S60 Open to new features

JavaOne is now over. It was a very fruitful conference on my behalf. Aleksi and I had a very well attended session. We have seen a lot of interest to our technology, especially eSWT. We are going back home with the new friendships and conversations we have established. Of course we have the photos from the event. I have created an Ovi channel for our JavaOne event photos, which is embedded to this post. You should expect more pictures as I am still traveling and did not yet gather all the pictures from the event.

If you are attending the JavaOne 2008 conference, there will be a BOF on creating efficient MIDP applications. S60 Java platform engineers will discuss about varying issues on creating well performing, pleasant MIDP applications. To start the discussion, we will be sharing some tips that we have gathered working with software and game houses. The tips will cover anything from graphics performance to usability.

There is a little known program run by S60 Java platform team. We regularly work with software and game houses to find out about the problems on our platform and also help them solve problems on their applications. We hope to extend our reach with this BOF to broader developer community. I will be at the BOF and will be sharing some usability tips, I know that most of the S60 engineers that are attending the conference are going to be there. I am really hoping to hear about some of the performance tips and also problems that you face when working with the S60 Java platform.

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.

A colleague has brought this posting to my attention that I am not famous. Although this did not come as a surprise, it did encourage me to do a posting to tell more about myself. So here it goes.

I am working as part of the organization that develops the Java platform for S60. Like most of the Java platform team, I am based in Tampere, which is located in Finland. On my daily work, I work with a group of talented people to create advanced stuff for the Java platform. Some of our publicly available work is eSWT UI toolkit for S60, which we had a posting about in this blog sometime ago and also the open source eRCP runtime. I also run a second blog that has more regular postings about eSWT and eRCP. Hmm... what else, I am a dog person, meaning I have a dog. I have joined Nokia because it would give me access to the cool devices and now it is addictive. And my star sign is Leo.

The greatest asset of S60 is the S60 community. We are constantly looking for more ways to make sure what matters to S60 community matters to us. As part of that effort, together with our product managers, we will try to discover what really matters, from your stories.

If you are reading this blog there is a good chance that you have chosen to use java for developing your application. But if you felt that java was not your thing and decided to use something else, we value your opinion equally. Whether you use java or not we are interested in your stories.

Tell us your reasons for choosing java or your reasons for not choosing it. Also add the type of applications you are developing. There is a chance that our product managers will further contact you to get more details so please do fill in your email addresses. Your stories will be valuable inputs for us.