Posts Tagged ‘development’

Writing a Bluetooth-based location-based reminder app

Sunday, May 25th, 2008

My bad back means that I’ve not spent too much time writing code for the past week or two. Tonight, I’m in the mood to try and hack something together.

I should probably try and do some work on my CurrentCost setup – now that I’ve got the new home server connected to the CurrentCost meter, I could write a script to start collecting data and do something with it.

But that can wait for another night – for tonight, I want to get back to doing something mobile.

One idea that I’ve had kicking around since last month is a location-based reminder app based around people – using Bluetooth as a way to know who is near you.

The idea was to have an application which lets you assign tasks in your Tasks list to Bluetooth device IDs for mobile phones and laptops. Then, when your phone sees that Bluetooth Device, it could remind you about that task.

For example, I could know that I want to talk to Will about a particular project. I can put this in my To Do list, but unless I’m actually looking at my To Do list when Will is around, it’s not very helpful.

But with this app, I set my To Do list to remind me to talk to him about it the next time I am near him – the next time his phone and/or laptop is within Bluetooth range, my mobile can prompt me with an alarm.

(more…)

Betavine

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008

I heard of Vodafone Betavine last September, at mobileCampLondon. I never got round to thinking of something to write using their API, so didn’t sign up in the end.

I met up with Owen from Betavine again last weekend at Over The Air which gave him another chance to ‘sell’ it to me. 🙂

Actually, both he and another Vodafone guy, Matt, spent time going through the idea behind Betavine and the benefits that it tries to bring – and it turned out that I’d missed some of the idea behind the site.

They convinced me to give the site another try, so last night I logged back on and started adding some content to see how it all works.

(more…)

Over The Air – ideastorming

Friday, April 4th, 2008

It’s ridiculously early. And I’m awake. And on a train.

Unusually, I don’t mind too much, because I’m heading to ‘Over The Air‘ – a mobile development event in London. Yay 🙂

Looking at the schedule, there are lots of interesting talks that I want to go to. Too many… in several places there are two or three talks I want to go to at the same time. 🙁

Also on the agenda is a development competition. It’ll probably work out to somewhere between 8 and 12 hours to hack something together (depending on how many talks I go to and how much sleep I want to get!)

Between paternity leave and the joys of coming back to work after a five week break, I’ve not had time to think about what I might create.

So I’m using the train journey to come up with a few ideas – and this is as good a place as any to ideastorm.

Here we go… Bear in mind that it’s early and I’ve not had any coffee yet!

(more…)