Designing Around Place
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009
Publk, the new local and (presently) anonymous broadcasting service, is about to launch Beta version 1.0 if its mobile web client. Publk lets you share words and images with people in the same venue. The web client is intended to allow extra features that our SMS users lack, namely image broadcasting. I guess it’s sort of an extension of Foursquare, and in fact we intend to incorporate the Foursquare API in our standalone app that should be ready in the next several months.
I believe the web client will be proof of concept that we need before moving onto the app. It will debut at Drink the Tree next week in Boston where we hope to gather all the documentation and user feedback necessary to build a very strong mobile application. The app will contain current functionality as well as some surprise features that will have to remain under lock and key for now.
While it will likely be in development up to next Friday, I encourage you to take a look at the web client on your iPhone or Android device. Like many mobile sites, it looks sort of like junk on a desktop browser, so until I get device detection on it I’ll just have to trust that you won’t look at it on anything but a phone. If you have any suggestions or recommendations, feel free to submit them right in Publk!
publk.com/client
Posted in Designing Around Place, Publk | 1 Comment »
Monday, October 5th, 2009
Can’t say I’ve ever heard of this magazine, but bless them for covering our app. Graziadaily.co.uk will feature Publk, Inc’s Love Machine in their upcoming issue for print and web. Will they accurately portray what Love Machine is all about? Who cares? We’re published! Here’s a preview of the article.
Posted in 1' 2' 10', BarTalk, Designing Around Place | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009
Tweet every text. Text every tweet. Twitter and SMS users connect.
Textmarks keyword = Twitter hashtag
The challenge was to get the most possible users contributing to a communication system from my most possible devices while allowing all users to feel like they are contributing to the same thing and providing an added bonus for smartphone users. The solution is TweetMarks.
TweetMarks is a marriage of regular ol’ SMS and Twitter. It includes the most possible users while adding some cool functionality for smartphone users. Users who opt for the SMS version will receive tweets, and users who prefer the custom Twitter client will receive the text messages sent from the short code. Users are also free to use their preferred Twitter client. However the advantage of using the Twitter client, of course, is the ability to follow people who are at the event but you didn’t already know. It’s a web-based app, so users don’t have to worry about installing anything to their devices when they arrive at a museum, conference, bar, or club and find out there’s a cool communication tool available that they don’t have.
To achieve this I just added functionality to my Twitter client to send tweets as SMS through Textmarks. Likewise, SMS messages are tweeted. Hopefully this includes mostly everyone at an event who wishes to participate in a group communication, and users can use their preferred method of messaging. I’m really excited about this. There are limitless possibilities for this application not only at bars and clubs as originally envisioned, but any large space where people who don’t know each other gather.
On Wednesday, April 8 we will implement this system for singles night at Hugs in Brooklyn. We’re going to project all these messages onto a big screen. The system we customized for them looks great! Have a look. New messages slide in on the projection screen thanks to Scriptaculous. I didn’t do device detection on this one so you can check it out on the web or your mobile device. TweetMarks will also be the engine that drives BarTalk, our 1′ 2′ 10′ project.
Messaging client:
publk.com/hugs
Projection:
publk.com/hugs/projection
Posted in 1' 2' 10', BarTalk, Designing Around Place, Live Web | No Comments »
Monday, March 30th, 2009
Since the BarTalk application is really just a metaphor for a system that can be used in any situation where there might be mingling, the entire application is being customized for the ITP Spring Show. What makes this application widely applicable is the addition of a third modular piece that is unique to the event or venue. The theme is still the same; there will be text communication and photo contributions.
The third component for the Spring Show application will be a visualization of projects. It will be a map with dots indicating a project’s location. There will be a yet undecided amount of information regarding each project in the visualization, but our text component includes a “Respect” field in which the user will enter a project identifier. The more respect a project receives, the more its corresponding dot pulsates on the map.
People have toyed with the idea of visualizing projects at the show in this sort of way. Some have challenged the idea claiming that it turns the show into a popularity contest. However people come to the show with a completely different perspective. There are so many projects, so much noise, and so very many people finding interesting projects may be a challenge in and of itself. If an excellent project gets stuck in the back corner behind 1000 patrons it may never be seen without a little help. Our visualization will help to democratize the projects in the show. And let’s face it, every project in the show is excellent.
The text component is a custom-made Twitter client designed for mobile devices. It will be available on the web on the night of the show. The client will act just like your current client, with access to your own personal content, but it also includes a special #itpshow feed. Every message sent from the client is appended with the hashtag, and our client will give you all Tweets corresponding to it. You can read what people are saying about the show and projects, do some networking of your own, or find out if any of your friends are around. You can follow anyone who tweets with the hashtag, so you are sure to make a few new contacts.
It is completely unstyled, but please see the prototype. Just log in to see what we mean.
http://itp.nyu.edu/~jkb315/bartalk/login.php
Posted in 1' 2' 10', BarTalk, Designing Around Place, Physical Computing | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009
Say you’re having a party and want to send guests a welcome message when they arrive, or you want to notify your employees as soon as they walk into the office about a last minute meeting. It is quite easy to detect Bluetooth devices in your area and send text messages to them using Processing, Textmarks, PHP and MySQL. The hard part is associating a Bluetooth ID with a phone number and making sure devices have Bluetooth enabled.
