Java ME menu with SVG-tiny.

Finally I did it! All the trial versions of Adobe Illustrator, Ikivo Animator, Beatware Mobile Designer and God knows whats more got expired and I really did start looking for other solutions to create Java ME menu (different than the standard solutions from the J2ME libraries) when finally I did something really simple – I just took a similar thing found on java.net and carefully examined the XML code behind the picture.
Looking for a similar solutions was my latest nightmare, I have to prepare my Final Year Project, the project itself is not about mobile GUI’s so I don’t want to spend much time on it but I just didn’t want to go for a demo with those ugly standard java components.
There are a number of tutorials how to add svg tiny files in Netbeans Mobility Pack but it is very difficult to find a tutorial describing how to create such a file. Nevertheless, I have found myself in a situation where I have just decided to write such a file from scratch and forget about all those fancy tools as they are almost zero compatible between each other (even when each of them produces “standard” svgt file as an output 😉 ), and because of the fact that I couldn’t find enough resources on the net about using them for this purpose.
Speaking about the tools, I have found very strange thing about Beatware Mobile Designer software, so many times seen on the Sun’s/NetBeans tutorias or screencasts, this software is almost impossible to find, maybe my ISP blocks access to their servers for some reason which I can’t imagine, but I had to digg in some very dusty corners of the net to obtain the trial version of this software.
Anyway, maybe sometimes is just best to stick with the simplest tool – text editor!
After a while, when experimenting with the svg document I started to realize that it is not actually that difficult to follow.
Check out the tutorial “Adding and Editing Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) Files in the Mobility Pack” @:
http://www.netbeans.org/kb/55/svg-tutorial.html
The necessary files for this tutorial you can download from:
http://wiki.netbeans.info/wiki/attach/NBDemoSVG/svgs.zip
When you download the svgs.zip and unpack it you will find a file named “menu.svg”,
Open the file in any text editor and you can play with it, checking in Netbeans if it’s still svgt compilant 😉
The menu is pretty simple, consist of two layers, one with graphics beneath menu elements and another one with menu itself :
To create the your own menu just delete the layer with the graphics if you don’t like it and add another one.
You can easily sort out the menu elements, how they are organised and how they work.
1. First thing to remember is that all menu elements must be named with the pattern:
menuItem_blahblah, this is necessary if you want netbeans to recognize the element as an actual menu item.
2. The menu itself consists of simple animated text elements, if you want to add/remove another menu item just copy the existing one and change the element name plus the values in “values” attribute accordingly, you can sort out what values you have to enter there by looking at previous elements.
3. To make the moving box work with additional menu elements you have to put some more work into it, first remove all existing “animateTransform” elements nested within element and insert there new transforms which will work with any number of menu items. The new transforms for my menu look like this:

begin="menuItem_0_download.focusin" dur="0.3s"
end="menuItem_0_download.focusout" fill="freeze"/> 
begin="menuItem_1_animate.focusin" dur="0.3s"
end="menuItem_1_animate.focusout" fill="freeze"/>
begin="menuItem_2_about.focusin" dur="0.3s"
end="menuItem_2_about.focusout" fill="freeze"/> 
begin="menuItem_3_exit.focusin" dur="0.3s"
end="menuItem_3_exit.focusout" fill="freeze"/>
begin="menuItem_4_test.focusin" dur="0.3"
end="menuItem_4_test.focusout" fill="freeze"/>

etc. with “values” element increasing every time by 30.
Here you have transformed, very simple menu –>
Anyone interested in JSR-226 know that there is a problem with SVGt if you want to use components like TextFields etc, as there is on support for these elements in the specs so far, at least I have never hear of it.
If you read this post you are probably looking for solution with custom J2ME GUI or you are one of my curious friends and probably you don’t understand much of this anyway, but if you are the first kind, and you know about any valuable tutorials, tools or simply anything JSR-226 related please post it in comments, any kind of collaboration would be appreciated!