Well working into the wee hours of the morning I finally finished off my Google Android Developer Challenge entry.
Bubbles! allows you to create a pop (point of presence) that is ‘broadcasted’ from your phone. Other Bubbles! users in close proximity (about 50m) get to see your pop and you get see theirs. Of course as you move around so does your pop.
A pop is anonymous and consists of a message and a nick name that you choose for yourself.
I was going to implement a feature whereby you could tie a pop to a location. This would allow you to attach messages to a point in space for other users to see. Unfortunately I ran out of time but its next on my list to build.
Here are a few screenshots so you can see Bubbles! in action (click to see them full sized)
I’m also thinking of including the ability to see the history of pops for another user and perhaps even the ability to initiate a chat session with another Bubbles! user. Maybe even overlay the pops unto a MapView (which would hook into Google Maps) .
Of course if I get into the top 50 for the first round of the challenge I’ll have some money to invest into more development. We’ll have to see how I go but here’s hoping.
April 18, 2008
I’m not sure if you want to give technical details, but if you want, I’m very interested in technical details. I was thinking about a similar submission, but realised I didn’t have time to implement it. Did you find a way to let Android phones talk directly to eachother? Bluetooth? Or do you send the coordinates to a central server and let that one figure it out?
btw good luck with the entry!
April 18, 2008
Hi Peter,
Yep I used a central server. This means that additional traffic over a channel that you will most likely be charged for traffic but it allows me to do things like attach messages to a point in space (which I think will be a killer feature for Bubbles!)
Of course this approach introduces scalability issues but if I ported the backend to something like Google App Engine it should be sweet
Bubbles! has been popping up in a few places on the web so hopefully it catches the judges attention and I get into the top 50.