At this years JavaOne, there was information released about JWebPane. Apparently development on it is underway, and it’s going to be released soon. Here’s more details on it JWebPane BOF slides at JavaOne 2009. Here’s old information JWebPane project, a browser plugin for Swing and soon FX.

Read all about the upcoming component in this PDF. It looks pretty awesome!!! Some highlights:

1. Swing component will be available, not just for JavaFX
2. Totally lightweight rendering done in pure Java, based on Webkit.

I can’t wait!!! I have tons of apps that will be possible with this component… I’ve been waiting for this for a long time…

However, if Sun does not deliver, there are 3rd parties who provide Java connectors for Firefox, and other native browsers, across all platforms… I will be reviewing this as soon as I get the chance.

RIM just released a new JDE version, you can download it here. Here’s a review of an early release of OS 5.0 on an actual Bold. 5.0 is going to be an awesome OS! In writing software for OS 4.6 for some time now, I’ve run into lots of limitations in media capture that are being addressed by 5.0! Video capture is coming in 5.0!

Here’s a short list of new features, read all the features here:

• SQLite Support
• Improved BrowserField API
• Third Party Application Phone Screen Integration
• JSR 135 Video Capture
• Multiple ContactList Support
• Enhanced Media Key Events

Good stuff!!! I’m planning on releasing software by the end of the year that takes advantage of all of these API enhancements . Stay tuned!

You can download Windows 7 RC here. Windows 7 rocks . Here are some great things that are coming with Win 7:

1. Built in support for SSD. Awesome!
2. Improvement in GDI Concurrency. Vista had some serious problems with “Application not responding” error messages with the GUI Event Dispatch Thread was inappropriately used. However, Win 7 takes matters into it’s own hands, as Vista should have done to begin with, and improves scalability! There are many more improvements .  
   
3. Multi touch. Awesome! I can’t wait for Win 7 to come out late October, and install it on a T200 Tablet .
4. Aero Snap. Awesome!
5. And too many more to list here. Check out the Windows 7 Blog.

I’ve been running Vista SP2 for a while now, and it works great! There are a lot of subtle changes, and some pretty visible ones. To get a list of details, check out this link. You can download the update here.  After you’ve installed the update and are happy with it, be sure to cleanup all the excess files using the cleanup tool, find out how here.

Here are some changes that I’ve seen:

1. The first thing I noticed was different font rendering on SP2. It looks great! Much better than SP1, and I thought that looked great too! On a font like Lucida Grande, it made a huge difference, and at point size! SP2 font rendering looks fantastic!
2. Transferring large files over the network got really really fast! I routinely transfer 500MB – 1GB files over my gigabit network daily… and I used to notice a slowdown using SP1 after an initial burst. With SP2, the throughput is incredible!
3. Large file operations are also much faster, when compared to SP1.

On my Thinkpad, some of my Thinkvantage stuff stopped working, but I never did trust them to begin with, so it gave me an excuse to rollback (before I installed the Thinkvantage stuff) and re-apply the SP2 update.

For sheer computing power and speed, the Bold can’t be beat. However, it’s big and heavy and bulky when compared to the Javelin. The Javelin is a much more balanced device which sacrifices a lot of the Bold’s functionality for greater battery life, smaller form factor. However, I don’t feel that anything is “missing” from the Javelin. It’s a great device. If I travelled a lot, I would get the Javelin . I really love both devices, and they are optimized for slightly different environments. To make a laptop analogy, the Javelin is an ultraportable, while the Bold is a mobile workstation.

Proceed to the full review - BlackBerry 8900 Javelin Review

This review covers the new functionality of OS 5.0.0.93, which is not an official release from RIM, but a pre-release copy of the OS. Lots of great changes: Conference Bridge Line support, WebKit browser (maybe), faster and better graphics, revamped UI, transition animations for picture scrolling, Outlook email message flag support, and much more!

Proceed to the full review - BlackBerry OS 5.0.0.93 Review

Sun has just been purchased by Oracle, as you must have heard already. After the IBM buyout offer fell through, Oracle snapped Sun up. I’m selfish. I have a software company that uses lots and lots of Java technologies, and I’m wondering what this means to me in the long term . I’m sure there are lots of changes that Sun employees are going to have to go through, but I’m not worried about that, just being honest.

There are very few official details of what this merger will mean to specific products and technologies from Sun. Here’s a good article to read that takes a guess at what might happen: Sun and Oracle: End of a beautiful dream • The Register. It’s important to keep in mind that Java7 is Open source – GPL 2 with Classpath exception. This is important regardless of the JCP (which is not even an organization but a department within Sun). Even though the direction of the Java language itself might be controlled by Oracle, Java7 is being built as we speak and that’s open source, so I’m not too worried that Java as we know it will cease to exist.

