Ok, so Nuux is about real-time nightlife information. You can checkout live where friends are partying, checkin to locations and events, message your friends for free, see what’s the hottest venues and generally get insider information about a particular town. To get my motivation behind this project maybe I can explain how it all began:

I was going out with some friends and ended up in a place where we had already paid some cover charge but it was not good at all. How would it be to have some network to check-out what other places and events are like, right now? An app to see where your friends are right now, how they like it, see pics, and recommendations from people just like me?

The idea developed into what has become Nuux right now. Currently you can checkout Nuux as a web platform, a mobile site, and the mobile application. Nuux is tightly integrated into Facebook (Single Sign On, Friend Connect, Publish, Pictures Sharing etc.). This means that for example the there is no actual friend building process required you can just use your connections from Facebook if you like, which are sync’ed on a daily basis.

The Mobile App, which is actually the main part is a 2ME Client available for most of the phones from Nokia, Samsung, SE, LG, Moto (other clients are comming, Blackberry the soonest in about a months time, then iPhone, Android). The website currently only shows a small part of the functionality which is available in Nuux. For example you can let your friends know of your Weekend Plans by linking directly to a venue of your city. Venues can all be filled with user generated content – ratings, tags, comments, pics, and weekend plans. So you can find out what is going to be a popular venue in a particular city on all those attributes.

In the near future we will also offer an API, to enable fellow developers developing their own applications on the Nuux network. If you would like to be notified for an early access, please contact us on developers@nuux.net.

If you would like to get more info please check out the Nuux Blog, or follow Nuux on Twitter .

And yes, please let me know what you think about it either in the comments or on uservoice.

Thanks – and I promise this will be the first and only plug for Nuux, really!

Given that this language is very old school, it makes me wonder what would have happended to the Appshop and Apple if they opened the Shop for Java, PHP or Python?

Until about 1 years ago the options for cross-platform mobile development were

• doing platform specific native builds for Symbian, WinMo, Blackberry, UIQ, etc. or
• Java development with specific twists per handset / handset group or
• WAP/XHTML Mobile Web Site

One of the biggest pains faced by mobile developers was – and still is – device fragmentation. However, with the iPhone a lot of developers turned to develop natively for just one platform because of the tremendous ease and improvements it brought to about every aspect of mobile development:
distribution, ui – experience, not treating apps as third class citicents, monetarization options and needed targeting of devices to reach a critical mass. Now, Apple succeed to generate more than 2 billion downloads with less than 2% market share, truly amazing.

In the same year, autom 2007 Android came out with a SDK which promised even a better world for mobile developers. Due to its nature Android had a slower start, but is definitely emerging as one of the big platforms for the future.

Also in the same year Sun open-source released their LWUIT framework for J2ME development. LWUIT is a GUI framework to target not only Smartphones but also Featurephones of the last few years that support J2Me.

And with the iPhone being such a success of course the other players started to move as well and brought along their own SDK to develop compelling UI’s: Flash Lite (Adobe), WebOS (RIM), Bada (Samsung), Memo (Nokia), Widgets (many), JavaFX (Sun). Last but not least the J2ME spec leads finally settled on a MIDP 3.0 spec and the MSA standard which is pretty cool if it would be adapted by many players.

So instead of fragmentation being reduced, over the years, it has actually being increased. What has changed to the good are that some platforms like the iPhone, Android and maybe others offer now a fairly consistent set of handsets that are fairly wide distributed, so that selecting / specializing on one/two platform became an option for the mobile developer.

However also in the last few years mobile browsers have greatly improved and WebKit became a quasi browser standard. Also manufactures are starting to build javascript extensions to expose phone features like location, multimedia etc. One could argue that given this trend and the forces behind (Google, HTML 5, … ) should give the mobile web sites a good chance of a revival pretty soon. The problem however is, that even though with modern browsers those sites will not be that ugly anymore, users expectations for UI’s have increased as well. Another problem is discovery of mobile web sites. Even though there are 100′000 apps in the app shop, this numer is nothing in compare to the number of possible websites out there.

So what are the new possibilites for cross platform development now, 1 year later?

• Widgets. W3C standard (no handsets yet though), or JIL (by Vodafone, Verizon, SoftBank and China Mobile): JIL defines a widget standard and more that 350 APIs to access to phone features, and this will be implemented on a lot of handsets in 2010/2011 (already in the oPhone from China Mobile or in the H1 from Samsung for instance).
• CrossPlatform SDK Frameworks, players include PhoneGap, Rhomobile, and Appcelerator Titanium

The interesting thing about the cross platform SDK’s is that they supposly allow you to create real native looking apps with a uniform technology which is HTML/CSS/JS or Ruby in the case of Rhomobile. So instead of going the long curve of learing Objective-C and then porting the thing to Java for Android you can a) work with a well known web technology and b) have a single code base. Very promising, if they all will live up the promisses the future will show. If anybody has experience  using those SDK’s I would be very interested in opinions and comparisons.

It really did drive me crazy. Bug only appeared in a certain phone model with a certain version of the app. Not in emulator, not in other phones, not with other version of the app and just 2 weeks ago – without major change in the app – all was running good in this certain phone. Of course I did not remember one crucial thing that happended in these 2 weeks: I upgraded my IDE NB from 6.1 to 6.7.1.

Shouldn’t matter you say? Not in J2ME development. In J2ME developmpent as a rule everything matters, I mean every little tiny seemingly irrelevant thingy you can imagine. So also an IDE change *did* matter.

The reason I found after about 2 hours of WTF’s: with 6.7.1 the proguard obfuscator changed and apparently introduced some bugs. Without obfuscating the app was running all smooth on this partucular phone. Fun thing is that I actually already had this problem once with an earier version of proguard, made a note and forgot about it.

I know about the location where the errors occured and am guessing its one of the errors that has been fixed in version 4.4. After I upgraded from proguard 4.2 to 4.4 all good again. I really want to remember this the next time I encounter such a nasty bug. I hope this post helps me with it, and hopefully it is also useful for some of you guys.