Foaf-browser-app

While playing with the very cool Foaf-browser Android application [1], I noticed that there are a couple of things that we need to standardise to make that type of application seamless.  

As it requires having an Android phone which not everyone may have, I put together a little video of the Foaf-browser here

   http://vimeo.com/30014844

where I also go into detail in some of the things that need to be improved, as I show how it works.

1. SEAMLESS STARTUP
===================

In order to allow seamless startup, there has to be a way for a user once he has installed the browser to find his home page. 

We discussed this yesterday on the WebID-XG incubator group meeting with Tim. 

a. getting to the home page
---------------------------
 
Clearly getting to the home page of the user is going to be important. That will require him to either:

 - know his profile url
 - the company he is with to have implemented something like web finger, so that one could just ask him for his email address
 - ..

We seem to have a few protocols to help here. What clearly was missing was the keygen equivalent for an application like that.

b. keygen form pointer
----------------------

 We need  some way to get the equivalent of a keygen form in rdf. Then a non html browser could know where it needs to send an html POST of a keygen like response. Any ideas how to do this? 

2. EDITING
----------

I suppose the RW community group have some idea of what is needed to allow such a tool to become an editor.


Henry


[1] http://code.google.com/p/mssw/wiki/Screenshots
  

You can run it in a emulator - very slow btw, but if you don't want to buy a phone it saves money.  Here is what I learned looking at it: The running stable release of the Address Book is

http://code.google.com/p/mssw/downloads/detail?name=mssw-0.9.6-stable.apk

The emulator can be found here:

 http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/devices/emulator.html

Once installed the tools/android  tool allows starts a GUI which allows one to create a virtual device. Perhaps one first has to install android 2.3.3 which is more like a phone, and create a virtual device for that. Then can launch the device. One installs the app on the virtual phone using once it is running

../platform-tools/adb install mssw-0.9.6-stable.apk 

(there may be a GUI way of doing that)


[2] this is true for creating WebIDs, for loving in and so on....


Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/

Received on Tuesday, 4 October 2011 18:05:31 UTC