Blipit 2.0 - The next steps

[Diptanu Choudhury]

Hi Buddies,

Starting this thread so that we can discuss the next set of features for BlipIt. Before that the good news is we have got a potential user of BlipIt. Yay! 

So i was thinking the next steps could be -

Android

* Usability improvements

BlipitServer

* Make it possible to host blipit out of AppEngine

* Make it possible to filter blips based on location from the website. The NGO's might not have android devices.

PanicSMS

* Add Bing as an alternate geocoding service provider.

* Have a custom geocoder which can be plugged into any datastore like GeoNames and NGO's should be able to enter local addresses too. Like none of the geocoders might have the local address in the interior.

* Have a page to show unresolved sms-es which doesn't have the addresses correctly. Since the situation when a user sends an sms is emergency, the system should not reject any sms because it doesn't understand the address.

* Make a basic Kannel Config to aid users to setup Kannel quickly.

Buddies, add more stuff which I may have not thought about. 

--
Thanks,
Diptanu Choudhury
Consultant, ThoughtWorks India
Mobile - +91 9686602153
Web - www.linkedin.com/in/diptanu

Twitter - @diptanu

[Kiran G]

Hi Guys,

I think we should work on the transport app as well.

I feel that will be a very useful app for all people who want to go by taxi or auto or car pool.

Its serves a good cause by helping people to car pool. I am sure Buddy will like this :).

What do you guys think?

Regards,
Kiran
Nagu nagutha nali nali yene agali

[Kalyan Akella]

Hi Buddies,

Good to see your interest in BlipIt even after the MADS submission. Thank you all.

I have been thinking through the BlipIt project road map for the past few days and using this excellent article on Wikipedia to guide me through the thought process. I am planning to finalize this list by this Sunday and write up a wiki article on our project page.

Functional Improvements:

• PanicBlip
• i18n & localization abilities on the PanicBlip UI
• Ability to attach additional info to a panic blip. This info can be a picture or video, text etc. that describes the victim's situation. We can upload this data separately once the panic blip is registered with BlipIt.
• PanicSMS
• Configure multiple geo-location providers
• Use the BlipIt Dashboard to retrieve SMS panics for pending processing.
  
• BlipIt Android Client
• i18n & localization abilities on the BlipIt client UI
• Additional configuration options like,
• polling interval
• max number of blips
  
• manual/automatic option for polling blips
• Manual override for polling blips. Perhaps a custom widget on the MapOverlay
• BlipIt Web Client
• Implement an AJAX based web front end for viewing blips.
• Configuration options similar to the Android counterpart.
  

Non functional improvements:

• BlipIt Dashboard
• Ability to clean up filter requests originating from various BlipIt clients.
• Re-implement dashboard to consume the REST APIs instead of the current JSP based implementation.
• BlipIt Deployment
• Implement a stand-alone deployment strategy for BlipIt services.
• De-couple the persistence layer with Google data store & make it configurable
• De-couple the services layer with Google App Engine & make it deployable on stand-alone J2EE containers
• Ability to import/export blips in the system for existing deployments.
• Testing
• Write Android side functional tests for all the use-cases and automate them.
• Build ability to import/export test data into the Google data store offline.
• Perform some field tests with real phones & data.
  

Apart from the above high priority tasks that need to be completed to make BlipIt usable as it is, I plan to maintain a wish list of features separately on our project page. I'll write a separate post on this to address K3's requirement & other similar features.

Please take time to go through the list & let your opinions known by this Sunday.
Sincere Regards,
Buddy

[Kiran G]

Hi Buddy,

After reading your mail feels like Panic Blip and Blipt It seem to be the priority right now.

My personal preference would be to work on Panic Blip and the transport app as both are serving good cause.

What do others think???

Regards,
Kiran
Nagu nagutha nali nali yene agali

[Kalyan Akella]

Hi,

I second that K3. Thank you for the inputs. We should indeed work on more POC client applications in the social impact initiative.

However, I first wanted to iron out some of the persistent issues (like lack of functional tests, App Engine independent deployments etc.) in the current release before we go ahead with the new applications. The road map has been written to reflect this idea.

Having said that, I would like to have a wiki page set up to capture such ideas & use cases for BlipIt. So, keep them coming :-)

Sincere Regards,
Buddy

[Kiran G]

Agreed that we need to write more tests and also think about our server side a bit (if you guys have forgotten I had sent a mail with questions regarding transaction, etc). But I think we can do all that work along with Panic Blip itself. Do we really need to work on BlipIt to test out server side changes? If that is the case then its fine...

Regards,
Kiran
Nagu nagutha nali nali yene agali