What might change then? Perhaps control over what new language features make it into Java, and what APIs are supported out of the box in the JVM distribution might change. Or perhaps Netbeans will be axed, and replaced with Eclipse, since Oracle killed BEA’s Workshop IDE as soon as it was acquired. Maybe JavaFX will be axed. Who knows? Personally, I’ve given up on desktop Java a long time ago. After having waited for Sun to do the right thing for desktop Java, all they could do is provide a stupid freaking scripting language and incompatible crap (can’t use JavaFX stuff from Java)… instead of providing a WebKit browser in Java, and better support for native audio/video playback/capture. The work the JDK team has done with 6u10 is awesome! I love native font rasterization in Java; it only took a decade?!

Who knows, maybe Oracle will trim the fat from Sun’s Java software stack and introduce some focus into the company and it’s technologies. Or maybe it will trim things that are important to the Java platform but not to Oracle. Since Java7 is open source, so many things are possible with it that were not with prior versions. E.g., with Java7, you can have an open source font rasterizer plugged into the VM for all OSes. And other things that are not attempted with current versions.

To be quite honest, in my world, there is no 1 version of Java. I currently write Java ME, SE, and EE software, with non-standard APIs from RIM and Google (for Android)… so write once, run anywhere has never really been true for me. However, I love the language, so if Oracle doesn’t fuck that up, it will be great!

T-Mobile has announced that it’s just sold the 1 millionth G1 smartphone in the US! I like Android, and want it to succeed, so it’s good to see positive numbers. However, there’s a long way to go still, with stiff competition coming from LiMo this year, and a dearth of Android powered devices in the market. In about 7 months, T-Mobile was able to sell about 1M G1 units, which is not bad, but not that great either. It still remains to be seen if Android is going to be a major player or not. We shall see.

Amazon has released a really cool mobile app for BlackBerry. You can download it it here on your BlackBerry, and learn more about it here. It allows you to see what’s in your shopping cart, as well as buy things on the go. One cool feature is that you can take a picture of a product, that can then be sent to Amazon to see if they have it in stock. If they do, you get an email notification later that allows you to buy the product from them!

The app looks and works very well. The only problem is that Amazon has done a very safe integration with the camera, instead of using the multimedia API to connect directly with the camera . In app ScreamingToaster apps, camera integration is done using 3 methods – you can select existing pictures, take a new one directly from inside the app itself, or do it the way Amazon does, by running the camera app and capturing the first photo you take. 

I’ve been developing software for BlackBerry for the last year or so and have been keeping an eye on Android to see if it will go anywhere. Currently, Android has enjoyed limited success in a very specific demographic, which represents a small fraction of the marketshare that RIM and Apple have. So while the T-Mobile launch of the G1 has been successful (1M units in about 7 months in US) for the modest goals that were set, I don’t think it represents a big accomplishment. However, all I’ve read on tech blogs and news outlets is how there are going to be around 10 new handsets for Android this year. This has been the buzz for more than 1/2 a year now… well, it turns out that slowly these rumors have stopped saying Android handsets, and saying Linux handsets… so I figured Android is basically Linux with a JVM and so they were talking about Android. Well, I was wrong. Most of the new handsets that have been announced using Linux Mobile, which is NOT Android.

I’d been looking forward to the Garmin smartphones that are slated for release soon. Sadly, they run LiMo, not Android. This basically means that the Android SDK does not apply to these handsets. So Android software won’t run on them, and they don’t run Java, as far as I can tell at this time. Maybe at some point the LiMo folks might come out with a J2ME SDK for it, but that won’t be Android compatible of course. I was really disappointed to see all these new handsets slated for release with LiMo and not Android, as I like the Android SDK and was hoping that it would be successful, enabling small software vendors like myself to consolidate development efforts. Alas, that is not the case.

In case you’re wondering what the difference between Android and LiMo is, here’s a short list:

1. LiMo apps are written in C/C++ using the LiMo SDK. Android apps are written in Google’s mutated version of Java5 (not J2ME, but not quite Java5 either).
2. There are lots of handset makers that have announced availability of smartphones running on LiMo. Not so much for Android; except for Google’s hype machine and the tech media’s love affair with all things Google.
3. Lots of big carriers have signed on to LiMo, including Verizon Wireless. Not so much with Android.

I’m personally dismayed at the fragmentation in the smartphone segment. Apple’s platform is consolidated for it’s devices. RIM’s is not. Android isn’t a viable platform, due to lack of hardware. And Windows Mobile sucks. Really sad.

Anyway, I’m personally targeting BlackBerry 4.6 OS devices and above. And at some point Apple’s iPhone. Right now, I’m making all my ScreamingToaster software run on BlackBerry, but I’ve already created a portable infrastructure (services running in my cloud) that is really language and platform independent, and will work equally well with Android, BlackBerry, and iPhone. I was planning on building Android support after BlackBerry, but I’m moving Apple support up before Android. Also, I wish that RIM would use WebKit like both LiMo and Android, instead of using it’s own crappy browser software.