Droid Projects

[jrising]

"I am Ready & Willing to offer my Services to any Nation or People under heave who are Desirous of Liberty & Equality"

I now have a Droid, Google/Motorola/Verizon's new PDA. First, it's an excellent device-- powerful and slick, lots of space, 5 MP camera, a touch-screen and a slide-out keyboard. To me though, it's all pretty pointless. I don't need it to organize any aspect of my life, I don't want any more pervasive connectivity a cell and a laptop give me, and I don't like playing with computers. I wouldn't have gotten it if I hadn't needed it for this project.

I have 11 more days during which I can return it. But it is sweet-edge technology, and now I have all this knowledge of how to code the thing-- why not use it?

But I need your help! I'm looking for fun projects that can either (1) recoup some of this $70 a month I'm spending, or (2) help PDAers live greener. To that end, I have some ideas:

Greener, Every Day Calendar

This would be a free "page-a-day" style calendar, juxtaposing pretty pictures (e.g. of climate change) with steps you can take to lessen/extend your impact. I hope to have connections to tons of non-profits soon through Democracy In Action, and they might have a lot to contribute.

It will be both personalized and built on community-contributions. Anyone will be able to submit additional day-pages on the website, and at the bottom of each day will be rating buttons ("up-thumb" and "down-thumb"), which both inform your preferences and affect the likelihood of those pages for other people. Also, there will be a "I'm doing it!" button next to the thumb buttons, which both lets users see their strength in numbers, and allows some pages to be "follow-ups" on other pages (e.g., one page might suggest "Move to Washington, DC", and if you do it, then you'll get another one that says "Work for Democracy In Action").

Open Artificial Intelligence

You can get a little chat A.I. that you can interact with, and teach, and watch it learn, and grow, and interact with your phone. I helped build a huge text-based A.I. for Virsona, and now I'm working on open-sourcing pieces of it. It can get responses from a dozen sources and learn in multiple ways, it understands grammar, emotion, the relationships between words, implied concepts and conversation trends. And now it's built on a plugin design, where anyone can add new intelligence, new knowledge, and new ways of interacting. There would be free and paid-for versions of this.

Virtual Painter

Turn your PDA into a virtual paint-brush, and view your pieces of art through its lens. You can paint anything-- a wall, a piece of furniture, a tree-- by selecting a color and sweeping the PDA like a brush. Any time you look through the PDA's camera, you can see your work of art. I might even make the paintings shareable, so that anyone who passes by the bus-stop that you graffitied can see it. A demo would be available for free, with a limited amount of paint.

I'm pretty excited about working on any of these, but I'm open to anything you've always wanted on your phone.

Comments

[cokebottletuque.livejournal.com]

Well, it has a car mode right? use the accelerometer/gps to drive a greener driving habits trainer, I'd use it when I get one. Is the keyboard as bad as the reviews claim it is? hows the LED flash? hows app writing? and it has a digital compass right?

[jrising.livejournal.com]

Not a bad idea, but wouldn't it mostly beep you (or whatever) on things you can't do anything about (say, stop-and-go traffic, or driving below your engine's optimum)? Or are green driving habits something else?

I think the keyboard is fine. When I just have something short to type, I usually use the iPhone-style virtual keyboard, but when I have something longer, the slide keyboard is faster. I haven't tried to use the camera in real low-light conditions-- the LED flash is definitely less powerful than a normal camera-- but in lowish light, it's a huge help. App writing is fine; there are some annoying holes in the documentation, but the framework is solid. And the digital compass is definitely sweet. One of the apps I download is Google Sky Map, and it really feels like you can look straight through the screen to the night sky.

[jrising.livejournal.com]

Actually, I want to say that I'm pretty impressed with the app writing framework. I haven't developed for iPhone, but things have gone very smoothly on Android. I was working for the first week on their emulator, and there wasn't even a hiccup when I swapped to the real thing. And it's all in Java with some xml files for conveniences, so how everything works is very straight-forward.