Mobile application development

This week's session was dedicated to mobile application development, since we only had a couple of hours to work with we decided to work using technologies we were all familiar with, web technologies. It would have been futile anyway if we had to decide which technology from which brands of smart phone manufacturers we should cover, everyone would have come up with their own personal preferences and it would have ended up being a long session with arguments as to why one technology is better. NOT the intention behind the session.

At this point I was thinking well we all know how to create websites so most probably we will be spending the session creating web-pages designed for smaller screen. I'm sure it would have been interesting but it wouldn't have done justice to the title "mobile application development", a web-page designed for a smaller screen is not a mobile phone app, it's just a tiny web page.

Fortunately enough I was wrong, we were actually going to be working on some additional features of HTML5 we had not yet covered, more specifically geo-location. I had no idea such functionality existed, for all I knew the only way to get a location from a visitor would be to look-up the user's IP in IP2Country database to figure out where the user might be located. From my experience with projects which had this implemented, it was not very accurate for one the IP2Country database (which is huge) would need to be updated frequently, you would also end up with a lot of inaccurate translations. People behind proxies would show up from the country where the proxy they used is located and not the actual location.

With HTML5 the browser will try and make use of the most accurate way of determining a user's location, on testing it out from my home PC, it didn't look too good, while it managed to figure out that i'm in Malta it flagged my location as somewhere in the center of Malta, some miles away from my actual location.

The browser will actually ask you before divulging your physical location, a privacy feature for all those who are worried that the entire world it out to get them.

On allowing the geo-location API to work, I was flagged as being located at Birkirkara, a couple miles away from my actual location, most probably that's where my ISP's servers are located and after the browser exhausted all possible ways of determining my location through GPS, triangulation etc.. it reverted back to the old-school IP lookup, which although not that accurate is far more efficient then maintaining an IP2Location database. On a side note, the location is only available to the client for the server to actually get a hold of your location the client would need to forward the location to the server through an HTTP request such as an AJAX call. 

The following test was carried out during this same session, this time using an iPhone, which comes equipped with GPS, etc... The accuracy here was mind boggling if reported my location to within meters away from our classroom at Pembroke.

Again the browser prompts for a confirmation on allowing the browser to provide your location and on pressing the Ok button, the API is available to that page.

As you can see from the above image here the location service is so accurate it would terrify anyone paranoid about the Internet, but for me the more APIs I as a developer have available the more functionality I can provide to the end user. 

The source for the web page listed above can be found at http://drunktext.org/Daniel.html

PS: It has been recently reported that one of the largest smart phone manufacturers has been tracking the where-about of all it's customers for years, all of which had no idea on what was going on and never pressed any "allow" button anyway.