Friday November 03, 2006

As already mentioned in an other entry lab.30, a media festival has started yesterday in my hometown Augsburg / Germany. Actually the exhibition IS much better than the last years and it has some real cool exponents...

Exhibition: To see, hear and feel.
For example an installation from Lynn Pook (Berlin/Paris) called "À Fleur de Peau - Audio-taktile Installation für einen Körper" (in english "audio tactile installation for a body"). The interrested visitors are invited to participate and if so they step into a small linnen cubicle and get wrapped with loudspeakers - actually that really looks like a medical bandage, a little bit perhaps like Frankenstein's monster - so that they can feel the music much more than hear it.

Another installation presents so called "printed circuit board objects" (Platinenobjekt) which have a very artistically layout - the subtitle is "Hardware hommage" and yes, that is it. These circuit boards from Ina Keckeis (Berlin) - are they etchings? Are they working small computers? Both. If you touch them they start to make some noises - and as there are many of them they start an own composition. Great.

Wham. Bang.
The concerts are much stranger: E.g. Florian Hecker's electronic noise. Or "Social Sounds", where sounds from allover the world has been merged into one big collage. Or the websounds in the party at the evening... Might be that an additional conference, workshops or a symposium would make sense to explain more of this kind of music. Is it music? Is it noise? Perhaps something between.

Looking forward to the next days...

Thursday November 02, 2006

Every developer for mobile devices faces the same problem: fragmentation of the Java ME market on the mobile phone handsets... The practice of creating an own version per each handset is not only costly and wasteful of resources - it is confusing to the end user. Additionally it inhibits the growth of the market for Java ME Platform.

Together Sun and Orange have worked to produce a set of guidelines for Java ME Platform programming that aim to reduce the practice of generating a distinct executable version (jar file) of an application for each and every phone. Last week, a joint paper has been announced and is now available at developers.sun.com. These guidelines look at some of the causes of fragmentation, and offer suggestions as to how an application may be written to achieve the optimal balance of application performance and coverage of a large number of phones.

Techniques for de-fragmentation
So, to use these guidelines, look at the capabilities that your application needs, for example screen output. Look at the guidelines for re-sizing images, determine what tolerances will work for your application, and apply the techniques to use one image to cover a range of varied screen sizes where the variation is relatively minor. The same can be done to cover different keypad inputs.

Generating one version to cover all phones is unlikely, but the fewer versions means a wider market and lower costs.

So to maximize the number of compatible devices per version, identify the platform and context that is relevant to the application. Then, for each point of variability, choose the technique to handle it. There is no general rule for selecting variability handling techniques, since some techniques may have different impact on different kind of applications.

More at developers.sun.com.