1. Where to start after downloading the SDKs?

Having a standalone project manager is a good way to invite developers in your mobile world.

So I downloaded the SDKs (see my previous article) and now I’m trying to find out how fast I can get ‘hello world’ working on a simulator. Here’s what I got so far.

• Nokia: there’s a getting-started section on the Nokia site. This is a step by step thing which would be great if I wanted to use NetBeans. I don’t know which IDE I’ll use. I guess I’ll download NetBeans to keep it simple, stupid. Over slow bandwidth, I’ll be waiting.
• Sony Ericsson – can’t find a getting started section online.
• Samsung… Here they have a getting started document that’s not really hard to find, and, apparently, a NetBeans/Eclipse free project wizard. Now, that seems easy enough.

After literally 10 minutes, I got HelloWorld running in a Samsung device simulator.

2. Hello 3D world?

It’s nice to show how to perform I/O operations. It’s even nicer when we know where to find the code samples.

So I decided to stay with the Samsung SDK for now, and try to get 3D stuff running in the simulator.

JSR184 Mobile 3D Graphics API is a tutorial with source code, explaining how to make a 3D app with JME.

It’s a pity the archive linked from the article only provides a .jad file, not the source (plus I run out of luck trying to run this directly.

Never mind, let’s see what we can do with this.

It turned out that the example fits in one file, with a bunch of inner classes. This failed gracefully, throwing a URI exception.

I uncommented a few lines just to get a clean run. Nice black screen. Then I poked around, and finally I got my hands on all code samples, neatly bundled with the SDK (yea, all the nice examples pop up when you choose, ‘Open Project’ in the Samsung SDK tool, but the tutorial doesn’t say that.

I kind of liked the so called Pogoroo example. It’s not very far from the kind of data I want to display, and blender has an .m3g exporter. So I guess I’ll need to slow down a bit and actually learn something.