What I’ll remember most is the sound. To call it “loud” is simply not an adequate description. The sound was a physical force, a sledgehammer to the chest and a blow to the very foundations of reality. There was light as well of course–the whole world turning white for an instant–but light I can deal with. There is no number on the decibel scale that can do justice to that sound. It was so sudden and unexpected. You’re supposed to see the lightning first, and then hear the thunder. 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, 3, count the seconds to tell how far away it is. Not this time. Impossibly, the sound seemed to happen before the flash. Time stopped. And then there was silence, and darkness.

After a few moments, the alarms started to go off. Every battery backup / surge protector in the house wailed in protest. Our home alarm system began a scratchy sickly noise that it wasn’t designed to make. A child’s toy that had been laying inert for days on the floor beside my feet started flashing insistently. The lights flickered once, and then somehow came back on. A siren started in the distance. As I regained my senses, I stumbled into the living room; thankfully no one was injured. I rushed upstairs and was hit by the smell of acrid smoke. Fearing the worst I vaulted into the attic. Surely such a sound must have left its mark–a fierce blaze, a gaping smoldering hole, something. I tried to remember where I had put the fire extinguisher, but as I frantically looked around I found… nothing.

A tree, I thought, it must have struck a tree, and I remembered the time when I was a child and lightning struck a tree in my front yard. Somehow that tree survived, though it was forever scarred by the ordeal. I ran downstairs and outside into the pouring rain, expecting to see a smoking stump where one of our once proud pines had stood. There wasn’t one. I circled the house. No fire, no smoke, not even a scorch mark. In some perverse way I felt cheated. The rain continued to fall, and another crack of lightning (1 Mississippi, 2) reminded me that maybe standing outside in a thunderstorm wasn’t the brightest idea. So I went back in.

The bitter smell was coming from our alarm system, which was still making that unearthly noise. I unplugged it, and it began to wind down, like HAL in 2001 (Daisy, Daisy, …). Had we somehow escaped unharmed? The people, the house, and the trees… yes. It could have been much worse, I repeated to myself over and over, thankful everyone was OK. But we weren’t completely unscathed. You see, we had lost our technology.

To be continued…

According to Hofert, while both LWUIT and JavaFX enable creating a better and more compelling user interface for mobile and other devices, there are really two target audiences / handset profiles:

LWUIT is aimed at current Java MIDP and Swing developers who are looking to enhance the interfaces of new or existing Java ME applications on MIDP 2.0 phones. LWUIT is a library which offers pre-made graphical functions and features that developers can quickly and easily assemble into a compelling interface.  LWUIT allows developers to worry less about the building blocks and instead focus on a consistent and richer interface across phones.  Therefore LWUIT is something that existing Java developers can incorporate and make calls to out of their existing Java code.JavaFX Mobile is targeted at designers and scripters who are looking to create very rich, very immersive experiences across the screens of their life (phone, desktop, TV, etc.). The level of interactivity and animation and control over the user’s screen is much higher than that enabled by LWUIT.  JavaFX Mobile can also run on MSA-enabled devices which comprise the higher end of the mobile space - smart phones and high end feature phones.

The programming and UI design of the two systems is completely different as well.

JavaFX uses a declarative statically typed scripting language that allows people to build out interfaces by describing the functionality that they want to see, instead of building it from the ground up.  This lets them think creatively and be creative. JavaFX includes scalable fonts, 2D graphics, rich animations, integrated audio and video, and you can build apps that will run across all the screens of your life.

In addition, with JavaFX, you can use design tools like Photoshop and Illustrator to build out graphical elements and even entire interfaces that you can directly build into and manipulate within JavaFX.  This lets the designers and developers work much more closely and efficiently together.

So the bottom line is that if you’re sprucing up an existing Java ME program, choose LWUIT. For new mobile and desktop apps, or if you’re working in a multi-disciplinary team with artists and programmers consider JavaFX.

Of course neither will work (yet) on iPhones, Android phones, or standard Windows Mobile phones. It’s unfortunate developers have to deal with all these different systems. If Apple open sourced the iPhone platform and allowed any handset manufacturer and any carrier to use it, they would be poised to completely take over the mid to high end mobile phone market within 12-18 months. But Apple doesn’t work that way. Google does, but it’s taking them so long to get Android out the door that they’ll be playing catch-up for a while. It looks like the dream of “write once, run anywhere” will remain unfulfilled for the forseable future.

