Pet projects

Bruce Gruenbaum — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:30:35 +0000

Like most software engineers, I love to just mess around with stuff – you know – just for the fun of it. I always have something that I am working on as a learning project where I can try something new and different just for the sake of it. My latest foray into this realm has to do with a little device that I have become addicted to. I’m talking, of course, about my Blackberry.

Now I am late to the Blackberry fold. I have never really thought of my cell phone as much more than a phone. I had an HP PDA several years ago, but I never really liked it and when I joined my current employer, I was given a Palm Treo that I absolutely hated, but used because it was provided by my employer. I had several of them die on me and the service was horrible through Sprint. But the one thing that I liked about it was e-mail, calendar and contacts.

My personal cell phone contract came up for renewal a little while ago and Verizon has this “new every two” thing where you can get a new phone at a much reduced price in order to make you sign on for another two. Despite all the other complaints I have heard by other people, I have been with Verizon now for 5 years and I have never really had any problems with their service or coverage. I think their service is very expensive, but it works well and if I can’t have a cell phone that works all the time, I really don’t want one.

The latter reason is why I won’t buy an iPhone. I want one so badly but AT&T’s coverage in my area is totally unreliable and frankly not much better price-wise than Verizon. I’ve always had a Mac just because its fun and I think the iPhone is probably a great thing, but Apple made a mistake entering into an exclusive with AT&T and I am not going to bite that bait.

The problem is the iPhone is really cool ‘coz you can write code for it. I can take a device that I use every day and make it do what I want it to do!!! OOOOH the POWER!!! But alas, I won’t waste my hard-earned cash on a phone that doesn’t even work when I need it to because of the network that it is tied to.

Blackberry has good integration with Microsoft Exchange through their Blackberry Enterprise server and as both my employer and my web hosting company (GoDaddy.com) have Blackberry Enterprise servers, I have a choice of where to go for my e-mail and calendar hookup. So I got myself a Blackberry.

And then I found out the really cool part… I can write code for my Blackberry! Not only that, it’s free – like any good developer platform should be. The only thing you pay for are the code-signing keys that you need to buy in order to gain access to some of the protected APIs and the keys cost next to nothing – it is just a means for them to verify who you are.

So I bought my keys and started playing with the API. The first thing I realized is that the documentation on it is really not very good. It gets some of the ideas across, but it takes some serious investigation just to figure out how to make the interface do what you want it to, but if you are willing to invest the time, it is great fun to be able to create and update appointments in the calendar, send e-mails, and most intriguingly, get access to the GPS. You can actually track the movement of the device so that you can find out where it is at any point in time. This allows you to do things like auto-fill address information based on the location of the device.

I was in my element! Just for the fun of it, I wrote myself a little app that I can turn on when I get into the car. It traces the route I take and the amount of time I spend getting between points on the route. I built in the ability to download that information to my desktop so that I can plot it on Google Maps and determine over time what is the most efficient way at different times of the day to get from one point to another. When I hit a traffic incident, I can add a comment about it to take care of the difference between slowdowns caused by accidents and slowdowns caused by general traffic.

Of course, as with any home-written software, every now and then the app explodes and I do seem to drain the battery really quickly. I think I know why and as long as I carry my car-charger the app does what I want it to for the moment. One of these days I will turn it into an open source gadget that people can make use of, but I am so excited that I have been able to write code that runs on my cell phone to make it do what I want it to.

The thing about pet projects, though, is once you get going you quickly start seeing a bunch of commercial applications for them. One of the things I am looking at is being able to provide remote administration and monitoring software so that a product operations group is able to monitor and administer aspects of the production environment from a Blackberry. I mean if I can write my blog posting on my Blackberry, why not manage my web-server from it? Of course, security is obviously a very good reason not to do this, but if you can find a way of doing that stuff securely, what a pleasure!

If you are interested in the Blackberry development platform, take a look at Blackberry’s Developer web-site where they have development options for Java and their browser. They even have a plugin for Eclipse so that you can do all your development in the Eclipse environment.

In an upcoming article I will share the source code for the app that I have written and describe how it works and what it does.

The Software Gorilla » Mobile Devices

Pet projects