Mobile Processing 0006 ALPHA is now available for download.

http://mobile.processing.org/

This release brings the PDE development environment up to date with the latest bug fixes in Processing 0124 Beta along with a number of improvements.  The update feature will now also update documentation in addition to the core and library APIs.  When the automatic update occurs upon program launch, the progress dialog will be displayed so that you can monitor (and cancel) the activity.  You can now always check the version of core and library apis installed in the About screen.

The Create Font feature now has options for which characters to include in the font, allowing you to customize the character set for only what you need, greatly reducing the size (and memory footprint, critical on the phone) of bitmap fonts.

This is the first release to include bundled reference documentation, accessible from the Help menu and with the CTRL-SHIFT-F keyboard shortcut for looking up documentation based on your current selection.  I'm happy to say I've made a lot of progress in automating the documentation generation process so it will be easier moving forward to keep things up to date and documented.

The core APIs include a revamped PClient and new PRequest objects for HTTP Internet networking.  They make it easier to make background network requests, which is critical for being able to animate and draw to the screen while your phone initiates a connection.  The Fetch example has been updated to demonstrate its basic use.  I've also updated the Yahoo! Sonar example to use their latest APIs, as well as to use the Phone library for dialing numbers (making the example MIDP 2.0 compatible only).

The core APIs also include the first version of a set of UI components for creating simple GUIs.  Each component has an example embedded with its documentation.  I look forward to hearing how these work out and improving them over time.

Finally, I've renamed the freeMemory/totalMemory methods to currentMemory/reportedMemory to avoid naming conflicts with the latest mpowerplayer sdk used on the Mac, since it didn't appear that the sdk was going to be updated anytime soon.

There's a lot to play with, so I hope everyone is encouraged to try it out (perhaps again) and see what you can build...!

Francis