MobileWish-Putting Technology to Mobile Emotions

MobileWish : Putting Technology to Mobile Emotions

A Presentation by : Samir K. Dash1st June 2007, 7pm-8 pm IST

System Consultant, Enterprise System Solutions Pvt. Ltd

Samir Kumar

Good Evening, Good Morning to everyone. And welcome to the presentation on Mobilewish: Putting technology to mobile emotions. In this presentation I will try answer the what, why and how aspect of this mobile client -- specially what it is, what problem it addressed, what solution it proposed,what technology was used, how technolgies were put together to bring this client to life and whenever necessary I will say something about why a certain was followed putting things as it is. The basic aim will always be to share the idea that works behind this mobile client and also to share the challenges which I faced during the development it...along with what I saw as the way to overcome those .So here we go ...

Web based client to let users send and receive e-cards anywhere any time.

World’s first complete mobile greetings solution.

One of the best examples available today representing the potentiality of Flash Lite.

What is MobileWish ?

Samir Kumar

few months back, looking at the growing popularity of Flash Lite, a small initiative was taken by me with the support from ESSPL , to build a sample application that will demonstrate the potentiality of Flash technology, so that it can be properly evaluated to make decsions wheter ESSPL will make its step in this domain or not.The result of this simple experiment resulted in world's first mobile client in Flash Lite that can provide mobility to the ecards by letting users to send and receive cards while on the move.MobileWish is a simple web based client that lets user to send andreceive cards while on the move. This is also first ever complete solution for mobile greetings where a mobile hand set isused for both receiving and sending cards. And because of Flash Lite it a cross pltform solution, as it can run on any open OS operated mobile phone where there is a Flash Lite 2 player installed along with the GPRS feature. There is also the desktop version available that runs over a PC with a Flash Player.

The idea behind MobileWish, is to let you send and receive your mobile cards anywhere, anytime ...

Access your card while you are on the move …


Samir Kumar

This solution was designed in such manner as the idea behind this client was that there should be no restriction for accessing the ecards... we can access the cards and send them any where any time..while driving home, walking on the beach you can now send your wish to your dear ones with just few clicks on your mobile hand set...


…access your card over the internet

Samir Kumar

and it is not manadatory that the receiver will also need to have the client installed on a compatiable phone ...as the ecard can still be viewed by following the link that was sent to him in an auto generated email on a internet enabled PC. Even using the desktop version of the client, the recever can also view the card. Thus by giving the total freedom ,in sending and receiving egreeting cards...MobileWish is a simple but unique solution.

Paper Greetings Card Restricted to a physical location

E-GreetingsNot restricted to physical location directly. But you need a PC with internet connection which may be restricted to a physical location

The Problem

People prefer eCard over a paper card because it gives more freedom.But this freedom is limited.

Samir Kumar

The genesis behind the birth of MobileWish client, is a common life experience....few months back before I started to work on it, on my last birthday, a friend from Banagalore sent me an ecard..which I opened up near about a week later, as i was out of town during that time and was in my village home, where there was no internet connection, though near about all major cellular operators were providing their service ... This gave me an idea to an existing problem : though we stick to ecards because it can be reached quickly, and can be accessed from any where still the freedom is limited. Though unlike a paper greetings card, the ecard is not bound directly to any physical location, still it is limited to the place where we have a PC with an internet connection.

Create a cross platform client that can let users to experience much higher degree of freedom by providing a complete experience on ubiquitous mobile handsets.

Users can use their handsets to send and receive the greetings to almost anyone around the world.

The Solution

Samir Kumar

And that provided the thought for food -- why not use a mobile phone instead? Mobile phones are now growing cheaper day by day...and a mobile handset is special because you can carry it any where and if you have the network connection alive...most probably you have the GPRS feature alive too!

The Idea

Samir Kumar

So the final idea was that later took shape into the client was like this --

Find a technology that will let you create client application that is platform independent.

The e-cards cards should be created in a manner that they can display consistently over various mobile devices (inside the client) as well as on a desktop (inside an internet browser)

Development Challenges: Which technology to Use ?

Samir Kumar

so the next step was to evalute available technologies for mobile domain, that can make this this idea a reality.The very first thing I noticed was that ...most of the very expressive ecards available at different sites are in Flash. But these can 't be played on the devices with lower processing power and using less resourses. Fortunately by this time Flash Lite profile was released, which meant to me that now I can add some interactivity to the ecards instead of just showing a animated GIF as a card.Other points that helped me deciding on the technology was that I was planning to run my ecards over different devices and even on PCs. I evaluated different technologoies and had made a comparision and found there is just one technology that is suitable for my purpose...Flash Lite

• I found that Flash Lite is an important step in creating a technology that can run consistently everywhere.

• Flash Lite offers several production benefits over competing technologies

– Design wow factor along with interactivity

– Small file size (Good for mobile devices!)– Flash Lite 2x allows XML (XML is also

cross platform technology )– Flash Lite can communicate with server

side scripts (ASP/PHP)

Flash Lite & XML Made it Happen

Samir Kumar

So the decesion is taken... I selected Flash Lite 2, as it had shared object and XML support . I was comfortable using XML and it was the best way to port data into different devices too. As the solution needed server side tasks to be performed...I used ASP and Flash Lite was also very easy to be in sync with it.

