recording and playback working

I pushed out a build and sources to Sourceforge.  Moved audio handling into it's own thread.  The "test recording" option records and plays back audio now :)

It worked great for a while on my Blackberry, however at one point the audio completely wedged and I had to pull the battery.  The implementation bugs I'm encountering are very discouraging.  I wonder how things would work on Openmoko.  It's C, and GTK.  Very tempting.

But I've invested a lot in this, so I'm going to keep plugging away.  Next is the network communication.

still poking at setRecordStream

I posted a question about the setRecordStream threading issue on the Sun CLDC and MIDP forum:
http://forum.java.sun.com

It's a very active forum, and I've started to post some hopefully helpful comments to others. Hopefully the open source newsgroup/mailing list/forum style of collaboration will help. I have also talked to folks on the Netbeans forums, but they are not very active as of Spring '08.

more experimenting - new release

There is a new release. I've been working on cleaning up the code and trying to take all the stuff that was working asynchronously (in separate threads) and pull it together. I still can't get setRecordStream() to work unless it's in a separate thread from the main program. Makes no sense yet.
I started playing with some UI stuff too. There is a spiffy icon now, and I'm using the logo image when the program isn't at the main List screen.

talkLock is on Sourceforge

Well the code is at a very premature stage, but now that spring is here I have temporarily lost some momentum. So in case anyone wants to help do some beating on these J2ME things, I went ahead and put up the sources and a build on Sourceforge. talkLock has a home now on Sourceforge. It's GPL so download the source and NetBeans with Mobility Pack and start hackin'. If you need an account to publish your builds and test on a web server, write me. marmot is where I usually publish my test builds and suck them down onto my phone. marmot will have a new home this week, so there may be some dns confusion at some point.
There is experimental audio recording and playback, no network code, and a very simple List interface. Also I went crazy with the threads, so everything is very asynchronous and bizarre right now. Enjoy.

other status

I found out that the RIM development kit has an audio API. But you have to send RIM some money to get a key, and then sign your builds with that key. You have to do it EVEN JUST TO TEST. I understand that they were charging $120 in 2006, and now it's $20 in 2008. I guess they aren't getting many takers. I don't see myself paying anyone to let me help their platform by developing software for it. Especially when the key is PER PC, so I could only develop on one machine. I have a web server that I use to publish my builds to the phone, and it has a build environment on it, and it's Linux. And I use my Macbook and another Linux laptop to do my programming. So I'm not going to limit myself to Windows development on one machine because RIM says so.

Thankfully I've gotten recording working without them.

Also I ended up using threads to get everything working. All of my exception handlers run Alert()s in their own thread. I increment a counter all throughout my code and pass it to the Alert() so I know where in the code crashes happen. I also ended up putting the recording part of the code in it's own thread.

Now I need to make that thread pass some things back to the main program.

And figure out why recording is working now, and use it appropriately.

And then it's time to write my talkLock protocol on https...

we have audio recording and playback... somehow

Yeah, so the other night I was showing someone the latest build of talkLock, and how when you choose "record test" it prompts you to allow the program to record audio, and then it says "recording now..." and then locks up. Only it didnt' lock up. Instead my phone started playing the recording of my voice saying "and then it says recording now, only nothing happens".

Yes I have reproduced it, but it doesn't work anywhere near reliably. Frankly I was pretty much ready to throw in the towel, and start a new project of some kind. I guess I'll have to keep going now :)

one other thing

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I have made the blackberry admit that I am trying to record. That has been happening for quite some time. So when you select "record test", the operating system pops up with "application talkLock is attempting to record audio to memory" with an ok/cancel selection or somesuch. Then the application immediately goes back to the main screen, but it is locked up at that point, and the application has to be escaped.

I appreciated that it admitted that I was trying to record, but the amusement from that milestone has worn off.

Upward.