Ideas for the Android Developer Challenge
Submitted
by
Carl Rosenberger
Carl Rosenberger writes "How are you going to take part in Google's $10 million
Android Developer Challenge?
Here are some ideas from a list we are working on:
Gestures
The iPhone came out with new cool user interface gestures that involve touching multiple points on the touchscreen at the same time. For some inspiration see the use on a huge touchscreen. How about creating a gesture library for Android?
Meet Friends
You run across old friends every day, but you usually miss them by half a mile or by a couple of minutes. Wouldn't it be nice if you would notice and could go for a coffee together? A mobile location based system could arrange everything automatically.
Peer-To-Peer Framework
Imagine a country like China, 500 million users and all want to query for location-based data at the same time. What a challenge for the server infrastructure! Would it maybe work better, if users in a certain area would form a local computing cluster with Android devices and exchange location-based data directly?
PDF Reader
There already are a couple of PDF readers that are written in Java. Consider porting one to the Android platform and creating a user interface that makes it fun to read and navigate on a small screen.
Profiler
On mobile devices application performance is essential for success. More performance means less battery usage, longer battery life and less weight of the device. A profiler that is runnable on the device will help to allow developers write good Android apps and strengthen the Android platform.
Remote Desktop Client
Consider writing clients for Remote Desktop and for VNC for Android. Think about how you could make remote control even more efficient on a small screen. Maybe you would want to include remote clients for popular mail programs or a remote improved file explorer with a UI written for a small screen.
Ride Sharing
It is not necessary that we all commute with one person in one car. We can do better than spending a tenth of our awake life in traffic jams and we can also do better for protecting our environment. A location based system could discover that two people always take the same route at the same time and it could organize to put them together in one car.
RSS Feed Reader
It would save time to read RSS feeds when travelling. You may want to take a look at the open source project RSSOwl for Java sources how RSS is accessed. Maybe the phone could read feeds to you out loud, so you could listen in your car?
Speech Control
If you have a device with a small screen and a microphone, what's more natural than talking to it to tell it what to do? It may be ambitious to program Perl this way, but for sure you can talk your device into 'Take Picture And Send To Friends'."
Gestures
The iPhone came out with new cool user interface gestures that involve touching multiple points on the touchscreen at the same time. For some inspiration see the use on a huge touchscreen. How about creating a gesture library for Android?
Meet Friends
You run across old friends every day, but you usually miss them by half a mile or by a couple of minutes. Wouldn't it be nice if you would notice and could go for a coffee together? A mobile location based system could arrange everything automatically.
Peer-To-Peer Framework
Imagine a country like China, 500 million users and all want to query for location-based data at the same time. What a challenge for the server infrastructure! Would it maybe work better, if users in a certain area would form a local computing cluster with Android devices and exchange location-based data directly?
PDF Reader
There already are a couple of PDF readers that are written in Java. Consider porting one to the Android platform and creating a user interface that makes it fun to read and navigate on a small screen.
Profiler
On mobile devices application performance is essential for success. More performance means less battery usage, longer battery life and less weight of the device. A profiler that is runnable on the device will help to allow developers write good Android apps and strengthen the Android platform.
Remote Desktop Client
Consider writing clients for Remote Desktop and for VNC for Android. Think about how you could make remote control even more efficient on a small screen. Maybe you would want to include remote clients for popular mail programs or a remote improved file explorer with a UI written for a small screen.
Ride Sharing
It is not necessary that we all commute with one person in one car. We can do better than spending a tenth of our awake life in traffic jams and we can also do better for protecting our environment. A location based system could discover that two people always take the same route at the same time and it could organize to put them together in one car.
RSS Feed Reader
It would save time to read RSS feeds when travelling. You may want to take a look at the open source project RSSOwl for Java sources how RSS is accessed. Maybe the phone could read feeds to you out loud, so you could listen in your car?
Speech Control
If you have a device with a small screen and a microphone, what's more natural than talking to it to tell it what to do? It may be ambitious to program Perl this way, but for sure you can talk your device into 'Take Picture And Send To Friends'."