Adobe Flash Lite 2/2.1 Mobile Profile.Action Script ASP (as server side script)XML ( for data portability and storage)MDB (for secure data storage)Flash 8 Professional with Flash Lite SDK

Adobe Photoshop CS2

Adobe Dreamweaver

Symbian Series 60 Development Tools

Tools & Technologies behind MobileWish

Samir Kumar

so here are the list of tools and technologies used in the MobileWish experiment:

Fundamentals are popular : Why to reinvent the wheel ?

I have not reinvented the wheel from scratch…just refined the existing one to fit my needs

Done by server side script

XML E-mail Address

Mobile client

ID of e-card

Samir Kumar

The most significant part of any application developmnent is to plan out a structure for the business flow... and for me also it was crucial as I had to involve a two way communication ...the sender and receiver being positioned at the two end of it. I thought why not adopting an existing structure ..that is so commonly used for real life postal delivery... at least that will save me from re-inventing the wheel again!In a conventional postal delivery system which you can see in the diagram...[explain diagram]

• Registration: Create an User Id & an associated XML file.

• Card Selection/Inbox View: Populate Gallery, Inbox etc. with the XML data

• Send a Card: Update receiver’s XML, Create Database entry and a generate an email.

• Additional features: Change Password, Retrieve forgotten password etc.

The Old Wheel – a New Look !

Registration Sign In Receive Card

SendCard

Create Profile

Create unique ID for userSaved the data in data base using ASP

Save users data on mobile for later useSaved these data in Flash Lite Shared Object on the mobile phone

Verify the authentication of the userUsed ASP to match the password from the database

Populate the inbox list with the received card details Used XML for porting data AS2 to create a Listbox component that can populate these data.

Populate the gallery list with the available cards

XML, AS2

Technologies in Action: Reshaping the Wheel

Communicate with a server side script (ASP)

As you can notice major part of the whole workflow is dependent on server side, effectively sending and retrieving data to and from the server was a essential part.

Postmortem of MobileWish Client: Common Programming Tasks involved

Populate a list in Flash with XML data

As there were several places where XML data has to be populated, in the list boxes, this was

also a major part of development.

Send and Load Data to & from Server

Send some data to server and get back the response from the server to process further

Loading XML to Populate a List

Get an article with sample file at Dev Center at:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/devices/articles/xml_photo_gallery.html

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/devices/articles/xml_photo_gallery.html

Registration aims at tracking the sender and the receiver. Registration creates the reference point for creating/updating XML files

User Registration

Real Challenge in User Registration

Sending cards to users who are not registered results in creating a User profile file for that person.

So in a later date if the same person wants to register then how to manage his profile so that it won’t result in a duplicate profile?

Samir Kumar

The target solution aimed at sending card to any one round the globe and this means we should be able to send card persons who has no registration profile in the MobileWish users database. The problem I faced there, was that how to maintain the uniqueness of the user? For this while sending a card to an user a search is made if the user has a profile in the database or not. If result is NO then create one. But then the question was what will happen when the user will come for registration ? Shall it create a new profile for the same user replacing the old one or just throw the message that the user name is in database ?For this the solution was that a default password is set to the profile while creating it for the first time in the sending process. While registration if the password matches the default one, then the password is replaced by the new one as requested by the user and all his old profiles will be intact.

Viewing Cards in Inbox

Sending a Card

Postmortem of MobileWish Cards: Dual Features

Card should be able to behave consistently while being displayed inside - The Flash Lite Client in a handset- The Internet Browser on a PC

It is because the ways how it will receive data to display the customized message and sender name are done in each of above case in a different manner:

- Direct value pushed into the card from the swf client - URL string based so that user can view it following a hyperlink

Samir Kumar

while the card is in the client...I am able to push the data into the card from the client...but while viewing this is not the option, as we need to provide a URL string as the link to the card, so the same card must have ability to accept the data and render it wherever it is. That's the dual feature of cards

Inside ASP page that shows the card in the browser

Postmortem of MobileWish Cards: Dual Features

• Plans are to Make it FL1.1 compatible along with a SQL databse support for preparing it ready for a real life production environment.

• MobileWish is a simple experiment showing the way to build complex Flash Lite based clients for creating subscription based models, eg. A client for subscription based content on demand service.

Going Forward

Get to know more about MobileWish at www.mobilewish.com Or

Send a mail to me at: [email protected]

Additional Information

http://www.mobilewish.com/

mailto:[email protected]

Thanks to Mariam Dholkawala, Manager, IndiMad

Board of Management, Enterprise System Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

Thanks for suggestions received

Debashish Paul, Member IndiMad

Vivek, i2fly.com

Acknowledgements

Thank You !

MobileWish-Putting Technology to Mobile Emotions

Technology

Transcript of MobileWish-Putting Technology to Mobile Emotions