Monday, September 20, 2004

New ideas for mobile applications

This is some idea that I have come up with, which would be realy nice for a mobile application. Since I havent thought about a name for it I am just going to describe the features that I am going to include in it, and how I came up with those features.

5 day Weather information: Since I am living in london the weather is total unpredictable and basicly shite, if you dont watch the weather report you end up wearing a jacket when it is warm and just a shirt when it is cold. Moreover there are other problems like it rains without any kind of warning.

I am working in london city so I depend on the tube and the DLR to travel into london alternatively I can take the bus to work (which I have never done uptill now). There are days when a certain tube line are down or running late, now if it is one of the lines that I am using then I need to be informed about those delays before hand so I can probally leave early or take the bus or someting on those lines.

DLR schedule: The DLR web site provides information about the trains arriving at a particular selected station, I would like that information to be visible on the phone.

I would require the 5 day weather forecast and the tube delay information to be pushed into my phone every day in the morning rather than manually clicking on receive and wait for the information to be received. I can just schedue it to run at say 7am.

As for the DLR schedule I would rather manually execute that to give me information about a particular tube station.

Now the question how do I go about getting all this done.
Weather information: I generaelly have a look at weather information at www.bbc.com/weather so I would prefer if bbc would provide some sort of XML based request repsonse providing me with XML response consisting of the 5 day weather forecast.
As for the tube delays I generally listen to radio and then I come to know about the delay but I gues there should be something on their site that also provides some live information about it.

DLR live information is avaliable over here.
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/dlr/service_info/index.shtml

I think I have some kind of scheduling feature in MIDP2.0 where in I can schedule an MIDP Application to run to run at a particular time of the day.

Well, all this is something that has just come into my head on a monday morning but I really have to get and down and put my head and my determination into developing something, and comming up with a plausable design.

22Sep04

Some update on getting live tube updates, on the Tube Site there is an applet that retrives live Service Update Messages from the the server, I deompiled the class file and found out that it gets it live feed from this URL
http://tube.tfl.gov.uk/realtime/nexus/underground_ban.htm
At times this page may not return anything since there is no disruption (ya that actually happens).

2 comments:

Vivek said...

That was still an idea I still have gone about doing anything about it. I think I can start by writing to TFL and ask them if they provide any API for external clientes to use their services ?
I also had another idea also the same lines -
http://thinking0utl0ud.blogspot.com/2004/11/new-idea-for-mobile-application.html

Anonymous said...

There's a company called Kizoom (http://www.kizoom.com) that specialise in providing travel updates to mobile devices.