I'm continuing to read Ant-Dev and while the traffic is still overwhelming I'm getting a better sense of who's who, how things work, and which messages I can skim or skip. I'm thinking about subscribing to Ant-User also and getting involved by helping users with problems as a next step towards getting involved with development. But that would be even more e-mail.

I'm also doing some work on J2ME apps of my own. The two currently underway are a Dice app (so that if you need dice and you don't have them, you can just use your phone, probably more fun than useful and an image-previewing app for developers. The image-previewer would be useful if you were working on images and wanted to try them out on the various emulators. You dump your images into the resource directory, build the app, and run the emulator. Type in a file name and it'll grab that PNG from the resource directory. Packaged with an auto-build tool that took care of the image-copying, it could be useful. The one thing I'm bummed about is that CLDC and MIDP don't seem to provide any facility for grabbing a list of the files in the resource directory. A possible expansion would be to let the user type in a URL and view an image over the network, but that'll require some research into HttpConnection stuff.