First, a personal plug: I recently wrote a short book on modern mapping & locative technologies that would be pertinent to developers and advanced users of devices like the Neo1973. It covers standards, formats, existing projects, project ideas, and geo-communities.
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/neogeography/ Specific to the points here - I've used MaemoMapper for the N770 and it is a good application that could be supported and ported to OpenMoKo. It appears similar to Cairo, but is probably more mature and supports various mapping systems (Google, Yahoo, and OpenStreetMap). Therefore, you can cache map tiles to the Neo1973 for display without necessarily having to use your data connection. As for contributing back to OSM (OpenStreetMap), it would depend on the actual accuracy of the AGPS. If the error is low, then data would just be saved as GPX tracks and could be uploaded back to this central repository and then later downloaded as Map tiles. Last - for a "Central POI database" - it would be better to use an existing mapping system, or even just aggregate many of these. For example, someone could make their own POI's in Platial/Wayfaring/Geoblog and then publish the data as GeoRSS (http://georss.org). OpenMoKo devices would then just subscribe to these feeds, or an aggregated feed via Mapufacture (http://mapufacture.com), to get live POI's. GeoClue (http://live.gnome.org/GeoClue) is an upcoming project that could be ported that aims to provide location information across a device to any application and then use this for publishing POI's to blogs, GeoCMS (Midgard/Drupal/Plone), or geotagged photos. For "GPSFriends" I would suggest looking at integrating with existing systems such as Plazes (http://beta.plazes.com/) - so that you can find friends that don't necessarily have an OpenMoKo device. Helps prevent that 'empty nest problem'. Also, Imity (http://imity.com/) just released their beta of their service that doesn't detect friends by "location" (lat/lon/address), but just "proximity" (what bluetooth mobile devices do I see near me when?). Both Plazes & Imity would be great systems to write OpenMoKo clients for. Look what's currently out there instead of redesigning yet another system. Andrew -- Andrew Turner [EMAIL PROTECTED] 42.4266N x 83.4931W http://highearthorbit.com Northville, Michigan, USA _______________________________________________ OpenMoko community mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
