iPhone: who wouldn't want one?

Ok, let me join the rest of the internet and blogosphere in saying: "I want an Apple iPhone ... NOW." When Steve Jobs announced it would be available in June, I felt my heart sink a little. Oh well. I guess this means I can just focus on getting my work done until June rolls around.

They have photos over at MacRumors. Very, very cool stuff. I know it is Steve's job to hype his company and his products, but his statement about the iPhone being revolutionary might really not be hype. This device is everything Microsoft has been trying to do with Windows Mobile and everything Palm and Blackberry have been doing--but done right. I had thought when the patent came out for touch screen it might be Apple planning a tablet--but using that technology for the iPhone was a stroke of genius. If it works half as well as the demos, it is going to be an incredible product.

I wonder if it will have a Java stack on it? Will it run J2ME? It's running some version of Mac OS X (look out Linux--if they license this, Linux devices could be in for a run for their money), but it's a question of how much of the core OS is on there and how many toolkits have been provided. To be honest, running J2ME would be a joke--why bother with that much horsepower and a screen like that? I'm hoping they just include a full JRE and call it done. Not sure if that is even feasible, but one could hope ;-)

I currently have a project that uses J2ME. It's fun in a very frustrating way. For instance, J2ME has forms, which do auto layout based on the screen or device type. They have nice little flags you can pass in to tell how to structure the rows (that is, it will try to cram stuff on the same row until the width is reached or a flag is set). So I set the flags. But on one device, it says those flags don't exist. On another, they work fine. But they are flags right from the MIDP API documentation! Argh. So I had to just dynamically append "\n" to my string values to force the row breaks in a way that works on any J2ME phone. J2ME is full of that kind of stuff.

As a part of this J2ME project, I also got to write my own POST code from scratch. It was scary how much I had forgotten about mime encoding and POST requests thanks to all the excellent toolkits that are available in every language these days. But it isn't there in J2ME--so I had to go digging on the internet and find some code examples to write my own. Again, frustrating but also strangely fun. It's kind of like making a fire while camping: it can be very frustrating, but when you are heated by the work of your own hands, you get a nice feeling of accomplishment. Perhaps there are easier ways, but it feels good to be able to fend for yourself, to create what you need from scratch.

Hopefully iPhone has a JRE and not J2ME. While it's fun to crank out J2ME, I would love to have Java5 syntax for iPhone apps. If not, I can limp along in J2ME until I teach myself Objective C ;-)