Nothing, however simple, goes without saying

My girlfriend borrowed a couple of cables from her office today, so I finally managed to wire the E61 to my netbook. As a first best, I hoped, Eclipse Pulsar would recognize my device. As a second best, I was thinking using the new and shiny Ovi suite to install my test app. To the average noob, Pulsar is the usual rhizomy mess of menus and panels, so after toying with the spider awhile I decided to try my luck online, indeed landing a nice Wiki page Entitled “How to install Java ME application in mobile phone“. Among numerous equally-unattractive-to-a-developer ways to install java apps on a nokia phone, I quote:

“If the device has a serial cable port and connectivity software for a PC, the MIDlet can be installed on the device over a serial cable”

Which I edited to:

To install the MIDlet, double-click on either the *.jar or *.jad file and follow on-screen instructions. On a PC, if jar/jad files are not associated with PC suite or Ovi suite by default, you can right click and select “open with” then choose “Ovi suite” or “PC suite” as applicable.

I always thought that PC suite associating jar files to itself in this way is somehow of a pre-emptive way to suggest that java doesn’t have a life beyond Nokia phones. Now I will modify my file associations, as I happen to have tens of thousands of lines of code on my PC that are nothing MIDlet.

I don’t care whether this goes without saying or not. I wasted another hour on this. I’m in a bad mood.

If it doesn’t work, downgrade CLDC and/or MIDP

In Pulsar, open the M folder labeled Application Descriptor. Then select create package to actually get a deployable jar/jad file. Since my device is 5 years old, I had a friendly ‘can’t run application’ or such message when I tried installing. By default, Pulsar is configuring to MIDP 2.1 (at the time of writing this, using the latest SDK). Until I find a reason not to, I’ll just downgrade CLDC and MIDP (in the ‘M panel’) to the oldest version that I can run something against.

Pingoo goes live

After I downgraded MIDP to 2.0, (note the advice on Nokia wiki if it doesn’t work for you), the Pingoo displayed at a decent FPS on my E61. I really need to come up with something chunkier, right?

So I used fractal subdivision in Blender to bump the poly count to ~10,000. This slows down the M3G exporter to a crawl because it spits out console output for every face. The M3G file inflated from 21kb to 565kb. FPS dropped to 2-3 frames per second, flat shaded, with 2 point lights enabled (no textures).