whaZZup Lite – My Blackberry app

Update: whaZZup Lite goes OTA here at Mobihand App store as freeware. Check it out here -> http://www.mobihand.com/product.asp?id=55415&n=whaZZup-Pro and click on the ‘Free Trial’ link.

1. Have you ever imagined how would it be to have the December season concert details at the finger tips?

2. How about all the IPL Schedules?

3. How about all the kind of events that are happening around your current location or any location of your choice?

4. How about seeing all the events scheduled in your favorite venue (Museum, Hotel, Music academy, Universities ….(the list is endless)

5. How about seeing the venue location in a map and let the mobile show you directions to take you there to the venue?

6. How about an application that is aware of your location and enables you to search for events around your place?

7. How about adding your events to your Blackberry calendar (and hence to your outlook) and let the calendar remind you about the event when appropriate?

8. Adding events and venues as favorites so that you can revisit them later on?

9. Search for keywords around a location

10. How about sending an invite to your friends? (Later)

Hmm. At least I would love to have one that fulfils the above

I have always been interested in the mobile platform right from the Palm OS days (anyone remember the Palm Pilots?)  and the passion inside me woke up again and I wanted to get my hands dirty once again. But I started wondering as to what to try.

We have plenty of applications that pretty much do everything and I wanted to do something unique (non-existent or un-tried). After doing some research, I had narrowed down to a few ideas and then the question of which platform to develop struck me big time. So is it going to be iPhone or Blackberry put me in loop some time

As iPhone demanded a big fortune to be kept aside for the development environment set up itself. So natural choice became blackberry with its native support to Java and a lot of goodies available as free.

I set up my Eclipse and chose Blackerry 4.6.0 as my base SDK so that I can use my mobile itself to try out the results. So the development stated around Feb mid and the app took some good shape. Next thing I tried was to then make it backward compatible (so that it runs on 81xx, 88xx, 83xx Curve devices) and hence moved my SDK version back to 4.5 and I was not surprised when the application did not even compile. Fixed some of the APIs that were missing in 4.5 and had to provide a workaround to get the UI back.

Development Environment

• IBM Eclipse Ganemede 3.4.2
• Blackberry SDK 4.5 (JDE 1.x with 4.5.0 component pack)
• 81xx, 83xx, 88xx, 89xx Simulators 
• Yahoo Upcoming API Key (you can sign up to get one)
• Blackberry signature files for accessing securing API keys ($20 and takes a week to get all 3 keys)
• Yahoo Upcoming RESTful APIs
• Use Location Based Services using device GPS (if the device does not have one, it is handled gracefully)
• Invocation of Google maps if installed
• Blackberry PIM manipulation

This is what whaZZup is all about.

I started the development around Feb 12 and now the application has reached a good shape to be shared with others. Has only one known glitch (the pop up menu gets a bit slugging on the home screen and I am working on it).

Let me know if you need the installation files (drop me a mail  or leave a comment and I will send it to you).  Use the Apploader.exe (“:Program FilesCommon FilesResearch In MotionAppLoaderLoader.exe”) to point to the alx file and you are done. The application is already signed. It has a small foot print of 125k.

Disclaimer: The events shown are as posted on the upcoming site and the application is not responsible for inaccurate results showing up (:-)). Believe me, sometimes search keywords gives me some results that has no relevance. It is a rarity though

If you have tried out, let me know how useful it is for you.