Luckily I found one cheaper here:

When I showed this to my friend his first comment was “For 1/5 of a mil you’d think they’d include shipping”. True, but at least there was no tax.

I don’t have any inside knowledge on how the shopping site gets its prices, but I suspect they’re using a method called “screen scraping“. In this method you just fetch every product web page and try to parse out the HTML to find where the number you want is located. This is fairly straightforward but it doesn’t always work, especially if the site you’re scraping changes its format. Also some sites don’t appreciate being used in this manner.

A better solution is to use a web service. Web services are sort of like web pages in that you access them with an “http://something” address. But instead of returning an HTML page they return the answer in a form that is easier for a computer program to understand, like XML or JSON. If the site you’re querying provides a web service then you can write a program (like a price comparison server) that calls the service and gets the result.

Here’s an example of a web service. When you click on this link, you will actually be calling a service from Google that translates the text “thank you” from one language to another, in this case English to French. Go ahead and click it; there’s no code that runs in your browser or anything dangerous. Here’s what I get:

{"responseData": {"translatedText":"merci"},
 "responseDetails": null, "responseStatus": 200}

The answer comes back in a JSON format that can easily be loaded by Javascript, Java, or any other language. When web services first started out, most of them used a protocol called SOAP that wrapped both the request and the response in a standard XML “envelope”. This was very general, but also very cumbersome. Nowadays, many web services are “REST-ful”, meaning the query is encoded in a regular HTTP request (like the one in that link) and the results come back in a simple format.

You can see an example of code that uses web services in the downloadable examples from my upcoming book, Hello, Android. I wrote a program that prompts for some text, calls the service to translate it to another language, and then translates it back into your original language to see how it comes out. The examples are free; from the home page select the Code link, download the zip file, and open up the Translate project.

For more info on the Google Language API used in the example, including the terms of use, see their site.

[ Read: More programming tips on Dev Connection ]

I’m excited by what we’ve put together but also exhausted. We’ve done an incredible amount of work during the last year. Now I know what it was like in the early days of Java. Since JavaOne 2007 we’ve built (from scratch), a compiler for a new language with many non-trivial features, a GUI runtime with a new graphics and animation stack, new Netbeans plugins with code completion, utilities for graphic designers, a new kind of Javadocs (rewritten from the ground up), plus docs, samples, and demos. And that’s not even counting the many improvements that are going into JavaSE 6 update 10. Whew! It’s been a long year.

According to Simon Brocklehurst, a few features will not make the preview release but will be coming in version 1.0 due out later this year. These include: 3d vector graphics, the ON2 VP6 codec, streaming video, and local file system access. However all the basics are there including standard UI elements, regular and key frame animation, 2d graphics, and export from Adobe Illustrator to JavaFX.

That last piece is important to Sun if it wishes to compete against Adobe’s Flash and Flex products. People working on a particular rich internet application have different skill sets. Artists need a way to develop content, such as the skin of a video player, in a tool like Photoshop or Illustrator which is optimized for their creative talent. Then they need a way to pass that content to programmers to add the behavior behind the art. Flash has had this capability for years. Instead of trying to create artist tools from scratch, Sun will try to piggyback on top of the Adobe tools through exporters. The preview version will export from Illustrator, and the final 1.0 version will export from Photoshop.

Will JavaFX be enough to unseat Flash/Flex? At this point, I just don’t see it. Flex 3 is growing like gangbusters, and Adobe controls the whole tool chain. They have the workflow covered, and they have years of experience bridging the gap from designers to developers. More importantly, Adobe has earned the trust of those same designers and developers. It’s a shame, really, but after 10+ years of leaving Java applets to wither on the vine, it’s going to take many more years for Sun to prove that it understands rich internet applications and that it can deliver a compelling vision of the future. Tellingly, even the JavaFX home page doesn’t actually use JavaFX; it uses Ajax and Quicktime movies.

There are some niches, however, where JavaFX may flourish. In particular, consider environments like certain TVs, set-top boxes, Blu-ray players, and mobile phones that already have Java running (sometimes as the only way to run programs). A scaled back JavaFX Mobile running on top of Java Mobile Edition (ME) will give JavaFX an instant base that can’t be ignored. It remains to be seen how much of the speed and functionality that we see on JavaFX Desktop will translate over to the mobile and embedded side, but Sun has a definite opportunity there.

