mobile phones - multi-platform apps muses

[sipst...@my-deja.com]

Having spent a surprising week or three in an entirely new area of the
country (UK) to me a few years ago whilst working on a peripatetic gig
- surprising mainly because of the amount of people on foot
permanently wearing mobile (cellphone) hands-free kits more normally
associated with people piloting vehicles, I figured this was as good a
place to ask about durability of RISC-OS enabled mobile phones
(Blackberries, iPhones, WindowsMobile and so on).

It not being available purely as an archive also helped, as my post
was mainly about iPhones and news:comp.sys.apple is now no good, being
available only as an archive.

But talk in the UK, up and down the country, for all kinds of people,
is currently revolving around the main question of "well, what you
going to do if the place has to close then...?".

And it being the kind of place where spirit levels are amongst the
items used for genuinely critically important work from time to time,
and mobile phones generally being so...ephemeral, I suppose, in their
durability, my contribution about considering starting to code useful
little widget apps for multi-platform cellphone units quite quickly
developed along the lines of finding out if there were any reasonable
RISC-OS emulators, at least for market-leading, units so that this
could be done from a home computer.

As it's now coming into comp.sys.wearables, this post, I'm instead
motivated to wonder if there are any voice-recognition type games for
wearable wearers, such as something to keep you awake at the wheaal in
the wee small hours when you're pulling an overnight run into central
London, for example.

But I suppose putting the soundtrack/s of various good movies onto a
CD for the journey kind of makes up for the execrable BBC reception
for various stations except r2 and r1 at some points on the M1 where
all the towns start getting close together (About 6 junctions north of
Luton, IIRC).

And that's without even considering the ethics of ad hoc frequency
sonics trickery to achieve such ends.

I was just thinking that the first really flashy phone I saw that
you're supposed to be able to flick through a photo' album with by way
of just shaking the thing to the right or left, er, didn't actually
work reliably at all by the time I came to see it. And nor was it very
old.

I was just thinking about the spirit level application, and why nobody
so far has written one to float above a viewfinder screen such as one
uses when, for example, taking said photographs. As well as whether
there's any point in a spirit level app at all if it's likely to end
up unreliable before the warranty has expired--keeping in mind the
kinds of workplaces a spirit level is most use in are those in which
the units tend to be exposed to adverse conditions and treatment
beyond the manufacturers' expectations.

Maybe I should put more shelves up more often, but bootlaces come in
pairs, tend to be the same length, and I can't think of anyone who has
only one key, never mind that fragments of stone often can literally
be picked up free, to a good home, or bad.

Actually, I have enough broken phones myself to make a set of themed
plumb lines now I think about it.

But seriously, there are dozens of apps that nobody has thought of--
not even me! But, working out how to code them for the range of phones
currently available, without taking on the franchise of a retail
outlet in order to play with them all, does seem best done by way of
home computer-based emulators. Are there any? Can iPhones be done with
AppleTalk?

And has there been any uptake at all of the "mobile phone web" which
is allegedly hitting massive in India, where users navigate menus by
voice with their mobile phone and the data and information put up
there by the others is in audio form (though pictures are likely to
follow, if you think about it, as I'm about the only person I know
whose phone isn't also a very basic digital camera)?

Can one now flirt with Bluetooth by way of tagged wearable
configurations to facilitate easy identification across a crowded,
albeit no longer smoky (which lends assertions about not wishing to
breathe the same air as someone I'm probably going to be expected to
go drinky poos with if I'm not careful an entirely new validity with
no small amount of real integrity) room? Could I rig up an earpiece to
blip every time someone who's interested in me stands within 10' of me
at the bar?

I don't know. It wasn't the group I was expecting to post this open-
ended consultation to. Particularly as I was then going to ask how one
puts one's own, basically original, MP3s of music up there on the
Indian audio web. I don't know anyone who lives there off the top of
my head. But if it's free to anyone who browses I want it up there if
possible.

I never thought of my old cassette-based personal stereos as "wearable
systems" but MiniDiscs, MP3s and iPods debatably are. So I suppose
that just about wraps up the issue of poor Radio 4 reception on the M1
as one can simply use one's phone to listen again. Not that I'd get
much more than a minute or two of it from what people with monthly
bills tell me they've been charged for not realising the internet
isn't free on mobiles, despite they were misleading folk into thinking
it was by referring to it as "mobile boradband".

Thanks in advance anyone who bothers replying informatively.

But isn't it interesting the extent to which we're bound by old
metaphors from the days of mechanical systems--not a mobile phone I
know of has a plug in fibre-optic lens jack so you can just take a
snap of whatever is in front of your right shoulder (after calibration
obviously) in a wearables environment.

Indeed, not one of the (admittedly small number of) apps I've seen has
featured even a nod to wearable frameworks.

I think I may have found a niche.

G DAEB
COPYRIGHT (C) 2009 SIPSTON
--