Hello everyone, awesome to see you guys selected for GSoC 2011!! My name is Achintya Prakash and I'm a third year undergraduate student of Computer Science, based in India. I've been involved with android development for well past 3 months now, and have dabbled in a lot of different aspects of it. Recently, I had the fortune of being chosen to attend a Design and Innovation workshop held by people from the MIT Media Labs, where amongst other things like efficient storyboarding/designing/brainstorming techniques, they also gave tutorials on android development.
I'm also a student of an android development course in my college, and I must say, its more fun than I would have ever thought!! That's a bit of background about me, but the real thing is that I would love to work as a student for your organisation on something related to android. I recently submitted, as my mid semester 'mini' project, the outline for an application that would give reminders not only based on time, but also location (the inspiration behind this was the fact that I would drive around town and always pass the places where I had to pick up something without noticing. Having a simple timed reminder didn't always help, since I couldn't really know the time at which I would be in the locality!) After I gave the skeleton of the app, my teacher gave me a few suggestions to make it more useful, so I wanted to propose an idea for a project. This project closely parallels your idea for "Develop a simple mapping tool for mobile phones", although the functionalities I have mentioned go further in scope than the GSoC timeline (since I plan to keep contributing to this idea). I would love to work on a project like this, and hence *would like to work on developing the simple mapping tool for phones* as a part/component of this extended project. App name: Effective route tracing and recording Functionality: A passive route logging tool for android phones. The basic ideology is that the route traversed by a single person should be remembered/logged if required for later reference, without any active input being given by the concerned person. A visual representation such as overlays presented on a map/ values of latitude and longitude/ a more human friendly address name( as decoded via geocoder) and intelligent direction sensor ( turn left on Abbey Road, or something along those lines) be the desired output. A number of added functionalities should be incorporated: 1. The ability to 'record' a route as a person is moving. 2. The ability to transfer a pre-recorded route via a multitude of ways, including through sms (the easiest way would be through a series of latitude/longitude, arranged in an appropriate format that could be read by the application and translated as overlays on a map, or some other visual representation), via wifi, bluetooth etc (could have an intelligent sensing to see the most efficient method based on a certain criteria, hence giving the user freedom from having to choose). 3. The ability to run real time route transfer ( especially useful in cases where you have a lot of people following each other in cars, where only one person knows the way). The 'master' phone would logging at predefined intervals and sending over the information to the 'slave' phones, which would automatically display the visual representation. 4.The ability to add user information to the route-points. Especially useful in cases where a pre-recorded route is being sent, user input could include textual or pictorial messages ( example, if giving directions, you may include a picture of a well know nearby landmark, or just any structure and include text references like 'take left here'.) Drawable attributes like being able to scribble, draw arrows, circles etc on the sent information should also be included. These are the initial proposed functionalities that I would think would make the application extremely useful in a lot of situations. Alternatively, there are a number of better improvements that can further be done: 1. To have the route synced with local traffic/ news updates, hence be alerted in real time if the route is congested or under repair. 2. Have an intelligent route sensing system that could, based on machine learning and frequent routes travelled, suggest alternatives/status updates of the routes. (Example, if a person travels via the same route to office everyday, or something) 3. Have different 'modes' of route sensing (example: vacation mode would be able to sync to useful API's and retrieve information of relevance to you about the nearby locality, like bars. restaurants, hotels etc and display them, in an interactive manner, like having a map overlay showing a connecting line between your position and the destination, the distance, maybe even recent tweets/reviews about the place.) Alternatively I was thinking of making an API to provide generic functionalities including the ones above, but again...advice and feedback would be nice. This is an informal first draft that I'm proposing. I know it sounds ambitious, and I don't propose the whole thing for the GSoC time line, but plan to keep contributing further to it. I have to work out the finer details about it. However, I do plan to take this up as my semester project, which means that I would start working on it very soon, and I would love to be able to develop it further. I would love your feedback on this. If you could give me some advice on how to get started, that would be brilliant. I really am keen to hone my android skills. Waiting for your feedback. :) This is the initial draft, and I would love to work thing out more. Thank you, Achintya Prakash Junior BITS-Pilani Department of Computer Science Signature powered by <http://www.wisestamp.com/email-install?utm_source=extension&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=footer> WiseStamp<http://www.wisestamp.com/email-install?utm_source=extension&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=footer>
_______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
