Garo Garabedyan- a private blog

Popular task managers are oriented to remembering tasks according to previously set date and time of reminding.

In real life people are engaged in tasks with not strict scheduled time of start and end. Many time people have to consider with their place in the city right now, about the city traffic in this moment and so on.

Thing are too complicated in order to be done in one moment. Why don’t we use Business Intelligence and SOA?

Imagine a Task Manager which runs on GPRS mobile phone. This software can establish a connection to the business server and retrieve information about the workers which work around the user and understand is there something important which is suitable for him.

Just like Twitter, the user will be free to enter information about his job at the moment before starting doing it and this way to inform all his chiefs, the workflow (Business intelligence) software and co-workers.

Desktop Computers are too old for the business, now people start from the web (which is its own SOA OS). Desktop is useful for many things, but not for business, which is fast.

It is crucial to enable mobile phone applications to react on events. Do you know a general interface between the cell phone OS and every application, by which interface the application can declare interest on some events, and when they occur, the application to be informed. It is not energy efficient to have many applications running at same time and each of them to ask periodically about possible changes (events). Mobile Phone have to use hardware to restrict when something get changed, and when it changes a call to be made to the OS, not only rising a flag.

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About the idea expressed in the last paragraph:

We know that mobile phones need to run J2ME in order to execute any java application. Now are modern, not java applets and applications, but widgets, which are placed in desktops as small apps.

Imagine that widgets are written in JavaScript, imagine that you can run such a widget on your cell phone.

How does it happen?

I introduce you Mozilla Prism, which is an application which tries to splits web applications into Desktop applications.

Imagine Mozilla Prism runs on your cell phone (may be on J2ME). It enables you to interact with our web applications like they are part of your phone’s software.

It will be great if Mozilla Prism enables overwriting of some JS DOM events with the aim of communication between the cell phone features, the rest JS widgets and the JavaScript widget. Event-Driven architecture of widgets can be enabled this way.

There are many things that we can say about JS Widgets vs Small Java Apps. Why you think Linux, Mac OS, Windows Vista provide small application execution on your desktop.

Short story
I have got SonyEricsson K310i. Once while I was chatting with a friend of mine, he gave me his mobile phone number. So I started writing it in the Contact list but suddenly I have received a phone call from him and this pauses the process of adding his number and causes popping up a dialog box asking me did I want to answer his call or not. At this time I was just going to save his contact by pressing “Save” but “Save” button turns into “Answer” and I actually answered his phone call.

Possible user scenario
I don’t find it useful to see pop-up dialog box of phone call with possible choices while you are doing something on your phone. I think that it is not a good manner to provide the user with an active choice while he is interacting with his phone. I think that the dialog box at this situations have to not receive commands at the first 1 up to 2 seconds from its appearance. When this period of time goes by, the phone have to allow the user to make his choice.

iPhone in example, when the phone receives an ansync event, a dialog box is popped up, but because the all screen of iPhone is touch screen, the buttons of the popped up dialog are placed on different locations from the previous buttons of the application before the async event.

Using Data collected from the phone User Interactions
Mobile phones should save every event (even the pressing of the buttons in order to see what time is it) with the particular moment of its happening, this can turn them into a portable diary by letting user add note when some idea or something happened. Presenting this all data can be a useful toll to calculate what time what he was doing, only saving what time a comment is added isn’t enough to determine the time period of work.

Many phones have profiles which set specific phone options. Some general profiles are ‘Home’, ‘Meeting’, ‘In car’, ‘Outdoors’, ‘Handsfree’, ‘Office’, ‘Normal’ and can be added additional profiles. Calculating the time period in which these profiles are set can give a lot of information about the stress of the phone owner. Special application can advise the phone owner to have a rest if it is needed if additional data about what kind of work the user is doing and with how many people. By using what time of the day what profile is set, what time the phone is charged, the phone can conclude many things.