SMS SmartCase

Meeting - 4th of March, 2006

Great meeting today. We have formally broken away from the silly physicallity of the cell-phone case, deviated from a bauble, and decided on a... better... solution. The solution being super-ultra-mega-secret.

We will meet again after Spring Break (either the 18th or the saturday after), with models (3D design) and more (hopefully) code.

The question is now: "Do apps exist which take over fundamental phone functionality for Series 60 Nokia handsets?"

Hopefully, the answer is yes, so that Dan and I won't have to touch C/Symbian (Masochism).

Progress

Good (albeit short, sorry guys) meeting on Saturday. Dan and Min are a great addition to the team, and I'm glad they are with us.

We defined the breakdown of tasks as follows:

Min - case design, electronics, getting serial from bluetooth, lighting design
Dan - intelligence logic - getting meaning out of the messages
Cat - data visualization, online component
Nanna - case design, data vis
Alex - getting incoming sms, outputing serial bluetooth, phone interface design

I have set up a wiki on this domain, and will create a page (or group of pages) for this project. You can visit/edit it HERE.

We have also decided to meet every other week, making the next meeting the week of March 4th.

Two Small News Items

The first is that I got a new phone... A nice shiny Nokia 6682. Hopefully this will have more capability than the old tester. And if not, well, I still have a sweet phone.

I would also like to link to my main blog. I update pretty frequently, and content usually centers around mobile technology—in all its manifestations.

Finally (okay, so three things), we should meet. Let me know your schedules so we can figure out a time.

Jan 9 Meeting re-up

Things to explore for the physical case:
-surface mount LEDs
-dragon skin
-molded resin(?) casting
-flexible PCB - the plastic printed circuit boards
-low profile power supply?

Web presence:
-mainly information visualization - look at network vis. abstractions
-SMS and MMS storage capabilities

Mobile software Dev:
-genetic algorithms and light AI (further exp. Bayesian alg. as well)
-push-registry and SMS store access in J2ME
-Python language (does it offer more support for the above)
-phone models that we can feasibly prototype on (WMA 2.0 capable, etc...)

Cat hates MySpace.

Also, I found a good list of mobile technology blogs - which I posted to the de.licio.us account. I'll see if I can't aggregate all the feeds to a page on this site for easier browsing.

Whats a break for, anyways?

The next semi-related facet is building a web-interface for text-messaging. This would essentially be a hacked email client. I'm thinking of starting work on it next week, writing the bulk in Perl—partly because it looks like a good way to go about it, and partly to get a head-start in Dynamic Web Development/Ubiquitous Computing. Drop a line if you are interested in swapping code, designing the interface, or have ideas on direction.

I would like to implement some of the filtering algorithms we have researched on the server-side. Of course, this requires a lot more research, and of course, code hacking. Thoughts? Comments? I miss my cheerleaders.

Final reactions

Congratulations, everyone, on a great final presentation. The project was well recieved in both final presentations, though not fully functional, by any means. We built a hell of an infrastructure, with more possibilities than I can possibly imagine at these early stages. Thanks for all the time, energy, and ideas, without which, this project would have been... not much of a project.

In the coming weeks/months, I would like to continue on this path. Hopefully mobile technology will catch up, and allow us to implement our concepts in a more concrete and substantial manner. But in the mean time, we can clean up our concepts, improve the already substantial infrastructure, and we can always work on the base-code.

Please use this as a casual forum for the exchange of ideas, arguments, inspiration, and goofing off. Also, please leave your entries open for comments.