School this semester was hard. I have a hard time with exam environments. Even my programming course took a lot of my time due to our (pretty cool) service learning project.

We made a J2ME app for a local community centre in our school which involved allowing a user to see his or her timetable and set reminders to the calendar. J2ME was a pain to work with, so some of the group members and I vowed (sort of) to complete it. We may end up making it blackberry specific. Code signing for J2ME is pretty expensive and we aren’t getting paid.

So lately I had some free time in between exams and played around with the new widget api for the blackberry. It was fun and easy, but the resulting app, maybe due to me never having used javascript before, was painfully slow. I used jquery and learned quite a lot about javascript dev, and managed to improve it quite a bit, but its clear a native app would be faster and not that much harder to make. I conclude that if you’re fine with Java, there is no harm in sticking with it. it was a fun experience, though, and I’m glad I gave it a try.