Good meeting 1

Met Chris earlier today to go thru’ my project. Told him of my problems with speech and J2ME. He agrees with me, if the phone can play music, why can’t we get it to read text messages. We also pretty much kicked the Windows Mobile idea into touch to as I don’t think I’ve got enough time to learn C++ between now and handin time. So, we went thru everything that mobile phones can do. We talked about stills and video, text, getting data to and from a server and hit upon the idea of skills exchange. For example, I build you a website and you sort out my central heating – only if you’re a plumber coz if you ain’t, you’re not coming anywhere near my pipes. One of the problems with this system is if you’re good at what you do, you’ll likely end up in credit with nothing to spend your points on. The system will have to have some sort of scheme to even out the share as it were but speaking from experience, when you find a good plumber, you hang onto them so I guess if the tradesman has a lot of points, then they must be good.

But, it did get me thinking and I’m wondering if instead of a skills exchange, the system is a files exchange. A bit like peer-to-peer but obviously phone-to-phone and you don’t just take files, you have to be prepared to swap, a bit like Panini stickers I guess. (Did you see how I did that? Managed to get yet another football reference in, it’s a skill) The user registers what files they’re prepared to swap and can browse files from other users before organising a trade. I know text messages are stored in hidden folders but I wonder if that’s the same with other types of files. Looks as though I’m researching again.

PS I’ve not given up on the speech-phone thingy. I’m still gonna keep working on it but I think the “go-live” date will be quite some time in the future.