Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news

Just finished developing Abiro Jitter, a basic Twitter client for mobile phones (a MIDlet) on the level of functionality found in TinyTwitter and Twitlet. I won't stay there though, so this is just to test out the Twitter API. It's up at GetJar for free download.

It was very simple to do, so kudos to the Twitter team for that. The transfer is not even encrypted, which is OK for this kind of casual communication.

As a side note: Of course almost all e-mail (including corporate e-mail) sent across the Internet is unencrypted as well, so it's not worse than that. Actually I wonder why we all still transfer e-mail unencrypted and without opt-in. What if you before you send an e-mail to a new recipient first asked for permission to do so, via your everyday e-mail client (similar to how you ask for permission in chat applications). After acceptance you would then have a peer-to-peer connection (logically speaking) with that person, and of course all messages sent over that "channel" would be encrypted by default. That would get rid of all spam and eavesdropping (including from internal management and the government via the mail relay servers). Why isn't it this way already? OK, back to the topic...

I used Mobile Blogger as a base, and all in all it took approx 2 hours to make in its current basic and stable form. It's designed to work on all mobile phones that can at all run MIDlets.

It doesn't look good though, as I use high-level widget calls, but that's what you get for your money. If I'd added e.g. the J2ME Polish UI it would be 30 KB larger. Now it's 13 KB, and half of that is the Jitter logo.

The transfer problems I noticed before mainly occured when running the MIDlet in the MIDP emulator, which is odd. Still, transfer can take a very long time, and sometimes also fail completely.

More later...

(Updated 20070420)