Rants And Ramblings About Mobile Technology
Anders Borg writing about the fun and crazy world of mobile and Internet service technologies.
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Sunday, July 16, 2006
Using NetBeans Mobility Pack for prototyping UI flows
The Visual Mobile Designer (VMD) in NetBeans Mobility Pack provides an easy way to design the UI flows of your Java ME / J2ME / MIDP applications. VMD is not optimised for games and other graphics-intensive applications. Rather it's based on the functionality of the lcdui class, and hence is optimised for creating input form, setup, login, etc screens.What I've found recently is that in the design phase it can be used effectively for creating mockups of the application UI, and it's even possible to adjust the UI flow when meeting with the customer and show the changes directly, as a UI flow diagram or by running the mockup in the WTK emulator, or even on a real phone. Customers that don't get impressed by that are rare.
What's really nice about this is that once the UI flow has been designed and the customer's satisified, the same UI flow can directly be used in the final product, as what VMD creates is pure Java code, and you can switch back and forth between Java code and the VMD views any number of times during development.
If you currently use Eclipse, or even a simple text editor, for writing your MIDP applications, the above might be reason enough to check out NetBeans.
At least I'm completely hooked on NetBeans.
Intro to the NetBeans Mobility Pack
Example of how the VMD views look like:
Abiro - The Lab - Java ME - NetBeans
