Mobile Social Navigation apps

I recently read two mobile social navigation studies, Barkhuus et al (2008) and Bilandzic et al (2008), that I wish I had conducted myself (particularly Barkhuus et al). Although the results from Bilandzic et al that people were unlikely to phone complete strangers for help finding coffee shops did seem somewhat obvious :-) Interestingly the solution to this problem that Bilandzic et al suggest is similar to the awareness approach taken by Barkhuus et al. So a very interesting couple of papers to read in parallel.

Furthermore some interesting notes about recent commercial technological developments. The CityFlocks system developed by Bilandzic et al has for the most part been replicated by the default google maps application on android phones, in that if you now search for a restaurant on an android phone you get an aggregated list of the reviews of that restaurant from multiple review sites, which includes some information about the reviewer (i.e. their name), if not their contact details. This functionality is not yet available on the iPhone google maps, although it is slated to become available in the future. Latest updates about google mobile stuff here: http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/

Similarly the functionality developed for Connecto by Barkhuus is almost completely replicated by Google Latitude (http://www.google.com/latitude/intro.html) in that you can see the locations of your friends, and you can set your location manually or automatically. The big thing missing from Google latitude (which runs on iPhone (in browser) and Android) when compared with Connecto is that it doesn't appear to run in the background (at least on the iPhone) and doesn't integrate the information about friend status into the contact list, which I think is one of Connecto's great features. I'm assuming that this kind of integration (friend location and contact list) will be hard on the iPhone, potentially easy on android. Here's a nice blog post showing you what google latitude looks like on the android:

http://androidcommunity.com/google-latitude-location-sharing-app-hitting-android-20090204/

Also of potential interest is that google maps on the android now supports layers, e.g. wikipedia, traffic, your google my maps and more. Here's a link on that:

http://www.streetmapmobile.com/20091203/google-maps-for-mobile-layers-2

We live in "interesting times", and it seems like Google is behind a lot of it :-)

Economic Thoughts

Probably due to listening to NPR again I have been having economic thoughts about how odd it is that people's willingness to expose themselves to debt affects the bottom line of many businesses, which in turn affects the disposable income of people who might be employed by those businesses, which links back to consumer spending power.

Seems like a steady state might not be possible, i.e. just endless cycles of boom and bust. Still I wonder if there is some way to quantify the value produced by working for a lifetime, or for just one hour, that would allow us to calculate the extent to which an individual or a society is overexposing themselves in terms of debt? Problem is that it is highly non-static and that value is in the eye of the beholder.

However, perhaps we can think of our monthly icomes as indicative of the worth that society places on what we are doing. Money is strange. I guess it is straightforward to work out debt exposure based on monthly income, but somehow the relationship between money and value seems a little broken ... e.g. We can be doing all sorts of things that we don't immediately get paid for, but produce longer term benefits, like raising children, or networking with colleagues. Guess I'm just wondering if there are any economic alternatives to money ...

Mobile Programming @HPU Spring 2010

I'm teaching a mobile programming course at Hawaii Pacific University (HPU) in the Spring. Will focus on iPhone and Android. Here's the link to sign up for single courses at HPU if you're not already enrolled there:

http://www.hpu.edu/index.cfm?contentID=373

I'll be teaching in HPU's mac lab so we'll cover both iPhone and Android programming. The plan is for every class member (or team) to have an app published in the iPhone app store and the Android marketplace by the end of the course.

Gravity thought experiments

For some reason (probably reading my son "The Magic School Bus Lost in the Solar System"), I started wondering about gravity. I was wondering why my sensation of gravity is just being pulled down, and not to the sides as well. I guess the mass to either side of me in the Earth is roughly equal and thus cancels itself out. Which made me wonder how something would fall if you happened to be standing on the edge of a hemisphere, or if there was a cylindrical space running through the center of the Earth. In the later case I would have thought that something might fall down past the Earth's center overshoot, and them fall back, oscillating until it eventually came to rest a the center. Not sure about the hemisphere example. Seems like something dropped might actually fall diagonally. Of course the natural rest state of objects large enough to have noticeable gravity is a sphere, so such toroidal or hemispherical objects would not occur without some kind of intervention. The funny thing about gravity is that all matter attracts other matter. I don't notice being sucked towards the computer because it has so little mass, but the mass of the Earth is huge and sucks me towards it. I wonder if there are objects in the universe massive enough for gravity to be noticed, but in different shapes so that the force of gravity is felt in directions other than straight down ...?

