Two weeks of beta1 - Let's get started with the dev builds

So I've now been working with the NB 6 releases beta1 and after, after here being the dev build of last week Monday. My strategy here is to install on Monday the latest dev build I can download and use it for a week, not installing any newer builds unless there's a bug that is holding me up. Sofar, I have one bug that is keeping me from progressing on developing my game and sofar it hasn't been resolved. Unfortunately.

Yesterday I installed the latest dev build, so now it is time to start raving and ranting on last week's Monday dev build. And let me put it this way, NB is really good and shaping up.

So just to re-iterate, what is that bug that is preventing me from developing the greatest mobile game ever produced? WS Client support on J2ME. And with the build of last week, that wasn't resolved. Since I filed a bug, I am waiting for that 'RESOLVED' message out of Issuezilla, which I didn't get yet. But in the meantime I started on developing the second incarnation of our Pong based game, called Mong, from scratch and I noticed some back-end functionality missing in our multi-player strategy game that I need to put in.

So what else is going on? SQE is back in the picture, as the SQE AUC was updated. And gosh, do I have a lot of bugs to be found in my code. Thanks to the modules in the SQE they're all visible now. Hmmm, I guess I should be happy about this. The good thing about something like SQE is that you get good quality plugins with one go, and you don't have to worry, in theory, that you are compromising your IDE.
Something that I really don't like, is the fact that when you have some (possibly crippled) JavaDoc on for example a method, than you need to fix it one step at a time. There's no such thing as 'fix JavaDoc' for crippled or incomplete JavaDoc. Guess the NB developers develop their code by starting of with the JavaDoc and then implement what was documented. Probably the way it should be done... Something I just came across is the lack of something called 'Get JavaDoc from overridden method', which would copy the JavaDoc from the method that I am overriding. In fact, the overriding method should always comply with the documentation of the overridden method, since it is just an alternative implementation of the same functionality. Purity over all.

In last week's status update from Jiri, he mentioned that there was suspiciously little email traffic on the J2ME stuff in NB 6... well Jiri, you have to blame the Mobility guys, since they're doing a great job. Really! I still have to use the databinding they came up with and the game-editor features. Time is here the bottleneck, anybody found a way to cram more than 24 hours in a day?

The coming week is going to be slow, I have to finish some stuff at a customer of mine, I need to do my Q3 taxes, but most important of all. I need to prepare for my trip to Oman. A week of scuba diving it is. I just hope that it doesn't mean that I will be kicked of the NetCAT team because of this.

Iwan

PS: Last week I got some really excellent feedback on my blogs. For one, I was told how to get the libraries from one project to another, and secondly the SQE AUC is fixed and now I got those excellent tools back in NB. Thanks to you all.