Binary Clock – A Simple Java Program For Mobile Phones
Thursday, December 17th, 2009Here’s an interesting take into how to make an open source program. This should make a good case study on how to plan out and develop a program for distribution to the open source community.
Presenting Binary Clock – a GPLed java program which shows the time in binary. This is a simple java midlet made for nokia phones (from what I’ve heard, it runs on samsung phones too).
Anyways, here are the steps (illustrated):
1. Decide on what you want to do with the program. You can then make a mock drawing on a piece of paper on how the program will respond like what is shown below:
2. You would also have to determine the target audience for your program. In this case, we target mobile phones, mainly nokia phones. To do this, you would have to have appropriate tools for the job ready. Shown below are the tools used to make the program (testing and design). Note that all these tools run in linux (although there are windows versions available, except for Fireworks which is a windows program); Fireworks was run in wine (yes, it does run, for those who are curious).
The final design from the Fireworks layout is below:
3. Since we have tested this in our emulators/sdk, it is now time to test it by ourselves with our available hardware.
4. When you feel that it is more or less ready to be distributed, you announce it to the world, and allow other people to modify and enhance our code.
Many thanks to Daniel Rindt of Visetics (http://www.visetics.com) for sharing the development workflow and the actual program with me. To get the actual source code, please get it here.
