AroundMe App for Nokia devices

Transcript

1. AroundMe Explore your Surroundings
2. Overview •About AroundMe •Features •Technology •Constraints •Some ux lessons •Questions
3. AroundMe •Where am I. •What’s around me. •Tell me about it. •Get me there.
4. About AroundMe •Allows you to find important businesses and services wherever you are e.g. Restaurants, banks…… • Designed for Symbian touch devices. S60 5th edition, Symbian^3, Symbian ‘Anna’. •Launched last month.
5. Symbian Touch Devices Symbian s60 Symbian^3 Symbian 'Anna'
6. Downloads Countries: 1. India 2. Italy 3. Germany 4. United Kingdom 5. Nigeria 6. Thailand 7. Australia 8. Spain 9. Kenya 10. France 11. Russian Federation 12. United States of America Devices: 1. Nokia 5233 2. Nokia N8-00 3. Nokia C7-00 4. Nokia 5800 XpressMusic 5. Nokia 5230 6. Nokia 5250 7. Nokia 5228 8. Nokia N97 9. Nokia X6 10. Nokia 5530 XpressMusic 11. Nokia E7-00 12. Nokia C6-00 13. Nokia C5-03
7. Features
8. Fast, easy to use and efficient.
9. Gives a long list of businesses around you in any category along with the distance from where you are. Items are ordered by distance starting with
10. View each listing's location on a map.
11. You can also get directions to any of the listings.
12. If possible, we can also plot the route to that listing for you on a map.
13. You can also call the business. Tap on the dial button and AroundMe will immediately launch the dialer. E.g. You can search for and call a Taxi or make a reservation.
14. Home screen If you put AroundMe on your device's home screen, it updates your location automatically. This feature is supported on home screen enabled devices such as the N97 and Symbian^3 and Symbian 'Anna' devices.
15. AroundMe allows you to explore any place in the world. e.g. just enter “Kimathi st, Nairobi” and AroundMe will take you right there. You can explore a place before you visit.
16. If street view is available you can explore the area by viewing street level imagery. Only supports static imagery. Dynamic street view imagery was too slow on the Symbian browser so I gave up altogether.
17. You can also read reviews about that business aggregated from multiple sources on the internet.
18. Code
19. AroundMe is just a bunch of API's. It's like a mobile mashup. Combines Nokia device APIs with Google Geo APIs
20. Nokia Platform services API Enables you to access key device features such as Location, Landmarks, Sensor, Camera, Contacts..... Very easy to use.
21. Nokia Web Runtime API (ui). You can actually create your own native apps using js and css. Easily leverage the power of ajax
22. Google Local Search API. Gives us all the results. Initial idea was to use local data (yellow pages)
23. HTTP Geocoder. Convert’s addresses into geographic coordinates and vice versa.
24. Google Static Maps API
25. Google Directions API Calculates directions between known locations using an HTTP request
26. Google Street View API
27. Custom API on app engine that handles the user requests and removes the load from the client side. written in Python. App engine handles HTTP requests pretty well: request, processing, response(json).
28. Architecture AroundMe App Engine Directions Api Street View Geocoder Local Search API Maps API
29. App Engine Handles most of the synchronization logic. E.g. Google only gives a maximum of 8 results per round trip and 32 for a single query. AroundMe gives a user 32 results in total. To get this the server does 4 requests to Google for every user request.
30. App Engine •Easy to use and works pretty well. •Cost efficient. •Automatic scalability. •Abstracts away sys- admin headaches. •Good as a back-end for mobile apps that require some
31. Basically AroundMe is a python back-end and a mainly JavaScript front-end (WRT) communicating via ajax (json).
32. Constraints •Slow connectivity on mobile phones. •Only a subset of phones supported. •Localization. •Monetization.
33. Some UX lessons •Every millisecond matters. Optimize optimize optimize. •Don’t trade-off user experience for a wide user base. You can ship several versions. •If you have to hit the network, minimize the download size. •Always communicate with the user. •Most programmers are terrible at design. Get help.
34. Places Directory
35. Money 1)Ads – plenty of eyeballs needed. 2)Paid apps.
36. Coding for Nokia •Java ME - S40 (next billion users….) •Native Web Apps- Symbian and recently S40 •QT – Symbian, Maemo, Meego •Python - Symbian S60
37. Thank You @jmwai