a touch device. Since we had some application logic in this method in our custom object, it did not work well. The solution was to move the code to the moveFocus mthod, which is called both on touch and keyborad devices.

In the long run we probably will have to provide different installations for users with 4.5/4.6 or 4.7 software version. Still we do not support more advanced touch screen usage.