I decided that it was time to upgrade my mobile phone a couple of days ago and went for one of the new Nokia 6600 smartphones. I've been holding back on buying one of these because they've been expensive on my current network provider and I thought that I would find it too bulky. Thankfully this isn't the case. This is my first experience with the Symbian platform and it's got to be said that this is one cool device.

I must admit that I've never been a great fan of mobile phones with integrated PDA facilities but my experiences over the past couple of days have changed all that. So, why did I buy a Nokia 6600?

Well, first of all I've been after a camera-phone for a while now because there's been a few occasions when I've thought to myself, "I wish I had a camera on me". Sure, the quality isn't going to win any photography awards but the VGA output is certainly good enough for posting to websites, like a blog for example. In addition to photos, the Nokia 6600 also allows you to record short video clips. Not sure I'm going to use this to be honest, particularly since you can't do that much with a 10 second clip. More importantly though, the phone is GPRS and Bluetooth compatible - useful for several reasons, especially since I have Bluetooth support in my Apple PowerBook.

• I can surf the Internet from my phone with Opera for Smartphones
• I can check my e-mail on the move
• I can send files between my phone and my Mac
• I can sync up my contacts between my phone and my Mac using iSync
• I can use the phone as a modem, surfing the web from my Mac

Having my contacts synced up between devices is very neat. You do get a whole load of software with the phone for managing your contacts but it's for Windows only. I do have a Windows box but I don't use it often enough to want my contact data on there. Thankfully this is all supported out-of-the-box with Apple's iSync via Bluetooth. My phone did crash the first time I tried to sync but it's behaved itself ever since. After a bit of playing around, I now have a replicated list of contacts containing addresses, e-mail addresses and phone numbers. At last - no more maintaining different lists!

Being able to dial-up to the Internet from my Mac via Bluetooth is amazing though. It's actually not that slow and you only pay for the bandwidth that you use. I was chatting to a friend on iChat the other night on the train - how cool is that!

The final thing is that the phone supports J2ME so I no longer have an excuse to not learn about it, particularly since I can transfer files from my Mac to the phone via Bluetooth. Shame most of the J2ME development tools are Windows only. Speaking of apps (Russell has a great list of apps here), I have got to get a copy of PhotoBlog for Series 60. I have no excuses not to implement the Atom API in Pebble now.

Responses[38]

Posted by Simon Brown on 27 February 2004 23:59:20 GMT #

My review of Developing J2EE Applications with Websphere Studio has now been published over at JavaRanch.

As I said in my review, if you're new to WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Studio then this book is worth hunting down because there's some really useful information in there. My only real criticism is that I would have liked to see more information about how to use WSAD for day to day development. We're using WSAD on my current project and there's a stack of stuff that we've had to learn the hard way or via an IBM consultant. A good example would be the use of Team Project Sets to make it easier to import all your projects/modules/components into the WSAD workspace in one go. Still, this book makes up for some very detailed information on J2EE packaging, performance profiling, etc which is why I gave it 8 out of 10.

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Posted by Simon Brown on 27 February 2004 23:00:38 GMT #

Now that the Pebble 1.4 release is done and dusted, I have some time to look at adding all that other stuff I wanted to do. First up is an implementation of the Atom syndication format which can be found here.

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Posted by Simon Brown on 24 February 2004 21:50:02 GMT #

Sam Dalton and I are running a JSIG session about Java development on Mac OS X next month...

Java Development on Mac OS X
The Mac OS X platform is gaining ground with developers because of its stable UNIX based architecture, easy to use UI and integrated Java runtime. This session discusses experiences of Java/J2EE development on Mac OS X, talking about the advantages and disadvantages of adopting the platform. The session also demonstrates some of the open source and commercial development tools that the speakers use on a regular basis, discussing any "gotchas" that have been encountered along with way. If you've never seen a Mac or are thinking of buying one then this session is for you.

