The J2ME App

The J2me team is made up of self-motivated individuals from the professional arena and also those still pursuing their undergraduates. They are what I call Java/J2me extremists.  Although words like “glass pane” and “spinner” were flashed around during the meet up, I tried to fit in. The team unanimously agreed to use the Light-Weight UI Toolkit (LWUIT). LWUIT for Java ME is a UI library that is bundled together with applications and helps developers to create compelling and consistent Java ME applications. The resulting UI's look and behave the same on all devices.

The first part of the discussion focused on the "Add Report" feature. Their main aim is to have the whole incident form fit the screen and so a user doesn't have to scroll to get other input fields. They tackled the photo field very well and so the application will be able to detect whether the phone being used has a camera to take a photo.  Also they will have two options, one for taking the photo in the process of filling the incident form and another to select from a gallery (photos that were taken earlier). The second part was for the "View Reports"  feature. It was agreed there would be no thumbnails due to limitations in phone memory (images use more space). It was interesting to know that they would display the location of the incident on a map even though the phone doesn't support GPS. The third part was the "settings"  feature. It borrowed a lot from the android app but they came up with an idea to let the user change the theme but maintain the Ushahidi logo. They agreed they would create the themes, at least 5 where a user would choose from. The other major feature was Internalization (i18n). They said it is possible to have it on the app and they would be incorporating it. This means the app would be usable in other languages apart from English. Although the meet up lasted almost 5 hours and by the time we left it was extra dark, everybody left with a  task list and on my part I left a hopeful person knowing we will be getting the j2me app soon and with some little knowledge of J2me.