Optimized Menu

In this demo, selected icons have a yellow border. As you move to a new icon, it becomes selected and the previous icon flips to the unselected state. If you navigate off the icon grid, selection loops around. That is, if the last icon in a row is selected, moving right selects the first icon in the same row.

This demo illustrates the flexibility that combining UI markup and Java offers: a rich set of functionality (graphics, animations, high-end 2D rendering) and flexibility in graphic manipulation, pre-rendering or playing.

In this example, a graphic artist delivered an SVG animation defining the transition state for the menu icons, from the unselected state to the selected state. The program renders each icon's animation sequence separately into off-screen buffers (for faster rendering later on), using the JSR 226 API.

With buffering, the MIDlet is able to adapt to the device display resolution (because the graphics are defined in SVG format) and still retain the speed of bitmap rendering. In addition, the MIDlet is still leveraging the SVG animation capabilities.

The task of defining the look of the menu items and their animation effect (the job of the graphic artist and designer) is cleanly separated from the task of displaying the menu and starting actions based on menu selection (the job of the developer). The two can vary independently as long as both the artist and the developer observe the SVG document structure conventions.