Changing the way your mobile displays incoming calls - Where to begin? - mobile

Here's a situation: I own a nokia mobile device. Quite often, I receive calls from unknown local/national numbers. Now, I would like to take those calls that are from unknown national numbers coz they could be important and I would not like to take calls from local numbers. I would like to write an application which displays " calling" instead of the regular " calling". For instance, " AT&T, CA". I have a database of codes with carriers and their reserved numbers for each state.
Now, I know this not simple coz I am talking about changing something that is native to the mobile phone. Sure, I could write a java app or a symbian app or something like that, but obviously, that would be kind of an aftermath app, which you would run after you've missed the call. I need something that is real-time.
So, to do what I want, where do I start? Is it even possible? Does some sort of SDK exist for this kind of stuff?

Without known the specific type of the phone I can only give you a general answer.
You have to find out if the APIs that your phone supports (J2ME or symbian) support an event to watch for incomming calls.
Then it should be simple.

Related

How to get current system DNS resolvers ip-addresses in codename one?

Is there a way to get all current system DNS resolver ip-addresses in codename one?
The classes NetworkManager and ConnectionRequest don't provide these information.
In general Codename One seems not to provide any way to access a devices communication status information like "Wi-Fi Mac address", "IMEI", "Mobile network type" etc. Am I right?
Do you mean something like Socket.getHostOrIP()?
There is no standardized explicit DNS lookup API though.
Most of these things aren't available across platform or even consistently within the platform. You can use Display's getProperty with "IMEI", "UDID" & "MSISDN". But that will only have any chance of working on Android and you will probably need to add the build hint for permissions.
You can also always use native code calls as explained in the developer guide and the How Do I? video.
I would suggest that you revisit your need to get these values and evaluate a way around them. E.g most advertisers no longer require them as they aren't provided by all mobile OS's.

Touching two phones together to send data

I'm trying to develop an application like Bump to receive data from another device by touching them together. I could not find any tutorial on Google about this. Can somebody help me make an idea about how this works? What programming language should I use, how can I do it by using Bluetooth or/and Wifi, etc? I only need some info. I don't know where to start. Thank you!
If you want to create something like bump for iPhone, you could code it in Objective-C or swift. (Based on preference) For android you would code it in Java. To make this bump you need to create a trigger that detects a shake gesture on the device to trigger additional code. The additional code will take the location and the time of both devices in the bump and save it into a database. You need to check the location and the timestamp and compare those values. If is the same location and at the same time you know those are the two devices in the bump. After you know the devices involved you can send whatever information between those devices. Hope this helped.

What is equivalent usage of sendmessage()[WINDOWS] in MAC OS X?

I have a ContextualMenuPlugin and an application. When user clicks the option from context menu i need to send a message to my app. In windows i achieved this using sendmessage() function. But i'm new to MAC OS X. Can any one please help me, by giving some api's or functions which will enlighten this situation?
You have plenty of choices on how to get messages into an application on your Macintosh.
The ways I'm thinking of include Apple Events or sockets or kqueues, but there's other stuff I've never even worked with that might even be more useful & appropriate (such as Distributed Objects). Check out this duplicate and/or related question and maybe you'll see a useful answer in there for you that you can build upon.
B.T.W.: how did you construct your Contextual Menu Plugin? Is it in Carbon or Objective C or is it some codeless plugin or plist or? The answer to that question probably will dictate a lot towards how you will be able to talk from your plugin to your app.
If you want to control just your application you might want to look into AppleScript. Using that solution has the added benefit that your users could also use it to automate things via scripting.

How to switch users in a smooth way in a Point-Of-Sale system?

