Who's Using MoSync?
The people who know the most about the challenges of mobile application development are our customers. Without them and the feedback they provide to us, development of the MoSync SDK would have been nearly impossible. We thank them all! Many of our cross-platform mobile development projects are for customers who insist on strict non-disclosure for commercial or security reasons, so of course we can't tell you about them, but here are a few of our customers who we can tell you about, and what they are doing with MoSync.
Astando AB and E-Adept
A guidance system for visually impaired pedestrians
The e-Adept system from Astando is based on a digitalized road network for pedestrians and cyclists. Combined with a precise and reliable handheld positioning system based on GPS and inertia navigation, e-Adept provides an extremely detailed route indication for its pedestrian users — much more detailed than the normal road maps for drivers. The pedestrian route network makes it possible for the user to be guided along sidewalks, pathways and pedestrian crossings.
Astando uses MoSync to build e-Adept on standard phones. In this project we supported the development of a mobile navigation service for the visually impaired involving intriguing challenges in areas such as high performance real time positioning, UI design for the visually impaired, speech synthesis, design of Web Services suited for mobile communication and more. Mosync's role in the project involves supporting development of the client software and the client-server communication solution.
A common problem with GPS positioning is that it doesn't work well indoors or when there is no clear view of the positioning satellites. To solve this problem, we first developed an indoor positioning solution based on WLAN beacons working in combination with a sophisticated triangulation software residing on the mobile phone.
The final positioning solution made use of a dead reckoning technology with circuit boards provided by Honeywell Inc — a kind of advanced step counter with compass and 3D accelerometers on-board. The goal for the project is to create seamless outdoor/indoor positioning and navigation for various groups such as the visually impaired, the elderly, tourists and other services requiring reliable, high-performance positioning. The system has been tested in full-scale in three cities, and is already in use in lesser scale, by user groups and a selected trial population. The delegates of the 2008 ITS conference in Stockholm had the opportunity to try the system during the tour day of the international conference on intelligent transport systems.
Further reading, and an introductionary movie can be found at the customer's project website at www.eadept.se (in Swedish and English).
Bloo AB and BlooFlirt
A social networked mobile system
You’re in a pub with your friends, having a drink and chatting. You see a good looking guy with his friends a couple of tables away. Suddenly your eyes meet, and a mutual smile is exchanged. You’ld like to talk to him but you’re to shy too approach him at this time. Instead, you pick up your mobile phone and start your BlooFlirt application. Within a few seconds you see a picture list of other BlooFlirt members in the same pub, including the good looking guy who you can’t take your eyes off.
Bloo use MoSync to achieve consistent cross-plattform performance from a single code source. Instead of spending time on porting to various phone models, they can concentrate on development of the actual application.
The application uses a lot of connections, both local using bluetooth and via the cell network. This allows a user to "connect" even though a client is not in use, as long as their bluetooth connection is active another peer in the system can identify another nearby handset and register bluetooth MAC adresses in its proximity. This together with smart algoritms for roaming makes BlooFlirt as a social media system very flexible and robust. For more information on BlooFlirt and other networked social media applications, feel free to contact tommy@bloo.com.
Dalarnas Tidningar and MoPub LBS
A daily paper's local lunch guide
Dalarns Tidningar is a local daily in the mid-west of Sweden, found at www.dt.se. They run a community hub where a lot of information in the municipalty can be found, along with reviews, tips and debate on sociatal matters. All the local restaurants publish their weekly menus at the daily's website, and as an introductary step into the mobile landscape they wanted to publish information into mobile channels as well - hence they created a mab-based lunchguide for their users using MoSync.
The application is developed for the project by Lars Åke Vinberg, who normally develops software for the Windows platform and is skilled in c/c++ development. His work is then contributed to MoSync where this application is generalised into a standard map library, with the possibility to support several map formats such as Open Street Map, CloudMade and Google Maps (static).
The software is layed out in a layered structure, with a tile-based slippy map as a base layer, and with graphical elements on top which are fed into the application over HTTP using an XML-based format called geoRSS. There is also a browser supporting a small subset of HTML for viewing details about each point location on the map.
The main components are today available as libraries of the MoSync SDK, which through an open source GPL licensing is available for download at the mosync.com website.
Read more about the Maps API here
