S60 Open to new features

JavaOne conference is very close now and looks like we are ready for it. Your friendly neighborhood bloggers, Aleksi and I, will have  a technical session titled "Touch UI in Mobile Java Technology based Devices". In this talk we will be covering the touch UI features of  all of the UI technologies that you can use on S60 devices. There will be also tips for designing touch friendly java applications. I highly recommend this session not only because I am on it, but also because of the rising importance of touch enabled devices.

This year, we will have several of the engineers and architects that build the java platform for S60 available during the conference. We will be occasionally hanging around the Nokia booth on the Pavillion. If you have questions or opinions you want to share or just like to see a demo and some code, find the Nokia booth on the Pavillion. If you want to meet S60 java bloggers,  Aleksi and I have scheduled ourselves to be at the booth on Tuesday after 16:00, during the JavaOne Pavilion Welcome Reception. We will be very happy to meet you.

There are many reasons why I like Widsets. What is not to like, it allows me to access to the web 2.0 content from my phone. It is based on java. In fact, it is one of the most innovative applications that is running on S60 java platform.

In case you have not heard of WidSets, I recommend you to take a moment and visit WidSets website. In a nustshell, WidSets is a widget platform. Simply put widgets is the name of the general concept of small applications that runs on devices and PCs. Widgets are commonly used to show web content, such as news, blog feeds etc.

One of the features of WidSets that amazes the little engineer in me is WidSets provides a user interface and scripting language itself. In a sense, it is a full-blown platform that runs on top of the java platform. The scripting language is good enough to allow developers to develop small applications, such as sudoku or chat for the platform.

But my vote for best WidSets feature is content discovery. If you are looking for some content to use in your mobile phone, it is probable that WidSets have it. WidSets web site and mobile client provides several ways to explore the available content. The list for the existing content is comprehensive and growing. If you happen to be a content provider then WidSets is an easy way to share that on mobile world and it is amazingly effective. A few days ago, I have experimented with WidSets to create a widget that shows the content of my personal blog and I was surprised to find that I had around 20 users in less than 24 hours.

Overall, WidSets is a highly recommended java application if you are looking for ways to consume web 2.0 content on your S60 phone.

I've just posted an article discussing about the new eSWT UI API that is available in S60 Java from 3rd ed fp 2 devices. (Nokia has announced some of these devices already.)

The article was originally published in S60 News magazine. S60 News is a newsletter for S60 licensees, S60 Product Creation Community Members and Operators. Since eSWT is a new public Java API for rich user interface creation I thought it's best to make the article available to anyone. Here you go:

"Taking S60 Java Platform user interface capabilities to the next level"
Download PDF file