JSR 226 Demos

I gave a speech at JAX this year (on the mobility track) regarding JSR 226 and the usage of SVG for the UI of mobile applications. I think that SVG is still a bit underastimated at all. The scalability features of SVG are very useful especially on the various screen sizes on mobile devices.
To show the audience the features of SVG on pratical use cases, I created some demos which I'd like to show you here. Static images can't replace the animations of course, but it should give you an idea what SVG can do for you ;) I should mention that the SVG artwort was created by our graphics team, I'm just doing the java piece :)

Java on iPhone

It looks like some guys really make progress on this.
JamVM is already available as posted here and here.
SUN announced to port it, and it looks like the guys from the phoneME team has taken this challenge and ported phoneME advanced (CDC) to it.
Cool guys, go ahead, the iPhone is definetly the coolest hardware platform you can run on currently!

Opera Mini 4.1 beta

...is out and it has pretty cool new features. My favourite is the graphical text-input of URLs including auto-completion and suggests. Very nice. Also the "save page" function is cool for saving time-shedules of trains or something like that. Good job opera!
Go to
http://mini.opera.com/beta/
for download!

How accurate is Google's My Location?

I've done some tests (with the help of some colleagues) with the My Location service of Google mobile maps. We know that the service works based on cell-id, means that there is cell-id database at google which maps the cell-ids back to coordinates. Question is: How accurate is the database? To answer that, we did some measurements in the 2.5 G network in germany.
We just compared our current location (via GPS) with the result of the My Location service and calculated the distance. We did 132 measures.

Here's the result as a graph:



To summarize, My Location is 707 meters inaccurate on average.
80% of the measures are less then 1075 meters accurate.

So this is (of course) far away from GPS based LBS, and it depends on the use-case of a service if this is sufficient.

on my run yesterday...

... I took this picture. I wish my mobile would have a better camera, the quality is really disgusting...

Android on Mobile Monday

I joined the android part of the mobile monday in munich this week.

Nothing really suprising happened there, but I collected some facts from the Q/A which might be interesting for you.

• A new SDK is on the way with a complete new User Interface
• The first mobile will have a H-VGA display
• The D-BUS system will be kicked out in final release
• Applications will only be self-signed by the developer
• Minimal hardware requirements for an android platform:
• 200 Mhz ARM 9
• 64 MB RAM
• SD-Card
• QVGA or bigger
• WIFI/bluetooth

JavaFX Mobile on DevDays

Unfortunately I'm not able to join the first Java Mobile & Embedded Developer Days in Santa Clara but I decided to watch the live stream of the session "Developing Applications for JavaFX Mobile" to find out a little bit more about Sun's mobile operating system.
First of all: The live stream worked really good, and there's also a chat attached to the session you're watching where you can ask questions. I took the chance to dig a bit deeper into the Web-side of the story and asked for SVG and Java PlugIn support of the WebKit based browser. Unfortunately Sun is not implementing this in their first release.... too bad. I'm wondering why they are putting so much effort on their new Java Plugin of the update N release if they don't put it into their mobile platform...
Anyway, the whole JavaFX Mobile operating system is clear competitor for android with the huge advantage that Sun is able to run 100% pure Java SE on it.
Check out the slides of that session, it's really worth it.