Mobile games development

TvProgrammi.com, the Italian TV guide, finally has its mobile version!

If you have a phone supporting J2me (MIDP 2.0), you can download its first version directly from www.tvprogrammi.com.

Navigation is really straightfoward:

• 1 .. 9 keys allow channel switching
• left/right keys change the selected date
• up/down keys scroll the program text
• left soft key updates programs informations
• right soft key closes the application

This version is not suitable for devices with small displays (let’s say, with a width of less than 128px), but for those a new version will be released soon.

From Google Mobile Blog good news for mobile developers: Mobile Image Ads will allow us to integrate Google image ads within our mobile websites the same way, and with the same useful analysis and report tools, as their web counterpart.

At the moment is still unclear how, and if, these ads could be used within mobile applications, like with other mobile ads services (i.e. AdMob), but it’ll be worth investigating a bit

Mobile browsers are really grown up, and it’s a clear symptom of this the fact that W3C published a Compatibility Test for Mobile Browsers (found via Ajaxian). You can simply launch test page within your mobile browser and you’ll get visual feedbacks about supported features, including:

• XMLHTTPRequest object support
• <canvas> element with its Javascript API
• contenteditable, to allow rich content editing
• transparent PNG support
• Dynamic SVG
• CSS3 selectors

Test page will give you a visual feedback like this:

Where each green square means that a feature is supported on your phone, while it’s not with a red one.
If you want to give it a try just point your browser to this url: http://tinyurl.com/37e33p, or use this QR code:

I’ve always loved fisheye menus but, while there are quite a lot of ready-to-use components for web applications, when it comes to mobile it’s hard to find something. What better reason to build one?

Since we’ll have dynamically resizable icons, a natural choice to build one with J2ME is JSR 226, that give us full support of SVG Tiny. This will limit portability of code, since this JSR is not supported on all J2me phones, but support is rapidly growing with latest generation phones.

As you’ll see, code is quite straightforward, and great part of it is dedicated to coordinates/size calculations, to create that “slide/resize” effect that is soooooo cool

You can find menu source code on my Forum Nokia Wiki article: J2ME Fisheye Menu with JSR 226, or download sample midlet here (and source code here).

FaceRoller is a micro-blogging service with integrated picture and geo-locating funcionalities: practically, you snap a photo, write what you want and tell where you are, and the job is done and, if you’ve got a Flickr or Facebook account, your pictures will be automatically uploaded there.

It has also a J2me mobile client to upload photos when you’re on the go, directly from your java enabled phone.

If you want to give it a try signup on FaceRoller and then download the j2me client.

We’re still developing and expanding its concept, so comments and feedback are welcome!