Whether the rumors turn out to be true this time or not, it’s a common pastime to imagine what the name of a merged company will be. Of course, it’s all but certain there would be no name change, and that each company or division would continue with its current name. But just for fun… what is your favorite?

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Not counting punishing server load when the store debuted last week, some users (like me) have encountered a series of obstacles to get apps to work at all. The first time I tried to install an application on my 8GB iPhone model after upgrading the firmware to 2.0 I got this error:

To fix this, you have to select Store > Authorize Computer… in iTunes, enter your Apple ID and password, and follow the instructions on the screen. If you don’t have an Apple account you have to create one, entering your credit card on the off chance that you may want to use a non-free application.

Once I had the authorization straight I got a bit further. Some apps installed OK, but on others I got odd errors like this:

Using the time-honored technique of “try, try again”, I was able to get several apps downloaded onto the phone. Whew, glad that was over with. Only one little problem: none of them worked. Not a single one, not even the copy of Super Monkey Ball that I paid $9.95 for.

I would tap on the program icon, and it looked like it was thinking about the possibility of beginning to start up, but then it would dump me unceremoniously back to the home screen. Sometimes I’d see a glimpse of the opening screen, sometimes not. All the built-in applications like Mail worked, but none of the downloaded ones did. There was no error message or anything.

A search through the community forums turned up a troubleshooting article from Apple that suggested uninstalling the apps from the iPhone and then re-installing them by doing a sync. That worked. So now I could run my programs, hurray! After trying out a few, I rush down the hall to show a friend, proudly tap on the program icon, and… nothing happens. The screen flashes and it goes back to the home screen. I try another one, same thing. Even apps that worked just 10 minutes ago refuse to start.

I discovered that a hard reboot (pressing and holding the top and front buttons for several seconds until the screen goes black) fixes the problem, at least temporarily. So far I haven’t lost any data, and iTunes does keep a backup just in case, but the situation doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

Some apps freeze in the middle, or poof back to the home screen for no apparent reason. When that happens, sometimes all downloaded apps stop working again. Does Apple expect me to re-install my apps every day when I want to use them? There is nothing weird about my iPhone: it was never Jailbroken, and it has plenty of free space. Built-in apps work fine. The only explanation is that the apps themselves are buggy, and that the iPhone operating system provides insufficient insulation between programs so that when one goes bad it can keep others from working too.

On the plus side, when I can get them to work many of the native iPhone 2.0 apps are quite impressive. Super Monkey Ball, for example, makes excellent use of the built-in tilt sensor, though it seems harder than the Playstation 2 version I’m used to. The 3d graphics are reasonably smooth with an apparent 20-30fps except during a few busy scenes. Sound effects and music are top notch in the programs that use them, and the touch screen is vibrant and responsive.

However that bright screen and fast clock speed does come with a down side. iPhone apps will suck the life right out of your battery, especially on the original iPhone model. If you’re looking for Nintendo DS-like battery life, forget it. It fades quicker than my notoriously power hungry but gorgeous Sony PSP. Even with minimal use I can’t charge the iPhone in the office on Friday and have it last through the weekend. Heck, it doesn’t even last until Sunday. Unfortunately, the battery isn’t easily replaceable, so I may have to break down and buy an extra charger or two.

My worn and battered Blackberry may not be as sexy, and it may not have the cool games and the iconic earbuds, but it has all the enterprise features I need for a fraction of the monthly cost, and I only have to charge it once a week. Sometimes function does trump form.

There is a PDF version and a Paper version. By ordering both versions at the same time you can save $13.20.  You’ll be able to download successive releases of the PDF as I add material, and you’ll have more input into what goes into the book. You’ll get new beta updates for free every 3-4 weeks, and then you’ll get the final PDF and a paper copy when the book is finished. Alternatively, the paper version only is available for pre-order from Amazon, O’Reilly, and other outlets.

From the introduction:

Getting started developing with Android is easy. You don’t even need access to an Android phone, just a computer where you can install the Android SDK and the phone emulator that comes with it. Within minutes, Hello, Android will get you creating your first working application: Android’s version of “Hello, World.” From there, you’ll build up a more substantial example: an Android Sudoku game. By gradually adding features to the game throughout the course of the book, you’ll learn about many aspects of Android programming including user interfaces, multimedia, and the Android life cycle.

If you’re a busy developer who’d rather be coding than reading about coding, this book is for you. To help you find what you need to know fast, each chapter ends with “Fast forward” section. These sections provide guidance for where you should go next when you need to read the book out of order.

