BB ScreenShooter by Oppitronic
To take screenshots of Blackberry screens, I use the GUI applications BB ScreenShooter and BB ScreenStream created by Oppitronic. I installed both programs in a folder together with the javaloader.exe included in the RIM Desktop Manager.
Additional tools to take screenshots from BlackBerry devices are presented at the website Binary Head.
Today my iPod Touch became frozen with a white blank screen. It was unresponsive to buttons and all other inputs and not recognized by iTunes. The reset procedure indicated by Apple to push the Sleep/Wake button and the Home button at the same time, for at least ten seconds, didn’t help.
After waiting until the iPod ran out of battery completely and recharging, the iPod Touch recovered and is now fully operational again.
Last update : August 30, 2012
Opera Mini 4.2 Simulator
Opera Mini 6.5 Simulator
Opera Software ASA gives developers tools needed to build and test HTML content for different devices on their PC’s.
Opera Mobile Emulator is the desktop version of Opera’s smart phone browser. The Opera Mobile Emulator renders pages as close as you can get to how it would look on a real phone. It can be paired with Opera Dragonfly, a great tool to develop and debug web applications.
The Opera Mini Simulator is the online version of Opera’s Mobile Emulator. It can be accessed from any Java-enabled Web browser, or downloaded and run independently. Two versions were available in the past : Opera Mini 4.2,the world’s most popular mobile Web browser, and Opera Mini 6.5. Today Opera Mini 7, the newest version of this browser, is online. All versions are powered by MicroEmulator, a pure Java implementation of Java 2 Micro Edition in Java 2 Standard Edition licensed under LGPL.
Opera is also available as desktop browser for Windows, Mac and Linux, for tablets and for TV sets.
The Opera TV Emulator gives developers the tools needed to build and test HTML5 content for TVs on their PCs, which will emulate the target device’s environment with no need for physical access to the TV, set-top box or Blu-ray player. The Opera TV Emulator offers a direct, easy way to develop, test and debug and can serve as a reference implementation.
OperaDriver and OperaWatir are toolkits used for automating interactions with web browsers. OperaDriver and OperaWatir allow you to drive the Opera browser and emulate user behavior.
ARCHOS 35 Home Connect
ARCHOS continue to push technological boundaries and innovation with two new Android devices designed for the home – The ARCHOS 35 Home Connect, an Android-based web radio and the ARCHOS 35 Smart Home Phone, an Android DECT phone. Both are smart devices and feature all of the Android functionalities.
The ARCHOS 35 Home Connect is the perfect music box and the best portable Android device for streaming radio and music anywhere at home with an amazing sound quality.
The ARCHOS 35 Smart Home Phone will make owning a home phone popular again.
Both cutting-edge ARCHOS Android-based home devices, thanks to the front facing webcams, bring new usages such as video calling, baby monitoring and even room surveillance.
A web browser based simulator for quickly testing an iPhone web applications is available on the website TestiPhone.com. The simulator is based on iPhoney, a free iPhone web simulator for designers.
mobileOK
W3C provides a mobileOK checker to perform various tests on a Web Page to determine its level of mobile-friendliness. The tests are defined in the mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0 specification.
The checker is based on the open source mobileOK checker library developed by the Mobile Web Best Practices working group.
The mobileOK checker is part of the MobiWeb2.0 Project and of W3C Quality Assurance Tools.
mobileOK conformance can be claimed using POWDER.
The mobiReady testing tool evaluates mobile-readiness using industry best practices & standards. The free report provides both a score (from 1 to 5) and in-depth analysis of pages to determine how well your site performs on a mobile device.
The WordPress Mobile Pack gets a high score with this test tool.
BlackBerry Playbook from RIM
Yesterday, RIM announced the launch of the BlackBerry Playbook tablet. The tablet will utilize an OS created by the recently acquired QNX company. The BlackBerry Tablet OS, which will offer full OpenGL and POSIX, support alongside web standards such as HTML5. The PlayBook will handle Flash content via Flash 10.1, as well as Adobe AIR apps. It’s equipped with an 1024 x 600, capacitive multitouch display, a Cortex A9-based, dual-core 1GHz CPU, 1GB of RAM, and a 3 megapixel front-facing camera (for video conferencing) along with a 5 megapixel rear lens. The PlayBook will be capable of 1080p HD video, and comes equipped with an HDMI port as well as a microUSB jack, 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi, and Bluetooth 2.1. The Playbook will be available beginning 2011.
Cellspark version 2
The CellSpark animation editor creates compact flash-like vector graphics animations for nearly all Java enabled phones.
Developped by Colin Mummery a few years ago, this tool allows to create presentations, screen savers and more for different handsets.
Runnable midlets can be created for Midp 1 and Midp 2 devices. In 2005, during the Luxembourg Presidency of the Council of the European Union from 1st January till 30th June 2005, I used the licensed version of Cellspark to create a multimedia show about the member states of the European Union as a Midlet for the Nokia handset 6680.
Today, a reinstalled Cellspark (a java program) on my new labtop running Vista and Java 6 without any problems. The program is still very useful, userfriendly and fascinating.
Last update : August 1, 2012
jar/jad 2 cod/alx
BlackBerry uses .cod and .alx files to deploy Java applications from the PC desktop (BB Desktop Manager) to a BlackBerry device. These files are generated automatically by the BlackBerry JDE or by the Eclipse BlackBerry plugin.
.alx is an XML-based BlackBerry application descriptor which can be generated by hand. An example for the Java application FirstApp.cod is shown below :
<loader version="1.0">
<application id="FirstApp">
<name >
</name>
<description >
</description>
<version >
</version>
<vendor >
</vendor>
<copyright >
Copyright (c) 2010
</copyright>
<fileset Java="1.5">
<directory >
MyFolder
</directory>
<files >
FirstApp.cod
</files>
</fileset>
</application>
</loader>
To download a BlackBerry application over the air to a BlackBerry device, a standard .jad file is used to describe the application. The .jad file is selected from the browser to load the .cod file. If the BlackBerry service to download standard MIDlets is enabled, the Mobile Data Service feature of the BES provides a built-in transcoder that converts .jar files into .cod files.
Brandon Dante Swift developped an offline conversion tool from .jar/.jad files to .cod/.alx files (JAR2ALX). The free version 1.5.1 is available at the website Brandon Swift Creations. The pro version 1.5 is now also available free of charge. Brandon developed another useful tool that makes capturing your Blackberry’s screen to an avi video as easy as a click of a button (PC program BeVi with usb connection). Donations are appreciated for all three programs.