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MS in Software Engineering, Technical Track Blog

Wondering if a Carnegie Mellon degree is right for you? Read about our students' experiences through the MS in Software Engineering, Technical Track program.

Rahul is a full-time MS Software Engineering, Technical Track student. He loves traveling, trekking, swimming and is a complete movie buff.
Anthony is a 2nd year part time student in the MS Software Engineering, Technical track program and works at OSIsoft as a Software Engineer. He loves spending time with his family, hiking, biking, gardening, cooking, and sometimes photography.
Suma is an alumna of the MS Software Engineering, Technical Track program. A Mechanical Engineering undergrad, she loves writing and is passionate about music, shopping and dogs.
Minh is a Software Design Engineer at Microsoft and alumnus of the MS Software Engineering program. He is also a Vietnamese community activist, a cat-lover and passionate fan of film music.
Nick is a Software Engineer at Google and a first-year grad student at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley. He loves hiking, gaming, and both really extremely good and extremely bad movies.

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Construction II – Building a Thick Client for the Mobile Phone


I started the year by missing school. Great.

While the majority of all Class of 2008 students in both tech and development tracks gathered on campus for the “Second Gathering” earlier this month, I was down in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for a different conference, and regretfully was not able to attend the once-per-year event to personally meet all the students in our program again. If you wanna read up on what went on, Rom has a good summary on his development track blog here.

I flew back from Malaysia and missed the first class meeting as well, but I was informed by my team that we will be shifting our focus this semester on building a thick client application for the mobile phone. In particular, we will be using J2ME to implement some application that uses the audio/video, GPS, and Bluetooth capabilities of the Nokia N95 cellphone. For those who don’t know (and that included me just a few months ago), the Nokia N95 is one of those extremely fancy and expensive phones that has all these technical gizmos and gadgets in it. Besides having a very clumsy and unfriendly user interface, it’s a very powerful device, so coding an application against it will probably be an interesting activity.

Just like every year, I find myself stepping out of comfort zones yet again. When I was finally starting to getting used to coding Ruby on Rails code with NetBeans to create websites, I now have to learn how to program in J2ME using EasyEclipse and transfer, deploy and debug the code on a physical mobile phone. Some of our students don’t appreciate the constant change in this class, and I have mixed feelings about it too. For one, I do love the idea of learning new things and new technologies. If you don’t embrace change in Silicon Valley, you’re as old-school as of 23 minutes ago, so I welcomed the opportunity to have learned Ruby on Rails last year, as it turned out to be a good thing, because I am passionate about web development. However, with J2ME, it’s a slight different story. I am not really gung-ho about mobile development. While I think mobile phone industry is about to skyrocket in the next years as the United States is slowly catching up with the Asian markets, I feel that it sucks to be a mobile developer, given the harsh restrictions on UI and hardware—and that’s going to be the challenge this semester.

Our team has put together a proposal for an application that allows you to take pictures on a holiday trip, annotate them with captions and audio logs and play them all back as a slideshow directly from your phone. Our adjunct professor this year is an employee of Nokia, so her expertise in mobile development will hopefully help us getting up to speed with this type of development. So far, I think that J2ME development really sucks compared to .NET Compact Framework development for PocketPC, but oh-oh, I just opened up a can of worms. Let the flames start.

posted by Minh Nguyen @ 12:22 PM 

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