Volcano's mind

It's been a while I wrote my last post.

I left one of the most beautiful cities in the world more than 7 days ago and I came back to my city where a lot of people were really waiting for me (my girlfriend, my family but also my boss).
Last Monday I went to the office and I started with a brand new project.
New project means a lot of new stuff to develop and think about.
I think it's quite good for me, I really need to start working on something completely new, I also need to start thinking on new ideas and new jQuery plugins and optimization.
So, my last week were really busy. A lot of stuff to do and a lot of friends and people to meet.

Fortunately (well, in some way unfortunately) last night I couldn't sleep very well. My mind started thinking on new projects (also personal one).
The work project was related to a GPS-system for bikers. For 'bikers' I mean people riding bycicle. I think could be really good to track and map people's route with additional data (such as traffic condition or streets' work). This project is strictly related to my next personal project, that means fixing my father's old bike and begin going to work with 2-wheels instead of 4 (that is for sure better for the environment and for my body).

I was thinking on some good idea. A sort of social app to share bike's route into the city and to receive suggestions from other bikers about a different route or a better one.

GPS is still in my mind but I think I'm going to find the right way to create something useful.

How fast a train can go?

This morning I had to wake up at 4 am because I had to go to the airport because my girlfriend was going back to Turin. While on the gatwick express to London Victoria I fell asleep because I was bloody tired. When I woke up everybody around me where standing because the train arrived at the station. Suddenly I started thinking about something useful for that scenario.
Imagine how many people in the morning took the train to go to work. For sure lots of them would love to sleep a bit on the route especially if they are far enough. At the end, almost every devices could understand what's about their right position. The range could be a bit wide or really small. Google maps knows the right position of a station. So, the equation is really simple: when the user drive directly into the interested station range the device starts ringing. The main problem is the battery saving factor. The app should consider the train average speed (I think it could be calculated to be not too much neither too poor) and estimate the time between point A and point B and start requesting data every X minutes. Simple indeed but really effective.

Lot of ideas in my mind

In the last few weeks my brain is constantly flashing my mind with new ideas.
All of them regarding new (mobile) projects but they're not only utilities, some of them are games.
I had this great idea (I won't dig deeper on the features) about a mobile game.
Not a game full of light flashing around the screen, great 3D effects or huge animation.
This is not yet the right time, my mobile skills are not great enough and my graphical skills are really poor.
At the end, I want to try something different from what market could give users.
I want to give users something that let their brains squeezing about real problem but in a funny way.
If some of you knows Godville could understand what I'm trying to explain.
Godville is a simple game (without any useless graphics) with a great concept.
It could be explained like a casual game with few interactions as well.
What I'm thinking about in these days is something similar: a game where you don't need at all graphical elements (just the really necessary) but with a lot of possible choice.
Imagine a simulation game (Sim City could be the most known) where is needed a lot of interactions and decisions to proceed and where there aren't good or bad decisions.
I'm still thinking on every possible features but at the end what I really want to achieve is something that could be played totally offline (online mode will only be useful to send requests to other players and to get game and randonmess updates) and whether you're playing it or not, it will automatically proceed further.
I know would be a long way before this idea could come to life, but I don't want to be in a hurry.

Should improved technology always mean harder learning curves?

Probably I'm not the first, but I won't be the last for sure, wondering why something that could seem so easy to technology guys should be impossible to understand (or unreachable in some way) to all the other people. We could say that after a pair of years, thanks to the first iPhone, the multitouch feature has become something that doesn't need explanation anymore.
I think that a bit of training or tutorial on new concept is totally okay, but overthinking is not the right approach to a new technology. Let's imagine augmented reality. Not all people really know what is or what could be. Not everybody really seems interested, probably because they haven't been trained in the right way or, even worse, because it seems them to harder to understand, unreachable.
To be successful, everything should be layered and accessible on different level of knowledge.

Layered information

Augmented reality could also rely on multiple information layers. A place, or something marked to contains additional info, should allow people to choose the depth of knowledge requested. For example, a tourist would like to know historical (but basic) information about a monument, while an architect would like to know who built this monument and some other technical detail and so on. Multiple layered details based on layered kind of people and knowledge.

GPS, such an hard work

Last days I started working on my last project (temporarily named 'Guidr').
I started reading a lot of documentation on cell towers positioning, GPS positioning and a ton of other really interesting stuff.
At the end I started writing some lines of code and I suddenly realized that would be a really hard work.
Not for the positioning itself (well, it's not so easy anyway) but for location updates.
It seems Android would automatically decide when the position needs to be refreshed and sometimes (especially when debugging on my personal device) the refresh process didn't seem to work.
This is only the first step of the projects when I will have correct data, right updates process and timing, poor battery usage and better performance I should start focusing on something totally different (such as UI, in-app search, distance calculation, augmented reality data).

Looking for people

My augmented reality project seems a really good idea. I talked with some friends and they all are enthusiastic about my concept.
The big problem, right now, is the lack of time to work on this brand new project.
Fortunately, some friends (they are developers as well) would be glad to work with me. I only need to find more time and also probably the right hardware equipment (really need a netbook to work on totally mobility while on the train home).

Like a Phoenix

Right now, regarding my actual skills, GBikr is too ambitious probably.
I decided to let it sleep just a bit more and trying to focus on something simpler.
Something that links sight-seeing (not only for tourists) and augmented reality. AR really fascinated me since I first heard of it.
Imagine to discover your city or every other cities only by pointing your camera and without even download (mostly) useless data.
I need to think still a lot on this project and I have to talk at first with some good friends before even deciding a name or the basic useful features.