A Review of LWUIT on the Samsung Instinct
filed in apps on Sep.20, 2008
I am working on a simple game app (TicTacToe) for the phone – seemed a good way to learn what the phone has to offer. I started out playing with the LCDUI.
LCDUI on the Instinct is far from implemented – mainly in the text input department – but my game is simple graphics, logic, and pen presses. I don’t really need text input abilities, but if I call “GameCanvas.hasPointerEvents”, I find that the device does NOT support pointer events via LCDUI – doh!
Now, I’ve been playing with the LWUIT (LightWeight User Interface Toolkit) on the Samsung Instinct. Not bad – not bad at all. It does support pointer events.
While running the LWUIT demo, the Instinct seems to be way underpowered, but it could be that the demo is just trying to “demo” everything and overpowering the device’s abilities.
Sprint’s Emulator for the Instinct from WTK 3.1 runs the demo fine, but a PC has a lot more power. The emulator is not real accurate in it’s representation of the Instinct – for example, several of the screen transitions work great on the emulator (I really like the “Cube” transition) but are not available on the phone at all.
Theming is a large part of LWUIT and works fine on the Instinct.
Like most toolkits, there is no way to input text on the Instinct, but since LWUIT and LCDUI seem to get along well, this won’t be a problem when the update that provides LCDUI compliance is available (soon, I hope, I hope, I hope).
September 21st, 2008 on 8:08 am
Try running with the latest LWUIT drop from SVN, performance should be better. There are also several optimization tips both in the LWUIT blog and in the LWUIT developer guide.
September 22nd, 2008 on 9:15 am
Thanks Shai. I downloaded the .svn and will try the demo again. I also ran the LWUITSpeed benchmark included in the .svn and have posted those results in another post.
September 22nd, 2008 on 10:06 am
Shai – I tired the LWUIT Demo using the LWUIT from the .svn. It runs a lot better – wqith the 8/14 rev, I was having major issues with the “isDragged” being so sensitive that it was near immpossible to select a widget. That seems to be fixed now.
With the .svn (210) I have, any time I access the menu in the lower right corner, the app hangs and I have to exit.