A basic knowledge of programming in Java is assumed, and experience using the Eclipse Java development tools is helpful but not required. The final release date depends on Google’s release of Android version 1.0 and the availability of handsets from manufacturers.

For more information see:

• Table of Contents
• Code examples
  
• Errata
• Discussions
• Free extracts (PDF):
  • Preface
  • Creating the opening screen
  • Adding graphics to Sudoku

I decided (ok, my financial advisor, aka spouse, decided for me) to skip the iPhone 3G frenzy this morning and just sit back and watch the fun. For all you fellow “phone potatoes” out there, here’s a roundup of today’s excitement from around the world. And it won’t cost you an extra penny in data fees.

[ READ: More iPhone on ZDNet ]

• When you’re Robert Scoble, you don’t wait for an iPhone — Greg Sandoval
  I was out in front of the Apple store near Union Square at 9 p.m. on Thursday evening standing in line for the iPhone 3G that makes its debut today. Robert Scoble (right) walks up at 7:15 a.m. on Friday, 45 minutes before the doors are scheduled to open and a fan lets him take cuts in line…
• Apple’s iPhone 3G activation problems — Jason D. O’Grady
  I’m not sure if it’s just a server load issue because of all the east coast Apple and AT&T stores opening, but here at the Apple Store at The Pier customers are being told that their phones can’t be activated and to take them home to activate. Rob and I popped upstairs to the coffee bar (thanks to free coupons from Apple) and connected to the free Wi-Fi network only to have the same problem.
• Apple’s MobileMe experiences post-launch pain — Michael Krigsman
  Apple’s new MobileMe web service experienced post-launch downtime yesterday, frustrating users who expected more…
• The iPhone: Now with Microsoft ActiveSync support — Mary-Jo Foley
  Microsoft’s been noticeably and characteristically mum about Apple’s iPhone 2.0 unveiling this week. But on July 11, the Redmondians did make sure to note that iPhones now include ActiveSync support for Exchange Server.
• iPhone 3G poses barriers to business adoption — Natasha Lomas
  For years, Apple has paid little attention to products for enterprise users. Now it’s pitching its new iPhone 3G as: “The best phone for business. Ever”. But has it got the package right?
• Software update gives new life to the first iPhone — Kent German
  Although Friday’s launch of the iPhone 3G is grabbing all the headlines, there’s no need to put the original iPhone out to pasture just yet. With the iPhone 2.0 software update, the first iPhone is getting another day in the sun, and it’s a nice toasty sunshine at that.
• iPhone 3G battery, screen are user-replaceable, sort of — iPhoneAtlas
  If you’re willing to void your warranty, perform relatively complex disassembly process and get your hands on a replacement, you can in fact insert a new battery in the iPhone 3G without worry of seriously damaging the device.
• iPhone 3G review –Ryan Block
  There are always things that could be improved, features to be added, fixes that should be applied — but from first to second gen, from year one to year two, Apple has proven itself a relentless upstart in the mobile space, and is showing no signs of slowing down. All those new features give the iPhone even more appeal than ever, but the price is what really seals the deal.
• iPhone 3G international launch lineblog — Engadget
  The iPhone 3G has landed — in New Zealand anyway. Let us tell you, it was an absolute madhouse. Everyone kept mentioning that for low-key Kiwis, this kind of thing was total pandemonium.
• The Apple iPhone 3G and me — Claudine Beaumont
  There’s been someone new in my life: the Apple iPhone 3G. I’m pleased to say that the relationship is blossoming. While everyone else had to wait until today to get their hands on the hottest gadget since?…?well, the last iPhone came out, I have been flirting shamelessly with it for the past three weeks…
• iPhone OS 2.0 Unlocked — Jesus Diaz
  The new iPhone OS 2.0 software has been unlocked and jailbroken. It was released just hours ago and it has already been cracked by the iPhone Dev Team. The first one took a couple of months, but this one was actually unlocked before Apple released it to the public.
• O2: iPhone 3G orders reached 13,000 per second — Jonny Evans
  U.K. cellular operator O2 has admitted that its online ordering system failed this week - on strength of orders reaching 13,000 per second at points on Monday morning…
• Apple’s App Store launches with more than 500 apps — AppleInsider
  Apple said Thursday that more than 500 native applications are now available on the iPhone’s App Store for use with the new iPhone 3G. Over 125 of those applications — or more than 25 percent — are being offered for free. According to Apple chief executive Steve Jobs, 90 percent of the remaining applications will cost just $9.99 or less.
• iPhone App store; why do we need 10 tip calculators? — Matthew Miller
  As I posted yesterday, I updated my first generation iPhone to the 2.0 firmware and started trying out 3rd party applications from the App Store. Since there are no trials available I had to pull the trigger on a couple applications I really wanted to try out and bought Super Monkey Ball and SplashMoney so far. Browsing through the iPhone App Store was fun, interesting, and a bit frustrating and I came away with a few impressions.
• 500 iPhone Apps, but why these? — Jeff Smykil
  Looking at what is available, we have to wonder how Apple picked the applications it did. There are many applications that are no-brainers, so how did the rest make the cut? We have talked to several developers, some with several apps that didn’t make the cut and have made some guesses as to what Apple’s process was…
• iPhone app hands-on: Super monkey ball (with screenshots) — iPhoneAtlas
  If you receive a call while playing Super Monkey Ball, play will be interrupted and you will be presented with the traditional “Answer” or “Decline” screen. If you decline the call, Super Monkey Ball will be automatically paused and you can immediately resume and return to play. If, however, you accept the call, Super Monkey Ball will restart and your previous game will be eliminated.
• Best of the worst: the App Store’s hits and misses — Joshua Topolsky
  We didn’t try all 500+ applications (fitness? puhlease), but we did handle quite a few, and we’ve rounded up the best and worst that we’ve seen so far for your viewing pleasure…
• More iPhone on ZDNet

