Create a location-aware drawing app to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement.
- Use geolocation to trigger a drawing prompt on the Toq smartwatch whenever the user walks past the Mario Savio steps on Sproul Plaza
- The drawing prompt should be randomly chosen from a list of prompts related to the Free Speech Movement
- Submitting a picture in response to a prompt will send the image to a FSM Flickr album
- After submitting, the user gets to see a drawing someone else sent to the FSM Flickr album displayed on the Toq smartwatch
For this project, made the drawing app using the Android SDK and the Toq SDK/API. To implement the core specs, I also used the geolocation service and Flickr's API.
This is a simple drawing app, with a palette of colors, a solid brush, and an eraser. There are "new drawing" and "save" functionalities. The "submit" button is for sending the image to the FSM Flickr album.
Some features:
- Brush/eraser is continually highlighted so user knows what 'mode' they are in
- Change brush size and eraser size with sliders and also quick presets. Eraser and brush states are independent of each other and keep state in between changes.
- Shake the phone to completely erase the canvas (or use the '+' button to create a new sheet - both have same functionality)
I would have also liked to make redo and undo buttons, as well as menus that could appear and disappear to give more canvas drawing space. Being able to change brush size and maybe opacity without having to get a popup every time would be really convenient as well.
Toq IntegrationA Toq applet is basically a "deck of cards," each consisting of a header, title, text and an optional image. "Third party applications" like the drawing app in this case can push notifications to the Toq and also edit the deck of cards. The Toq API was very limited because of the somewhat experimental nature of the watch itself, so I had to implement with its constraints in mind.
For this project, I created a deck of cards that included all the drawing prompts, and attached on click listeners that would trigger the drawing app to open up. I also needed to push a notification to the Toq watch whenever the user walked to the correct location, and push another one with the randomly selected FSM drawing from Flickr.
This is a video taken from home, showing the whole interaction. The location was set to my coordinates for this demo, so I got an alert right when the app started up.
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