Re: RoadBuddy status?

On Tuesday 02 December 2003 08:13, Nordenberg David wrote:
> Hello
> How usable is RoadBuddy?
Very - for what it does. It's not, as yet, an all-singing all-dancing 
user interface, nor will it necessarily become so, unless there is 
demand to be able to do things like set preferences on the road. What 
it can and does do is presence, chat and status changes. You can use it 
to log on and check for messages, send some back, set your status, sign 
on, sign off, and that's about it.

> Are you still doing development on it?
Most definitely!

> I haven't seen a page update for it in a long time :(
Yeah, sorry, my bad. The reason is that the website is being completely 
rewritten for beta release - the current one is just a rush job I 
chucked up when I first started the project. Don't worry, the code's 
moving faster than the site :-P

> I'm thinking
> about buying a Java/GPRS enabled telephone just so I can use it with
> ICQ/MSN from home, no internet access at home :(
Hmm. Interesting idea. At the moment, though, RoadBuddy can't do things 
like adding and configuring local accounts, so you'll need to set 
yourself up with ebqt first.

> Data communication
> is quite expensive here so I'm interested in how much traffic it
> generates, some figures or guidelines for basic usage?
My (large) contact list was about 30k to download last time I did a 
bandwidth profile. The messages themselves have an overhead of about 75 
bytes (on top of the text length, that is). The real kicker, however, 
are status updates - if you're on AIM, at least, you get an idle update 
once a minute from each idle user on your buddy list. Also, if you're 
using GPRS, the build of RoadBuddy currently on the site will NOT be 
kind to you - it polls for new data every few seconds (to support those 
%^&* phones which don't support held-open connections). I'm intending 
to release a GPRS-friendly build (which assumes a little more about the 
phone's capabilities, and therefore won't work on some phones, even 
though they might be 100% MIDP1.0 compliant), but this won't be coming 
just yet :(

> Will it be
> cheaper then SMS (around 0,2 USD per SMS)?
Per message (and not using AIM), I think so. However, IM messages tend 
to happen a bit more frequently than SMS, so I'm not so sure. For the 
moment, though this is all academic - I need to work on a GPRS-friendly 
build.

There's one thing I'm really looking into doing with RoadBuddy at the 
moment, and that's a burst-mode version. It would allow you to connect, 
check for messages that had been left while you're away, send pre-typed 
messages, set your away message, and so forth, all in one go (probably 
under 30 seconds' airtime). This would cost far less than long 
sessions, especially for circuit-switched users (that's anyone not 
using GPRS or 3G). Also considering having this interact with the VPA, 
which is pretty much going to supercede the current away message system

> It really sounds like an interesting project :)
Many thanks :^)
Please do give any suggestions you have - they're all welcome...

Meredydd