I have long tried to get perfect milk for a perfect (is this ever possible?) cappuccino. It always seemed so easy to me, but I never quite manged to get the milk right. Well, as Silvia has a 1-hole steam tip, there is one little trick to get excellent mircofoam.

So, we are all (I mean, we coffee geeks) well aware of many tips for the ultimate microfoam, e.g. follow these instructions at CoffeeResearch.org or this one at CoffeeGeek.

However, to become perfect microfoam with Silvia, you have to change some parameters as compared to a heat exchanger machine:

• Where to place the steaming tip? This is actually crucial, especially for the expansion phase: Hold the pitcher slightly beveled and put the wand directly towards the edge of the pitcher, but make sure that the milk starts spinning while you do so. Place the wand to the middle of the pitcher – and you won’t get perfect results. Touch one wall and perform your milk expansion and you’ll be surprised by the result! After expansion sink the wand and start turbulating as usual.
• The milk stretching/expansion phase shouldn’t be too long – as a rule of thumb stop expansion phase at about body temperature (40 ºC or 100 ºF). The final spinning/swirling of the milk needs to be a bit longer (up to about 65 ºC or 150 ºF) with Silvia, as she is not as powerful as heat exchangers. Another reason is if you expand the stretching phase you also end up with too much foam.

Enjoy milk frothing with Miss Silvia!

You want to develop J2ME applications with a Mac OS X operating system ?
This is not as easy going as one might think:

SUN unfortunately provides the “Java Wireless Toolkit” not for OSX (for whatever reason) and their emulator therefore does not work. I think there would be more potential J2ME developers under OSX, but this is actually their (bad) decision. Furthermore, they provide their latest stuff only for Windows :( The only way to get it going on a Linux system is using the old WTK2.2 – nice uh ?

However, there was light at the end of the tunnel:
The mpowerplayer SDK is an emulator (and more…) which is supposed to work on an Apple computers. Well, it does, but there is another catch: No support of the JSR75 fileconnection API so far.

Now and finally one very nice guy implemented the specification and provides a CLDC.jar for mpowerplayer which now allows file input/output !!! This is great news. Thanks for all the effort again! You can see the discussion and also a link for the download of the file here (I think you have to be logged in to view it).

Now and finally my MiniPauker stuff can be developed on my Mac. Nice – very nice indeed.

If you use J2ME-Polish and want to migrate your stuff to OS X, there is one more thing you have to change in your ANT build task:
the preverification of the code is not working with the WTK (the Linux version) – modify your build section and point it to the MPowerplayer subdirectory osx:

 *snip* build preverify="/Applications/mpp-sdk/osx/preverify/preverify" *snip*

Enjoy your Midlet development!