|
|
I've recently been working on a mobile application called daylite. My vision for the program is to provide users with all the daily information they need directly on their device. So I've had this idea over the past few months about providing traffic information on the device. I started to do some research and decided I would integrate traffic cam images into daylite. This would allow users to view publicly available traffic cam images on their phone. I believe this would be extremely useful for those who despise traffic like I do.
To make a long story short, Flash Lite doesn't support directly loading images without wrapping them into an .swf file. So to do this on the fly I would need to implement something like PHP Ming. I'm still not 100% certain this will work so I'll be investigating this option in the coming weeks.
With this roadblock in place I decided to get my J2ME groove on again. I already had a remote proxy that grabs images from the on-line traffic cams and sizes them down to a usable size for Symbian Series 60 devices (ie Nokia 6620). Now all I needed to do was code the phone client (I'm calling it MoTraffic). Even though this is VERY beta I'm posting a couple of screens here. This currently only supports three traffic cams in the Dallas area.
I'd ultimately like to integrate this with every traffic cam in Texas, the US, and then take over the world! But seriously, I've just been extremely frustrated with Dallas traffic and this is my way to beat the system. I'm hoping to get this integrated into daylite in the near future, but in the meantime I'm going to work to make it available to sll J2ME compatible devices.
If you have requests for MoTraffic to support your phone as well as your city, please shoot me an email or post a comment here. If you have links to on-line traffic cams it would be extremely helpful so I can see what it will take to integrate with them. Stay tuned!
Posted by dennis baldwin at April 17, 2005 08:52 PM