NOTE: Jaiku’s devku.org site links to this post, but newer versions are available. See the jaikuBerry page for the blackberry-specific app, and the software page for the current J2ME midlet.

As you can see from this screenshot from my actual Blackberry:

… I am now fetching the overview feed and the “your jaikus” feed and displaying them on demand. You can also see that, once again, I’ve completely disregarded any sense of aesthetics that I may possess. I wanted to make this as lightweight and simple as possible (which is fancy talk for “I’m a lazy bastard, trying to get by with the bare minimum while I wait for the mojax jaiku moblet“).

At least I bold-faced alternating entries so it’s easier to scan across them! And, seriously, if you want a bare-bones jaiku interface with very low overhead, I think this isn’t such a bad little app. It’s still all standard J2ME/MIDP stuff which should run on some very low-powered phones. Not that I’ve got any such phones to test it with….

At this point, I think I’m calling this product feature complete (It already does a decent job of posting updates, as discussed in the previous release’s blog post). At least, until the official API is enhanced, I’m done. I’m not going to resort to screen-scraping to be able to post comments, etc.

It would be nice if I would add some sort of status as I download the presence streams, so that you can tell that the app is not frozen… it can take a few seconds to pull the whole json structure across. Maybe I will do that if I get motivated.

As always, you can download it from my software page. The package contains all the code, and the JAR/JAD suitable for transmitting to java-enabled phones. It also contains the ALX/COD I built with the BlackBerry JDE 4.1. This COD file works on my Blackberry 8700c, and has not been tested on any other blackberry (since I don’t have any others!).

(note to self: you take a screenshot of an actual blackberry by connecting it via usb and using the command: javaloader -u screenshot filename.png. It will generate a HUGE png file that you’ll want to re-encode.)

I made an update to my jaiku posting MIDlet today. Screenshots from the emulator:

New features:

• It counts the characters for you, while you type. Seems most posting apps do this, so why not mine? I was initially concerned about the effeciency of this operation, but it turns out the lcdui TextField interface provides a size() method which doesn’t make me request the current String. So, I assume most devices manage to perform this operation pretty efficiently.
• Support for sending post icons. To keep things lightweight, I just gave text descriptions of the available icons. I included all the ones I myself would ever use, of the currently available set. There are 52 to choose from.
• It also uses that status field to tell you whether the previous posting was ok, or had errors. The previous version would pop up an Alert box to tell you about the error, but if you blinked you’d miss it. Plus, it now leaves your post message alone after an error, giving you a chance to try to re-send it.

Tested on my Blackberry 8700c, but the code is all plain J2ME midlet stuff, so it should theoretically work as-is on a ton of java-enabled mobile devices. The tar.gz contains the code, the jar/jad files, and the alx/cod files. I’m not sure which Blackberrys will be compatible with the alx/cod files provided… I compiled it with RIM’s JDE v4.1. But, you (or someone else) could certainly compile it with other JDE versions for other Blackberrys if need be…

As always, you can get the latest versions of the software I release on the software page (I’ve got quite a backlog that I’d like to package up and add there, over time, now that I have a semi-permanent web page).