Some ideas

Had a meeting with Chris on Friday to show him my progress so far. I think it went pretty well but he did particularly like the phone call link. When you think about it, it is pretty mad. You’re on a website, you click a link and the webpage then places a call to someone which essentially is what is happening. So, anyway, Chris suggested that I list the phone ideas that I’ve had coz maybe my project could be a suite of mini projects.

Phone2Fone
A peer-to-peer type system that allows people to swap mobile-type assets.
Progress – 5

Online phone directory
People load their phonebooks up to a central server which they can share with their friends.
Progress – 2

Translation
Using a camera phone, people can take a photo of some text in a foreign language, upload it to a server which translates it for them.
Progress – 5

Music library
People upload MP3s to a central server which they can access and play from their mobile phone.
Progress – 2

Project progress 2

Following on from a bit of a major rethink on my skills, I’ve decided to go with something mobile phone based. As I’m still quite keen to have something that can help disadvantaged people, I looked into voice synthesis so that SMS texts could be read out. Unfortunately, current Java voice synthesis needs a lot of memory, around 2-16MB and most mobile phones only have around 512KB although PDAs have 2-16MB so they would be a possibility. However, as J2ME isn’t a full version of Java, it doesn’t support javax.sound which all Java-based voice synthesis needs. I then looked into smart phones. As most of them run Windows CE, they have better memory management so ought to be able to handle speech albeit perhaps a bit slowly. I managed to find a synthesis kit for Windows but all development for Windows CE is done in C++ and I don’t think I would have enough time to learn it as well as turning out a major piece of work.

After a bit of a dump of things that mobile phones are capable of doing like taking photos, shooting video, connecting to servers etc, started looking into the idea of a skills exchange. When you need something doing, you use your phone to access a central database to find a supplier. When you do, a request is sent to their phone and when they do the work, they earn some credit in their account. The main problem with this, as with all skills exchange systems, is the good trades people will always have a lot of credit and if they can’t cash the credits in, then they will always have an excess. However the idea of an exchange system was still worth pursuing so I came up with the idea of a peer-to-peer system where users exchange “assets” on their phone such as video, photos, ring tones etc. Each user would register with a central server and log the assets that they have available. Other users would then browse the database and when they find something they want, they put in a request for it. The difference between this and the “normal” peer-to-peer networks is that the transaction is an exchange so each person has to be prepared to swap assets instead of just taking.

Over the Christmas break, I investigated technologies. For the server, MySQL and PHP seemed the most obvious and for the application on the mobile J2ME also seemed obvious. However, testing proved otherwise. I wrote a simple J2ME app that just called a script on the server. On 2 of my test phones it worked fine but on the 3rd which is Java-enabled, the app wouldn’t run. I believe it’s because it can only run MDIP1.0 J2ME apps and I’ve been using MDIP2.0. I did consider just developing for newer phones but as I have this “thing” about technology being accessible to everyone, I carried on researching. I came across XHTML MP which is XHTML for mobile devices. It calls a different doctype to render the page for the smaller screen and has a couple differences with normal XHTML but other than that, it’s pretty much a normal web technology. So far I have developed scripts for uploading and downloading assets to and from the server and have been able to use sessions for controling logging in. I’ve even managed to write a routine for browser recognition. With the system being mobile phone based, accessing it from a normal browser defeats the object somewhat. As typing on a phone keypad is not the simplest of things to do, the next thing to look into is the use of cookies. Again with memory at a premium, they will have to be stripped down to the minimum. I have already mapped the database out on paper so once I have got the cookies issue resolved, I intend to create the database and then work on the messaging system of alerting people when they have a request for a swap.

Xmas progress

I’ve been playing about with different technologies to drive the peer-to-peer system – or as I like to call it the phone2fone system. I had first thought about using J2ME. I’ve used it in the past and it seems the most obvious but I’ve had some interesting times with it. Transfering data to and from a server is not the easiest of things to make it do plus, one of my test phones which can run Java games won’t run my demo. I think it’s because of the version of J2ME I’m using is too new. The phone is around 2 years old which is positively ancient I guess BUT I’ve got this non-exclusion policy when it comes to things like this so I had a bit of a rethink.

There’s a new(ish) verison of XHTML called XHTML MP which was developed with mobile devices in mind. Since I found it, I’ve managed to upload and download files on all my test phones and have been able to use sessions to control logins. Cookies is the next thing on my list to do. I’ve even managed to write a browser detection routine so I can now distinguish between mobile and “normal” browsers. I want to be able to do this so that if anyone comes across the site using a normal computer, they’ll be sent to a different page. Access to the system has to be from a mobile device otherwise it beats the whole object. Anyway, I’ve also discovered that you can put a link on a page that when clicked will make your phone call a number. How cool is that???