Saturday, November 12, 2011

iOS developer... kind of wanna be :-)

I enrolled the Apple's iOS developer program and getting ready to start development of iPad/iPhone apps. I am really excited because it is something I was not doing (developing software) for a long time. In fact, I was able to teach programming but being a developer is something else.

(Well, I developed software in Prolog, but that's something else...)

I really like XCode IDE and the features of Objective-C. I plan to become proficient as I believe that the future of computing is with mobile devices and the cloud. That's also Apple's vision and I am willing to play a role in it.

More to come... stay tunned!

Saturday, September 10, 2011

It is never too late...

Today I choose to be positive!

Finally they installed power plugs in Swiss trains as you can see in the picture. It's certainly useful but it comes when now laptop batteries have extended time life. It would have been more useful a few years ago when batteries lasted only 1-2 hours.

Next I expect to have Internet connectivity when nearly everybody will have their mobile Internet plan on mobile devices.

One lesson learned is that innovation bust be deployed in a timely fashion otherwise it becomes obsolete or useless.

Providers of public services need to understand that. If users ask for a new service or an improvement, that means that they need it NOW! They must react fast even with a suboptimal solution.

If I am really hungry, every kind of food will do the job.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Apple iOS5 location-based reminders for Just in Time/Place task assignment

RemindersApple introduced a new feature in the new iOS 5 that could open several opportunities for developers. As described by Apple here:

A better way to do to-dos.

Next time you think to yourself, “Don’t forget to...”, just pull out your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch and jot it down. Reminders lets you organise your life in to-do lists — complete with deadlines and locations. Say you need to remember to pick up milk during your next shopping trip. Since Reminders can be location based, you’ll get an alert as soon as you pull into the supermarket car park. Reminders also works with iCal, Outlook and iCloud, so changes you make update automatically on all your devices and calendars.
I have explored location-based reminders in one of my works on Kinetic User Interafaces. I instantiated this type of reminders to a shopping-list (UbiShop) scenario where a shared shopping-list is used to send reminders to people when they are located in a place where items in the list can be purchased (e.g. near a grocery store).
This not the only application of location-based reminders as it is applicable to several other situations. I called this "just-in-time/just-in-place" task assignment. You can find here a research article on this subject.
If Apple will provide API to manage location-based reminders within the OS for developers, what I have conceived can become a true reality. I am very excited about that and willing to dive into it.
You can watch below a video made by some of my students who implemented a prototype of Just-in-Time/Place reminders for the UbiShop scenario.