The easiest way to do this would be to use OBEX to push the device’s Bluetooth ID to itself in the form of a message and instruct the user to forward that message to 41411 + keyword (of course, the device’s Bluetooth still must be turned on). That way the user has to do no signing up or digging around for their Bluetooth ID. You can parse the ID and store it along with the corresponding phone number. Then the device will receive subsequent messages when it is detected by the app.
Here are a couple files to get you started. The Processing file is modified from the bluetoothDesktop library to include a HTTP request to the script that checks the database for devices and sends messages. You will also need Textmarks class files.
Processing source
PHP source
Posted in 1' 2' 10', BarTalk, Designing Around Place | No Comments »
Saturday, February 28th, 2009
In forging a stronger relationship between the mobile device, desktop, and TV I thought AJAX might have great potential. With the iPhone’s Safari browser supporting AJAX there is lots of fun to be had. I made this little application that turns the iPhone into a remote control for the desktop or TV. When you visit the page on the iPhone you get a number of images that when clicked display a larger image on the remote screen. Likewise when you visit the same page on a desktop or TV, you will see only the image that you chose to see using your iPhone. This page is equipped with device detection, so you will automatically be directed to the proper page for your device.
Give it a try! http://summermittens.com/1210/10 (mobile & desktop)
If you don’t have an iPhone, you can still try it using http://summermittens.com/1210/10/iphone.html as the controller.
If you would like to make this yourself and need a script, use this one.
Posted in 1' 2' 10', BarTalk, Designing Around Place | No Comments »
Thursday, February 19th, 2009
For our final project, Matt Young and I will design and develop BarTalk, our idea for a social network centered around bars. BarTalk will allow bar patrons to interact with each other and the bar as a whole using their mobile device. It allows for patrons and bartenders to interact in new ways.
A user’s mobile phone is automatically detected via Bluetooth when they walk into the bar. Once this happens, the user will be able to interact with the bar and with other BarTalk users in close proximity, resulting in a mobile social network of complete strangers in your immediate surroundings. Development will include a mobile component that will be the primary interface communication, a web service for new users to register with and for bars to run the application on, and a TV to display user-generated media and facilitate participation.
This project expands upon the first iteration of BarTalk.
Posted in 1' 2' 10', BarTalk, Designing Around Place | 1 Comment »
Thursday, January 15th, 2009
This week I used ITP’s 4 in 4 Project Challenge (do one project a day for four days) as a kind of mobile development crash course. I’ve sort of done mobile development using Textmarks, but I’d never built a native application for any particular platform. This week I learned Android and BlackBerry. I dedicated a day to each platform to set up their respective development environments and playing with Hello World, and one day each for a real application for Android and BlackBerry. I will post the Charlie Rose schedule application for Android and BlackBerry when they are solid and ready for download. My experience is detailed in the 4 previous entries.
Posted in 4 in 4, Designing Around Place | No Comments »
Thursday, January 15th, 2009
Sometimes you might be out trying to decide whether or not you should head home early for Charlie Rose. It’s a tough call when you don’t know who’s on. When you look at the channel guide on the TV, it doesn’t tell you who’s on that night. So here is the Charlie Rose app for BlackBerry. When you launch it, it tells you who’s on tonight and, if applicable, tomorrow night.
The app hits this php script and displays the text on the device. I figure if I let the app hit the script for the data, I can manipulate the script later on without asking people to update their version of the application. This app was considerably easier to develop than the Android version, due to BlackBerry’s more direct way of displaying text. When writing your code, I strongly recommend using Eclipse as your development environment. The BlackBerry JDE is utter crap. I’ve heard that JDE plugins for Eclipse are also crap, so you can simply add net_rim_api.jar (located in the lib folder of your BlackBerry JDE Component Package) to your Eclipse Java project as an external Jar file and start coding. Here’s a screenshot of the Charlie Rose app for BlackBerry. When the app is packaged and ready for download, you will find it on Summer Mittens.
Posted in 4 in 4, Designing Around Place, Etcetera | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 14th, 2009
Today, I set up my BlackBerry development environment. To do this, I installed version 4.2.1 of the JDE which came highly recommended. From there, this Hello World tutorial was dead simple. However, there are lots of other fun things to do with the BlackBerry, like connecting to the Internet, that are not so simple. These things require MDS. It took a small village, but I was ultimately able to connect the simulator to the web. To do this, I installed the JDE Component Package 4.6. This sounds relatively simple, but at times during the process I found myself tearing up. I was eventually able to get ahold of myself, and my simulator connects to the web. Tomorrow I will do a Charlie Rose app for BlackBerry and post the results.
Here are two excellent guides to you help build your app:
BlackBerry_Application_Developer_Guide_Volume_1
BlackBerry_Application_Developer_Guide_Volume_2
Posted in 4 in 4, Designing Around Place, Etcetera | No Comments »
