tmro

Sun have released not too long ago a Java ME SDK 3.0 that finally brings an official Wireless Toolkit Emulator to the Mac platform.

I have been dealing with SUN software for a while now and I was not expecting this to be a smooth ride. Those who’d dealt with the WTK on Windows/Linux platform are well aware of the limitations of these emulators. What I was not prepared for was to get so much clutter that would just not work more than a couple of times.

First impression: this wtk looks like the most polished emulator ever released by Sun.

Sadly, after using the thing for a few days I discovered that the old habits had not changed:

• there is no menu entry to run an existing jad/jar pair. You have to right click on an emulator instance and then run it…
• you cannot set-up a project starting from a jad/jar pair. There used to be an option to do this back in wtk 2.2…
• after running a couple of apps the whole thing crashes an burns
• when closing down the wtk a process is left lingering. Run this in a terminal:  ps aux | grep device-manager.app
• switching the verbose mode when launching the emulator kills the whole thing dead!
• they bundled ant 1.7.1 with the distro although ant is built in Mac OS
• Permgen errors are thrown if you try to launch the app too often. LOL

Here’s what happened when I created a new project and tried to run it:

*** Error ***

Failed to connect to device 0!

Reason:

Emulator 0 terminated while waiting for it to register!

The same thing happens with Emulator 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 5 and 6 and … you get the picture.

Googling did return lots of forum posts, but hardly any answers…

So after wasting more than 2 hours on this issue I did the unthinkable: rebooted my mac! To my surprise the miracle happened during the reboot: I was finally able to run the project again.

Needless to say I am very disappointed but not surprised by the quality of this, early access, Java ME SDK.

Cheers…

Recently I have decided to put together a new website. I never really enjoyed putting together a website for myself. Somehow I always feel more inspired when I have to develop / assemble a website for someone else.

For this reason I decided to keep things simple so I embraced a WordPress template. After quite some time of using blogger (blogspot) I thought all blogging engines were the same. I was wrong. WordPress simply is better: nicer UI, more plugins, upload directory, editable database, and more. The New Post editor seems a little buggy (HTML tags seem to get lost when switching between WYSIWYG and HTML) but that’s a small price to pay considering the multimedia support and the plethora of configuration options.

I haven’t finished migrating everything yet, and I am still customizing the template but now you should be able to get a rough idea of what the website will look like. So please don’t hesitate to post/email your comments and feedback.

Cheers…