I am designing a Point-Of-Sale system for a small shop. The shop just have one Point-Of-Sale but often they are one to three users (sellers) in the shop. Each user have their own user account in the system so they login and logout very often. How should I design the login/logout system in a good way?
For the moment the users don't use passwords, because it takes so long time to type the password each time they login.
The Platform is Windows Vista but I would like to support Windows 7 too. We use Active Directory on the Network. The system is developed in Java/Swing for the moment, but I'm thinking about to change to C#.NET/WPF.
I am thinking about an SmartCard solution, but I don't know if that fits my situation. It would be more secure (which I like) but I don't know if it will be easy to implement and smooth to use, i.e. can I have the POS-system running in the background or started very quickly when the users switch? Are SmartCard solutions very expensive? (My customers are small shops) Is it preferred to use .NET or Java in a SmartCard solution?
What other solutions do I have other than passwords/no passwords/smartcards?
How should I design the login/logout system in a good way?
Is there any good solution using SmartCards for this purpose?
I would like suggested solutions both for C#.NET/WPF and Java/Swing platforms.
I would like suggested solutions both for Active Directory solutions and solutions that only use one user profile in Windows.
How is this problem solved in similar products? I have only seen password-solutions, but they are clumsy.
An interesting solution is to use "Fast User Switching", i.e. the capability to have multiple user sessions open on the same PC. The POS software could be launched through the Startup folder of each seller account and would stay active in each seller session.
I thought that being in a domain (i.e. using Active Directory) disables Fast User Switching, but according to The old new thing, this was true on XP only. I just checked with my Win7 machine at work: it is in a domain but still has the "switch user" menu item.
The main advantage is that if your software is already multi-user aware, you don't need to change it.
I should have made the Fast User Switching check before writing what is below, because this seems to be the simplest solution. Here are other ideas, anyway.
Another solution is what you mention of having a single Windows user but several "virtual users" that your application manages. A smart card is a good way to implement a pseudo-login. In C++, the API allows detecting the removal or insertion of a card, so the application could detect this and read the card after insertion to know who's currently in front of the computer. .NET can easily call this API through P/Invoke; I don't know much of Java, except that JNI could be a solution to call the native API if there is no managed library that publishes this capability.
What should be done is researching the different types of card and how to talk to them, as your app should use a card that does not require a PIN to be accessed (or you are back to the slow login system, except if tying a 4-digit number is not considered too slow).
I've seen restaurants where waiters insert a key into the cash register in order to be identified. I googled "cash registers" but could only find a complete solution package, rather than the components like a key reader.
An almost idiotic question is: how much security do you need ? Does it make sense to have big buttons on the first screen of the app, where people click in order to tell the system who they are ? When they are done, they click on a "Finish" button and the app goes back to the "identify" screen. I've put this at the end because it is so simplistic that it has a low probability of being useful.
I'm not familiar with a broad range of smart card provider solutions, but I know Gemalto has a .Net friendly setup. Most others are geared to Java, but support is widening.
With regards to switching user sessions and your application, it depends on how "heavy" your application is. If your app requires quite a bit of start-up time / resources then you might consider creating the basic application as a service on the machine which can run in the background continuously and then you can load a light-weight UI to interact with the service with each user session (maybe launch via Startup menu).
There is a C# project on CodeProject which provides a framework for interacting with smart card services in windows - might be interesting reading.
I had a chance to work with the Open Source Computer Vision library (OpenCV)
in one of my past projects and its "Face-Recognition" is what you're after. It is written using native code, but can be easily used with Java, .NET, Android, iOS. All you need is a webcam and a button "Switch User" with the onClickListener that will take a picture and compare it with the images of your employees. Advantage? Once the picture's taken, it gets processed in less than 10ms. And as Timores mentioned earlier, once the face is recognised, you simply switch the session. Simple yet effective solution. Good luck!
maybe you want to think about using barcode scanner... probably you already have this device on POS ... my software for bars and restaurants use barcode scanner to recognize users. You have 2 options for using: first, user must log in with own barcode card, then he can use the application ... the second is better, everyone can use application, but to print the receipt user must use barcode card. After then he is responsible for that amount on this receipt.

Who supports WTAI (Wireless Telephony Application Interface)

Does anyone know how widely WTAI is supported in mobile phones, or can point to a list of supported devices.
The great majority of device support some WTAI primitives (because they are include in WAP). Those are current supported: WTAPublic.makeCall, WTAPublic.sendDTMF and WTAPublic.addPBEntry
More information here and here.
I came across a couple resources on device capabilities today.
DeviceAtlas
and
WURFL
It depends on what you are hoping to use WTAPI for.
If it is for a wap site then check out Device Atlas or WURFL, or Mobile elements
The next problem that we have is after you have the click to call link, you need to track it we have done this in the past using a service like OnSip.
Whereby each call goes to OnSip then they forward the call onto the correct number they then call to a url hosted on our servers whenever a call comes through enabling us to track the number of people who clicked on the click to call link

Resources