SmartFM Mobile Study Dictionary Upgrade

So I released an upgrade (1.0.1) of the SmartFM android client, adjusting the media type for audio uploads (although the AMR uploads are still only audible on the phone and not the main site) and disabling the voice input when the google speech recognition package is not available. This latter was in response to a marketplace comment from Zom-B about force closing on voice button.

Of course this makes me want to say a few things about the marketplace comments, which are potentially a great resource, but are kind of odd in that they can be signed under any name, and there is no way to reliably communicate back with the people who made the comments. For example, originally SuaveAfro made the comment that the app should support downloading other people's lists. I replied to SuaveAfro in my own comment explaining that that functionality was included. Subsequently SuaveAfro became Havoc, and so I updated my own comment accordingly, but that moved my comment away from the one it was referring to. I guess the solution is that I should update my comment to reflect whatever is my response to the most recent comment, but it seems less than optimal. Would be nice if the commenting framework could link directly to a discussion forum on that app, but I guess that's overkill. Comments are a simple solution - would be nice if they were at least linked to a user's email so I could have a fighting chance of getting responses back to users who are unlikely to look at the comments again after their first download ...

SmartFM Mobile Study Dictionary live in Android Marketplace!

So shortly after my last blog post, I managed to get my SmartFm mobile study dictionary app live in the Android Marketplace. I think I finally managed to set it up so it won't conflict with the ADC version of the same app.

In less than 24 hours the app jumped into the the 100-500 downloads range, and we got some great feedback and ratings. Steve O's comment that it was "Very easy to use and definitions are very accurate. Excellent!" was music to my ears. I can't accept that praise without thanking Robert Brewer, George Lee, Viil Lid, Karhai Chu and Kim Binsted at the University of Hawaii for input on the developing interface, and huge thanks to the SmartFM team for their input on all aspects of application and various adjustments to the API to make everything connect up properly.

When I woke up this morning there was another comment from SuaveAfro, about wanting the app to allow the user to download other people's lists. I've commented back that other user's lists can be downloaded through the "Search Lists" function in the menu tab, although it is not an easy function to find, since you have to click "More" in the menu to get there. That is partly intentional, as the focus of the app is on items rather than lists, but I have to concede I haven't put up a help manual or anything that explains all that. I was so focused on the ADC submission that there is not much in the way of online support materials, and only a cursory help system on the app itself. I'll do my best to make better documentation available, but in the meantime I'll put as much as I can on this blog to help users of the application.

Video describing SmartFM Android Application

So the other week I submitted an android application to the second Android Developers Challenge (ADC). There's over a million dollars in prize money up for grabs from Google in the second such competition. Last time android was only available on emulators, but now the devices are out, so competition will be fierce.

I've put together a short video about my app, the SmartFM Mobile Study Dictionary, which shows you how I integrated the Google Speech Recognition component and got multimedia content creation working. I'm real excited about this application because now any user can create study content (focused on languages at the moment) on the go, uploading sounds and images. So say you learn a new word in the language you are studying you can check what it means using the dictionary, and if it doesn't exist, add the entry there and then. If it is there, you get helpful info on the word and its usage, and you can add new example sentences and usages you've discovered, with images and audio to illustrate.

The results from the ADC won't be in till late November, and owners of android devices should be able to vote on the best apps later this month (please vote for me :-), but I'll release this to the market before then, once I've worked out a few bugs.

Please check out the video and let me know what you think:

SmartFmMobileStudyDictionary.mov