Having recently acquired a Pocket PC phone with 3.5G internet, I find myself in need of a feed-reader. I use NetNewsWire on my Mac – and it is superb – and NewsGator to ensure that I need only read once across all my devices. However, NewsGator has two flaws: firstly, there is no Linux client, forcing you to use the somewhat rubbish web interface; and secondly, the Windows Mobile client is mediocre at best, not to mention pricey.
What to do? Well, write one of course. And the most tempting target would be .NET Compact Framework. It allows you to build for the PPC in a high-level language with a nice framework. Plus, it would be nice to learn some C#. But then I ran into a problem – Microsoft firmly believe that no one uses anything but Windows. Hence, all their development tools are only available for Windows.
Microsoft are daft on development tools – unlike the world of Java, where everyone and his dog offers an IDE and most are free and really rather good, Microsoft prefer to make life easy only if you buy Visual Studio. Great for corporates, for whom a MSDN subscription is a small investment. Bad for individuals, small companies and those who just want to learn. They have released a SDK for .NET Compact version 2.0, but you’ll still be hunting elsewhere to find a nice environment.
But this is all beside the point for those with a Linux box or a Mac. Yes, there is Mono, although the most I could find about .NET Compact support was a comment about having to hack assemblies to get the .NET runtime to accept them. All in all, it would appear Microsoft doesn’t want to make it easy to develop for their flagship mobile OS. Indeed, they seem positively desperate to ensure it stays chained to a Windows PC.
So, I’ve ended up falling back on J2ME. J2ME is maddening in some ways – it’s very basic, it’s very modular (and hence your never sure what device supports what version of what), has a very small standard library and lacks environmental integration on some platforms (such as, surprise, Pocket PC). The UI structures are extremely basic – I’m having to write my own tree control, for instance. But, on the other hand, the SDK was a 40Mb download, and I was up in running in IntelliJ in minutes. (Or, you can download NetBeans and the Mobility Pack for a free environment).
It’s annoying in a way, as I’ve played with J2ME in the past and wanted to try something new. But at the end of the day I’d rather cut code then arse about with the basics.
