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There are several apps that I'd like to build, if I had the time. This is one:
It's a 1-to-many messaging system, not unlike Twitter, but it only communicates over short range to other phones running the app, possibly by bluetooth or wifi.
When you send a message, it must hop from your phone to another's. It cannot use any other network to propagate. That ridiculous limitation is the essence of the app. IMO it makes it suck, but compelling. People that subscribe to you will get your message if it hops onto their phone. Otherwise, it is just stored, and hops from their phone to any others it contacts running the app. I imagine walking through an airport terminal with the app on, trying to collect what messages other's might be pushing.
It would be and must be ridiculous. If a message is to cross an ocean, it must travel on a phone on a plane or boat.
IMO there's a lot of interesting challenges to building this app.
The one thing that I think it could do that might be semi-useful, is to work as a broadcast network in a protest or disaster.
If by some chance this already exists, point me to it.
JakobVirgil · 2280 days ago · link ·
android? I think I could do this weekend what should we call it?
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I would be more than impressed. It has some weird issues. But, I'd chuck my iPhone for this. :) Telephone? :) I'm sure that name is taken. Maybe 'Tin Can'. BTW, I think it would have to be Android. I doubt Apple would be ok with this.I think I could do this weekend
what should we call it?
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sounds_sound · 2280 days ago · link ·
I like this idea. You could call it 'Gift Shop'.
JakobVirgil · 2280 days ago · link ·
Maybe this week are we just pushing messages through bluetooth or are we saving and rebroadcasting them?
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JakobVirgil · 2280 days ago · link ·
I will start in a bit I have to finish an app that stuns babies.
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flagamuffin · 2280 days ago · link ·
All right, I'll bite. Why are you creating an app that stuns babies?
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My brother's baby was colicky. For months, if he was not unconscious from sleep he would be screaming literally at his maximum volume. Completely binary, -either asleep or creating the most horrendous noise that makes you want to bash your head against the wall after hearing it for hours on end. Until you have experienced this it is hard to put into words how awful it is. Parents will pay any price for relief from this. And yes, the only thing that shut him up (they discovered eventually) was a CD of a vacuum cleaner running on an endless loop. It only sort of worked sometimes though :
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JakobVirgil · 2280 days ago · link ·
My first was like that for about 3 months (her mother for 39 years and counting).
My newest is very calm like her mother. What is funny is that my current wife is worried that I won't bond as much with my new daughter because I won't have to pace the floor with her all night. That is a risk I am willing to take.
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It was released and downloaded about 15k times. It worked on very cheap Android devices like a charm, but the wifi hotspot standards are very fragmented, and thus it didn't work very well. We want to retool it with BLE (bluetooth low energy), which would be far better, but we have yet to find a developer with the time and the chops to do it.
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My Uncle has three kids and he often talks about how he bonded with each one more than the last. Every child before taught him not to take for granted the little moments with the next, and the effect compounded. I don't know if that applies in general, but it sort of makes sense to me. You get better at things the more you do them. Why should bonding with your child technically be any different?What is funny is that my current wife is worried that I won't bond as much with my new daughter because I won't have to pace the floor with her all night.
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JakobVirgil · 2277 days ago · link ·
Perhaps but I should hope I love them the same.
flagamuffin · 2280 days ago · link ·
I'm not sure 'stuns' was the word there, but fair enough.
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JakobVirgil · 2280 days ago · link ·
the two issues you prolly already know.
1. to use bluetooth it has to be visible.
2. some phones may require manual linking. possible solutions to problem 1.
the app controlling visibility using a pseudo-random algorithm based on the clock. i.e. all the phones running the app turn on at seemingly random intervals talking to each other then disappearing. problem 2 is troubling
but I think I can solve it by shoving the info thru the capabilities.
especially if we limit the usable characters to 64.
the cool bit is that it would look like the phones are not even syncing up.
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JakobVirgil · 2280 days ago · link ·
Oh I was not clear 64 legal characters the 26 letters of the alphabet X 2 (upper and lower case) 0-9 and "?" , "." but maybe that is just a 6bit fantasy. during discovery bluetooth sends packets back and forth I think we just need to put the message and id in one of those packets. May need more research.
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JakobVirgil · 2279 days ago · link ·
I think ours might too. I need to find low level bluetooth stuff to make it work.
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geneusutwerk · 2275 days ago · link ·
This reminds me of how Kaizers Orchestra released their album. Basically, their fans downloaded an app and then the band picked one lucky fan to start the "virus". From their the virus only jumped between users based on proximity, so slowly moving through their fanbase. Of course the "virus" was a single from their new album. There is more information on the wikipedia page, everything else I can find about it is in Norwegian which I do not speak.
JakobVirgil · 2276 days ago · link ·
I think we will have to use wifi. Do the messages get deleted when they move to a new phone?
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Ah well. My thinking was that a new set of messages would come in to my phone, and be compared against those I have. Duplicates would be removed, and any with a sender I subscribe to would be displayed in my feed. Of course, there would have to be a purging mechanism, and I think stored messages could be culled by date. However, you might do something more interesting, and add the # of hops to each message. Therefore you could cull messages based on date and their # of previous hops. If a message has hopped a lot, it is more likely to have reached its subscribers. Messages should be short, of course. I'm sure there has been work done on this type of network. You could probably model it to find the optimal parameters for purging the list. It's almost like a flu.I think we will have to use wifi.
Don't add to my comment wheel, but I have been looking for something similar to this for a year. The only thing that fit was this: www.mulliner.org/collin/chaosmsg.php . Unfortunately, it was abandoned. ALSO: What about overflow? I'm not sure that phones can send 500 messages in a short passing.