Early this morning, I had my first meeting of the 2005 South by Southwest Conference PDA team. For the last three years, my friend Charles and I have produced a Palm OS application that contains the complete schedule of events for the annual SXSW conference. I wrote about the previous versions on my old palmoswerks blog, so I'll continue that tradition here. The 2004 application is still available on the archived SXSW web site.
South by Southwest is a huge annual conference with separate tracks for music, film, and interactive media. Last year, there were over 1000 bands, over 150 films, and over 100 different presentations and panels. People come from all over the world to see what's happening, with a strong focus on independent work. Back in March 2004, the big trend we saw at the conference was the popularity of the Treo 600. This year, we expect the 600's to still be very popular, but I also expect to see a lot of Treo 650s and a few Samsung Palm OS devices.
Right now, we're thinking of a few key changes to the application:
- support "add to date book / calendar" action for events
- automatic updating of application over wireless connection
- turn the "My SXSW" view into more of a "Today"-style screen using a two-line detail view and having links to general information from the SXSW website
- improve one-handed navigation by supporting context menus
The context menu idea is something I really like. This is used very well in Versamail that's bundled on the Treo 650. When you have an item in your mail list highlighted, hitting right on the navigator causes a list of actions to popup on the screen. All of these actions would also be available in the detail view for the item, either through command buttons or menus, but this gives faster access to those actions on devices that have five-way navigators.
Automatic updating can be done by using a tip that I mentioned at the European Developer Conference. Just open the web browser to a URL based on the current version number of the application. On the web server, the URL that maps to the current version will just go to a "you're all up-to-date" message, while all of the older URLs will go to a page where you can directly download the new PRC file.
Our "My SXSW" view has been very popular; it lets you mark events on the calendar to display in your own personalized list. Since you use this view so much, it would be nice to have it closely track the current time, showing you the next three or four sessions you want to attend, with all the details you need, all on one screen.
The 2004 schedule didn't have DIA support; the screen layout was always square. I'm not sure that I'm going to try to add DIA support for the 2005 version, but if I do, I'll probably use the palmresize library to handle the details, although it will take some work to integrate that with the POL class framework that I use for the application.
I'll also be validating the application on the Palm OS Cobalt 6.1 simulator. When I tested the 2004 version, there were a few issues with its five-way navigation support, since it assumed that only the Treo 600 had the right set of APIs. For the 2005 version, I'll use the new Palm OS glue library routines for the navigation APIs.