I’m having trouble deciding if I should start out writing tutorials that covers the basics of J2ME programming, or maybe even the basics of Java programming? Or if I should just refer readers to other tutorials on the internet that covers those basics, and go straight to writing about the more advanced stuff?
Now I know I don’t have any readers right now, but I’m kinda hoping that’ll change soon, and then maybe someone will be able to give me some feedback on this issue.
While this is still very much a work in progress, I’ve decided to release this first beta version. It’ll be a functional version that supports several features listed in the previous post about the program.
Short guide
When you initially start it up, you’ll see a currency symbol on the screen, and the application will appear to have frozen up. It hasn’t, it’s just loading the list of currencies from an array, which seems to take forever (20+ seconds on slower phones) unless you have a powerful phone like the W960 from Sony-Ericsson.
Once it finishes loading the screen should look something like this:
There are three important fields to consider here; the first one is the amount, which represents the amount of “from” currency you’re converting into “to” currency. The other two are the “from” and “to” currencies selected with the “Sel” (or “Select”) option.
Once the currencies have been selected and the amount has been entered, you can activate the “Calc” option which will go online and fetch the rating (after asking for permission to do so), and then calculate the result before displaying it to you.
The rates will be stored for up to 24 hours after which the program will try to download the new rates, if you attempt to convert between those two rates again.
Please note that the program will use the rate for conversions both ways which can give a fractional difference in the result. Thus is you convert USD to EUR, it’ll download the rate for that. If you then convert USD to EUR, or EUR to USD within 24 hours, it’ll use that same rating, which saves bandwidth, something that’s desirable to most people.
The rest
There are other parts of the program that I haven’t explained here, like the “MemStats” page, which will show you how much memory the program is using, as well as the number of entries in the RecordStore (RS). It’ll also allow you to “Purge RS” which will delete entries older than 24 hours, though this shouldn’t as such be necessary since they don’t take up a lot of space, but running through the records can take a bit longer (mere seconds) if there’s a lot of entries in the RS.
“Clear RS” will remove all entries, no matter what their age is. And of course, you can use the “List RS” to see the individual rates registered in the RS as well as how old they are. From here you can also Purge or Clear, as well as delete individual entries.
Reporting back
If you find anything wrong with the program, no matter how minute it might be, please let me know about it. But please be specific, because comments such as “This sucks!” are valid opinions, but they won’t help me create a better program. I hope some of you will try it out, and let me know what you think.
Before I start writing tutorials on how I program certain things, I feel it’s important to tell people what sort of development environment I’ve chosen for myself.
OS – Windows XP/Vista
While this one is less important I still want to mention it, as there is one tool I use that isn’t yet available for other platforms, but that tool isn’t necessary in order to develop these things.
IDE – Netbeans 6.x
I have tried out multiple IDEs over time, and for Java development, in particular J2ME, I’ve found Netbeans to work better for me, especially starting with version 6. Now you may personally prefer another IDE, like Eclipse, which is fine by me. It just means you’ll likely need to do some manual work in converting things from how I do it in Netbeans, into how you’d do it in your preferred IDE.
Source Control – Subversion
In this day and age I find it nearly impossible to do any serious development without using Subversion. Of course it might be overkill for someone who develops alone, on just one computer, but I use a laptop as well as a desktop PC, so for me it’s definitely necessary.
Extra – Sony-Ericsson Wireless Toolkit
This one apparently only works on Windows, which sucks a bit, but it’s not strictly necessary, so you don’t have to worry about it if you cannot install it on your system.
That’s all, folks
I believe this is it for now. Shall get started on a tutorial soon. 
Contrary to popular belief, there’s nothing sinister about the BS in my project titles, but rather I find that “Blazing Skies Currency Converter” was a bit too long, so I decided that “BSCurrency” was a far better title for it. Same goes for any other project I make.
Why?
I was looking around for a good currency converter for my mobile phone, but couldn’t find one that worked the way I wanted it to, so I decided to make one myself. I’m sure if I had looked further, I would’ve found what I was after, but I’ve been meaning to learn about J2ME, and so this seemed like a really good place to start.
What can it do?
Obviously it can convert between multiple currencies, actually 150 of them. Currently it only fetch the rates online, after which it can store and use them until they expire, which is after 24 hours on v0.6.x and user-configurable starting with v0.7.x. In a later version there will likely be a way to have static rates, meant to help those with either no ability to go online from their device, or just having way too expensive a dataplan. Doing so will take up more space on the device, but will make conversions endlessly faster.
Anything else?
Right now I have some plans for the system, which will involve quite a bit of coding, but it is my hope that the changes will make the software even better. The main changes involves having a list of favorites that the system will use, saving time both when choosing currencies, and also on load times. Another important addition is the settings dialog, which will enable the users to change the few, but important settings in the software.
Offline support is scheduled for a later version.
Okay, so this is it.. I’ve created this blog mainly for me to write about the various programming stuff I do. Whether or not I’ll be getting any readers is left to be seen, but one can only hope so.
Currently I’m working on a small and relatively simple currency converter for J2ME enabled devices, in particular mobile phones, and I’ve been thinking about writing it down in more details, like a sort of tutorial into building the applications that I do.
I don’t know if I’ll do that yet or not, but I might try it, see if there are people who will enjoy it and/or benefit from it, in which case I may continue doing it.
