see a puffin eat a fish

I spent some time reviewing the MMS application that came preinstalled on my N80. It’s surprisingly robust with serious support for multiple media formats. Although the n80 lacks a qwerty keyboard and has a tiny screen, it brings mobility to the functionality of a decent business productivity suite. I just didn’t notice because I haven’t been doing much business lately. Here is a link to the flowchart and some screenshot slides.

My thesis, tentatively named CrowdScapes, is moving along and i’m learning a lot in the process. At first I was using MPowerPlayer to test out my code but although it ran fine in the emulator, it didn’t really do anything on an actual phone. Didn’t work on the N80 or the SLVR. So I finally tried the same code on the Sun Wireless Toolkit Emulator and guess what, it didn’t run. There were a number of errors with thread blocking and an odd situation where a string was getting padded with a bunch of spaces. After fixing those so my code ran in the WTK2.5 Beta 2, my code still didn’t run on my N80 so I downloaded the Nokia 3rd Edition emulator (see left, click for larger image) and my code looks to work ok on that. Maybe it’s just late, i’ll try it on the phone again tomorrow. The emulators are pretty funny. Although you’re on a pc with a full keyboard, you’re still required to SMS in your content. I guess it’s good to eat your own dog food. Let’s hear it for improved interfaces.

Update: It kind of works on the 6680 but not the N80. Huzzah.

Usually when I do cell phone development I do it in an emulator. Sometimes though I have to pull the jar to my phone to see what it’ll look like. Below are the actual steps I have to go through every single time I want to push a built file to my SLVR. Added bonus is that the ‘accept’ button switches sides after every question.

• Incoming transfer: CrowdScapes1 From Powerbook (Accept)
• Storage Devices (Phone or Card?)
• Midlet details (Install?)
• Storage Devices (Phone or Card?)
• Application already exists (Details)
• Detail Information (Update)
• Not a signed application. Continue downloading? (Yes)
• Run Midlet (Yes)

Other than that i’m having a great time doing J2ME development.

Yahoo Research’s World Explorer was recently released! The semantic mapping of the world is something i’m very interested in. It overlaps nicely with my goal to bring an added value context and narrative to people out in the world, participating in the everyday. Today I got the TagMaps API talking to my cell phone. I wanted to try to do this with Java but Python is my strength and there will be plenty of time to do it in Java. Rapid prototyping proof of concept means Python.

I want to overlap our world, known as RL when we’re chatting, with the landmarks of this collectively defined virtual world. Using the TagMaps infrastructure coupled with location information, I think I can bring this new context to people through their mobile phones. The Flickr community is large enough where there is data for a lot of places. A much smarter path than trying to build up the critical mass with my own custom application. Using the basic framework I built today, I can provide walks and tours through places deemed noteworthy. I can show photos taken in the place you are standing but a month ago, I can give you the ‘vibe’ of a location.

Today I wrote a cell phone app that talks to a GPS device and passed that information to a server. The server converts the GPS data and passes the coordinates to Tag Maps. Tag Maps then returns the most popular tags for that location. I then pick the closest tag to my location and ask Flickr for a photo for that tag. Here’s where it breaks down. I need to give Flickr both a tag and a lat/long but I haven’t figured out how to pass the lat/long to Flickr. The World Explorer flash tool does it somehow so there is a way. Right now I just pass Flickr the tag. Flickr gives me an image back and I pass it back up the chain to the phone. Once I figure out how to pass lat/long to Flickr, the photo appearing on the user’s phone will be relative to both the popular tags and the exact location of the individual. (I figured this part out, thanks Rahul!)

Oh and I almost forgot to mention the nightmare of converting an HTML page to an image on my ISPs box. I really need to move somewhere where I can have root. I ended up converting an html page to a PDF and then from there using Imagemagick to convert the PDF to a GIF. It isn’t pretty but it works.

We’ve been accepted to the 5th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM) in California. We’ll be presenting our paper on WayMarkr as a continuous documenting device which provides an alternate perspective. It’s only a month away, very cool. We also got a writeup in the New York Sun as part of an article about ITP. WayMarkr development has stagnated a bit but this week we finally integrated the software with a Bluetooth GPS module to log more accurate coordinates. It’s not a requirement for the WayMarkr but it will be a neat feature for those with a GPS module.