The session is taking place on the 26th of March in Sun's offices near London Bridge, between 12 and 2pm. Full details (including how to sign up) can be found on the JSIG website. As the abstract implies, it's a good opportunity to see what Mac OS X looks like if you've not seen it before. Besides, it's also a good excuse for us to demo our shiny Macs. ;-)

Read more...

It's taken a while but Pebble 1.4 is finally available. If you're upgrading from Pebble 1.3 then there are a lot of new features that you can take advantage of. Highlights include...

• TrackBack support
• Multi-user blogs
• Easier installation and configuration
• A user guide!

Version 1.3 was released 5 months ago and it's been an interesting learning experience for me. Shortly after releasing 1.3, I started cleaning up the web administration interface and made Pebble easier to install. This was going to become version 1.3.1 but before I knew it I was refactoring a whole bunch of core code and the corresponding unit tests. Next came some requests for multi-user support and before I knew it several months had gone by.

Although the outcome is great, in retrospect I really wish that I had kept the release cycle short and delivered smaller incremental upgrades. Getting JIRA installed has certainly been a great help because I had previously been "managing" feature requests and issues by e-mail. JIRA has helped me focus on what I need to do to get the release out.

Anyway, back to Pebble 1.4 ... you can get it from here. If you are looking for a Java/JSP based blogging app then take a look and have Pebble running in less than 5 minutes or your money back! If Pebble isn't quite what you're after then don't forget there are alternatives that are also written in Java. Feedback is always welcomed - have fun!

Responses[4]

Posted by Simon Brown on 22 February 2004 13:37:26 GMT #

Been a bit slack in getting these up on my blog because it's been a busy week in one way or another. Anyway, here's a selection...

Remember ... be safe, be seen.

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Posted by Simon Brown on 20 February 2004 11:22:56 GMT #

The title says it all really so here are a couple of links.

• Meetup details
• Books I'm bringing along

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Posted by Simon Brown on 16 February 2004 09:24:11 GMT #

Version 1.4 beta 3 of Pebble has been uploaded to the SourceForge servers and you can get get it here if you're interested. The changes are as follows.

• Removed <pebble:getProperty> tag - use <c:out value="${pebbleProperties.propertyName}"/> instead.
• Modified look and feel slightly, particularly on the admin interface.
• PEB-10 : Create/Edit blog entry window opens too small
• PEB-11 : URL lacking ending slash causes exception
• PEB-21 : Use a textarea for specifying websites to ping via XML-RPC
• PEB-22 : Build error from CVS
• PEB-23 : All instances of ./ in a blog entry are replaced in the RSS feed
• PEB-24 : template.jsp

Thanks once again to everybody raising issues on the JIRA instance. Expect a final 1.4 release as soon as I update the user guide.

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Posted by Simon Brown on 15 February 2004 20:42:26 GMT #

Okay, so I may not be not American but it seems that John and Joe are both going for President. How do I know? Well I keep getting referer spammed from their websites. Great. Thanks for that - clearly the act of canvassing voters has taken on a whole new approach in cyberspace. Shame on you both.

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Posted by Simon Brown on 12 February 2004 23:20:29 GMT #

If you're running IntelliJ IDEA on Mac OS X then you may already know this, but there is a way to tell IDEA to put its menu items in the menubar at the very top of the screen. To do this, find your IDEA installation and look in the bin directory. Next, Ctrl-Click on the IDEA application and choose "Show Package Contents" from the popup menu. Open up the Info.plist file in the Contents directory and append the following text to the Root/Java/VMOptions element.

    -Dapple.laf.useScreenMenuBar=true

A neat little tip that I picked up for gaining a few pixels real-estate. Incidently, you can also use this in your own Swing apps.

Responses[1]

Posted by Simon Brown on 10 February 2004 22:52:22 GMT #

In response to a comment left about an earlier blog entry, I discovered how to start up a JSP container on port 80. Just run the startup command (such as ./httpd.sh for Resin) under a sudo.

    sudo ./httpd.sh

Also, don't forget to shutdown your Apache server (aka Personal Web Sharing) in System Preferences... -> Sharing if you get port binding errors. Not revolutionary, but I'm sure that this will help out somebody at sometime.