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The first problem is that Yahoo BOSS is not open source. They’ve just added some more web service APIs that can be used to create mashups. Heck, it’s not even free. According to the FAQ, in order to use the APIs “It will be a requirement to host our ads on your site.” Before using the APIs you have to agree to a terms of use document which says, among other things:

Yahoo! reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to charge fees and/or require the display of Yahoo!-supplied advertising on Your Offering, under additional terms and implementation requirements, for future use of or access to some or all of the Services or other APIs made available by Yahoo!. If Yahoo! decides to charge for the Services or require the display of Yahoo!-supplied advertising, such charges and additional terms and conditions (including implementation requirements designed to protect Yahoo! advertising networks and exclusivity for sponsored search advertising) will be disclosed to You prior to the effective date when such fees or requirements would be imposed.

It’s open search not open source. And not terribly open for all that.

Second, Larry goes on to condemn moving to open source as sign of desperation in general. “When you go [from] proprietary to open source,” he writes, “it’s usually because you’re losing the war and it’s too late.” Then he compares the new platform to Netscape Mozilla, RealNetworks Helix, and Sun’s investments in MySQL and OpenSolaris.

I feel compelled to point out that despite its rough start, Mozilla is now a poster child for successful open source projects. Mozilla Firefox has forced Microsoft to compete once again in the browser market by capturing a share of nearly 20%. MySQL was open source from the beginning, and would never have captured the imagination of the LAMP generation (Linux-Apache-MySQL-Perl) if it had been yet another proprietary database like Oracle or DB2. Solaris’ main competition is Linux, which is open source itself. And let’s not forget Eclipse, which started life as a proprietary IDE, but its release as open source spawned a billion-dollar ecosystem surrounding it.

Y!BOSS is not open source, but even if it were, open source is not the dumping ground for lost causes that Larry seems to be implying.

Protocol Buffers allow you to define simple data structures in a special definition language, then compile them to produce classes to represent those structures in the language of your choice. These classes come complete with heavily-optimized code to parse and serialize your message in an extremely compact format.

You can think of protocol buffers as kind of a cross between XML and IDL (Interface Definition Languages). Compared to XML, they have several advantages for serializing structured data. From the documentation:

 Protocol buffers:

• are simpler
• are 3 to 10 times smaller
• are 20 to 100 times faster
• are less ambiguous
• generate data access classes that are easier to use programmatically

Protocol buffers were written by Kenton Varda, based on an original design by Sanjay Ghemawat, Jeff Dean, and others. The package is used widely inside Google:

Protocol buffers are now Google’s lingua franca for data – at time of writing, there are 48,162 different message types defined in the Google code tree across 12,183 .proto files. They’re used both in RPC systems and for persistent storage of data in a variety of storage systems.

Version 2.0.0 Beta is available for download now. It supports C++, Java, and Python, but you can easily add support for other languages. All the source code is provided under the Apache license, and there are no restrictions on using this in free or commercial software.