Diamond asked us about an easy way to do dropshadows in Codename One to which I answered that it’s pretty easy thanks to our Gaussian blur support…​ We ended up with this code which is usable but probably not as intuitive for most: Form hi = new Form(“Drop Shadow”, new BorderLayout(BorderLayout.CENTER_BEHAVIOR_CENTER)); FontImage mm = FontImage.createMaterial(FontImage.MATERIAL_PERSON, … In the Shadow

We will make another attempt to migrate to the new xcode 7.x build servers this Sunday. This might introduce some disruptions to your iOS builds but those should be fixable. One of the stackoverflow discussions below sparked an interesting group discussion about improving the UI design of a Codename One app. If you feel your … Questions of the Week XX

We had almost everything ready for the release of the kitchen sink demo this week until one of our fixes broke the build and we couldn’t get everything out in time. It’s disappointing but this means one more week to refine the demo. During our debugging of the contacts demo that is a part of … Performance True Story

One of the first Codename One performance tips is: “Don’t use gradients”. We already wrote about improved performance to gradients in the past but that covered linear gradients and didn’t cover radials on iOS. With recent commits radial gradients are now performant on iOS/Android and elsewhere. On iOS Steve implemented gradients as a shader which … Performant Radial Gradients

A lot of our focus in the past couple of releases has been around the material design icon fonts, they changed the way we build UIs. We also support arbitrary font icons, this features isn’t limited to material icons and we blogged about it a while back. After going back and forth with developers we … Using Icon Fonts Such as Fontello

When picking up a new UI API people often start with a list of items. Lists are often used for navigation, logic and data so it’s a natural place to start. Codename One’s List class is a bad place to start though…​ It’s complex and encumbered and has far better alternatives. How did we Get … Avoiding Lists

It’s cucumber season, there is little going on around here and elsewhere. Stackoverflow mirrors this general trend with seasonal low activity. Our update to the build servers today includes a lot of fixes but is still tame compared to the last update. Onwards to the questions on stackoverflow: Cannot edit new locale in Codename One … Questions of the Week XIX

I hoped todays post would cover the new Kitchen Sink demo but due to a couple of bugs we decided to postpone that to next week. In the meantime I’d like to discuss something I did there which is actually pretty cool and most developers have no idea that we can do: Image Overriding. The … Image Overriding

We tried migrating to the new iOS build servers before and decided to revert the change due to xcode crashes. After a lot of work we think the new server code is ready for production. We will try to migrate to these new servers again on the 28th of August (Sunday) to minimize impact if … Xcode Migration Revisited Again

A couple of years ago at Google IO one of the prominent speakers turned to the audience and asked them: “Raise your hands if you understand the activity lifecycle”. He then proceeded to call them “liars”, claiming that after all his years at Google he still doesn’t get it properly…​ As a guy who worked … Improved Background Behavior

Starting with the next Friday release we will migrate to the new peer support. This migration will allow us to focus on a single code base and remove the branch where we are maintaining the old peer support. If you run into issues you can use the android.newPeer=false build hint to see if the issue … New Peers on by Default on Android

This has been a very busy week with huge changes and new features to the code base. Because of that we will shift the Friday release this week to Sunday so we’ll be able to revert the deployment if build issues occur without affecting too many people. Besides the big changes and new plugin versions … Questions of the Week XVIII