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Posted by Simon Brown on 10 February 2004 21:37:34 GMT #

It looks like Jeremy is trying to relive his childhood at the next London Java Meetup (16th February) by organising a Java Book Swap Shop! I've been meaning to have a clearout for a while and after a quick look through some boxes (I moved house before Christmas) I've found the following that I'm prepared to swap for other books or, failing that, for beer.

If I find any more I'll let you know, but if you're planning on coming along and would like any of these books, just leave a comment stating what you've got to swap.

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Posted by Simon Brown on 09 February 2004 22:13:32 GMT #

I downloaded the latest version of Pebble today in order to set up an internal blog for news on my current project. Less than 5 minutes and I was up and running ... extract the WAR file and drop it under $TOMCAT_HOME/webapps/, edit the web.xml file and add a user to the Tomcat configuration. Your blogging software is that easy to setup too, right? ;-)

Responses[18]

Posted by Simon Brown on 09 February 2004 19:35:08 GMT #

An interesting thread started up on JavaRanch about the new Java 1.4.2 update for Mac OS X. I'll let you read it for yourself, but essentially I never realised that there is an additional Java developer package that you can download from the Apple Developer Connection (login required).

It's a 50Mb download and contains Javadocs, examples and additional tools. Notice from the screenshot what the prerequisites for this install are and what this install adds. I'm not sure that there are any further tools supplied (but I've not stopped looking and besides, the Java distributions contain javac anyway), but there is tons of documentation, including the Java 1.4.2 API. There's also loads of other stuff kicking around underneath /Developer that I've not looked at before. Anybody found the extra tools yet?

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Posted by Simon Brown on 06 February 2004 22:19:38 GMT #

I had a sample of the iKlear cleaning cloths kicking around and after owning a PowerBook for over 6 months, decided that it was about time to clean the screen. These things are great (recommended by Apple) and I wish I had done it sooner. Not particularly cheap here in the UK but worth it, particularly if you only clean your LCD infrequently! Exciting blog entry huh? ;-)

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Posted by Simon Brown on 06 February 2004 21:22:32 GMT #

At last, Mac users have a way to video chat with people running Windows. Don't get me wrong, I do really like my Mac, but you do often feel you're in the minority! Take Yahoo! Messenger, for example, you can video chat but there's no audio in the Mac version.

The iChat AV 2.1 beta download page says the following:

iChat AV v2.1 Public Beta adds support for video conferencing with the AOL Instant Messenger 5.5 for Microsoft Windows.

Now I just have to get all my Yahoo! Messenger friends to use AIM! ;-)

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Posted by Simon Brown on 05 February 2004 22:38:00 GMT #

It's been a bit hectic over the past few days but I finally got around to uploading Pebble 1.4 beta 2 to the SourceForge servers. If you're interested, you can get it here. The changes are as follows.

• Added useful links to the admin panel.
• PEB-2 : Remove Comment and TrackBack links from RSS feed
• PEB-5 : Invalid day of 31 specified
• PEB-7 : Blog entry (started before midnight, posted after midnight) cannot be viewed or edited
• PEB-8 : Timezones should be sorted alphabetically in Edit Properties
• PEB-12 : Add message to indicate when no comments have been added to a blog entry
• PEB-13 : Add message to indicate when no TrackBacks have been added to a blog entry
• PEB-14 : Comments/trackbacks dialog boxes for different Pebble based weblogs share target name
• PEB-15 : Edit Theme uses username, not theme name
• PEB-16 : Choosing the "Simon" theme breaks user's blog
• PEB-18 : Some referer filters can't be removed

Thanks to everybody that has been providing feedback and don't forget that you can raise issues/feature requests on JIRA. :-)

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Posted by Simon Brown on 05 February 2004 22:13:37 GMT #