Latest posts from Codename One.
Blog
Insights, release updates, tutorials, and engineering notes from the Codename One team.
Comparing Xamarin and Codename One
Last time around we compared Codename One to QT and this time around I’d like to compare Codename One to the 800 pound gorilla: Xamarin. Xamarin is an amazing product that I contrasted with Codename One in the past but this is worth repeating. On it’s surface Xamarin might seem like a similar tool to Codename One using C# used instead of Java, but this is misleading as the tools are so different conceptually they have very little in common. ...
Featured App – Pumpop
Pumpop is a social networking app in the spirit of tinder that is available globally and installed on many devices all over the world. One of its major draws is it’s portability which will soon extend to Windows Phone as well. Pumpop uses social login controls such as native Facebook login as well as email activation. __ | If you are in a committed relationship I suggest notifying your spouse that you are “just testing this app for work”, ...
Camera Demo
With the 3.4 release we discussed the process of modernizing the demos and the first one we picked for this task is the camera demo which is probably the easiest one of all the demos… The demo is trivial and doesn’t really demonstrate anything other than capturing and showing an image captured from the camera/retrieved from the gallery but this is where it gets interesting. It even works in the JavaScript port so you can even run this in the browser and it works as you’d expect! ...
Java 8 Switch, New Preferences & Demo Structure
With the 3.4 release we discussed the process of modernizing the demos and also mention that we would continue the trend of building Codename One on top of itself. We now have a rough outline of what we are going to do possibly starting with the next plugin update. Java 8 Switch New builds will use Java 8 by default for all projects. In the past we needed you to define the build hint java.version=8 and if you left it out we defaulted to java.version=5. ...
Switching on Android Marshmallow Permission Prompts
Up until Marshmallow (version 6) Android used a rather obtuse permission system that very few end users understood. With API level 23 (Marshmallow) Android finally shifted to a structure that makes more sense similarly to iOS. Marshmallow asks a users permission the first time an API is used e.g. when accessing contacts the user will receive a prompt whether to allow contacts access. __ Permission can be denied and a user can later on revoke/grant a permission via external settings UI This is really great as it allows apps to be installed with a single click and no permission prompt during install which can increase conversion rates! ...
Questions of the Week IV
I’d like to open this weeks post by covering some things we do and try to avoid on stackoverflow. I try to upvote your questions/answers whenever I can and most of us should upvote questions that are decent especially from a person who has low ranking and might not have the stack overflow experience to phrase their question properly. Points in stackoverflow are important as they provide you with more capabilities and allow you to place bounties on questions that need assistance. In that regard it’s important that if you ask a question and get the right answer you should accept that answer, this provides points both to you and to the person who asked it. ...
NetBeans Plugin Update Center
The NetBeans plugins.netbeans.org site has been down for another weekend and has been down again today. This isn’t ideal as we like the convenience the official plugin center affords in our update process. However, this blocks installs and updates of our plugin most of which originate from NetBeans. As a workaround we decided to relaunch our own update center which we will manually update with each plugin to allow you to install the plugin even when NetBeans is down. The URL for this update center is https://www.codenameone.com/files/netbeans/updates.xml ...
Clarifying our Support
For years we treated support with a “we’ll meet our developers where they are” attitude which is problematic now that we have more than 6 free support channels! Notice that we didn’t include the email/phone support for pro/enterprise users in the list of 6 channels… We try to respond to every query within 24 hours in stack overflow and the discussion group: StackOverflow – please try asking any technical question here. We know it’s sometimes challenging but the payout is great as the site is very searchable and provides a treasure trove of Codename One information thanks to your questions! ...
Codename One 3.4 Now Live
We are thrilled to announce the immediate availability of Codename One 3.4! Version 3.4 brings with it refinement and stability as its core features, this is a trend that we are very pleased with and intend to carry on to version 3.5. Highlights of this Release Rewritten documentation – the developer guide was written from the ground up and the JavaDocs were significantly improved IntelliJ IDEA Plugin rewrite – the new IntelliJ IDEA support is as good as the NetBeans plugin ...
Windows Phone 8.1 & UWP Support
Fabricio just submitted a pull request that Steve merged to provide support for Windows Phone 8.1 in our new UWP (Universal Windows Platform) port of Codename One. This is huge news as it means we can fully migrate to the new port without leaving developers behind! This means we’ll be able to make the migration to the new Windows port quicker and throw away the old port without losing much. ...
New Getting Started Video – Eclipse Version
We finally uploaded the last of the 3 hello world videos covering Eclipse, which now joins the ranks of the NetBeans and IntelliJ/IDEA videos. Check out the Eclipse version here: These are probably the three most important videos we have which is why we decided to start with them as part of our restructuring of our video tutorials & guides. Now that we got them out of the way we need to decide on the next high priority video? ...
Questions Of The Week III
We’re releasing new plugins today in for the 3.4 release, if there are major regressions we’ll push out new versions for the release itself but if they are stable they will be the actual release versions. We had a great week on stackoverflow as well with many excellent questions. As usual this post isn’t exhaustive and doesn’t cover all the questions asked, but it should provide a sense of the top discussions of the week. ...