We had three main areas that we focused on for this Goma; stability, speed and mobile apps. To introduce the release, here’s David Kobia:

Stability, Speed and Mobile Apps: Ushahidi’s Goma Release from WhiteAfrican on Vimeo.

What’s in Goma?

It’s not possible to track all of the minor upgrades, changes and additions to the platform here, but here are some of the items that are important for everyone to know about.

• Caching – map and database queries have been slowing load times down considerably. All pages with maps now have caching built-in.
• Alerts – email and SMS proximity-based alerts are now fully functional.
• You can now watch incidents play chronologically on the main map using the “Play” button.
• Refined the submissions page, simplifying the location chooser, date/time and other minor features.
• On the detailed incident report page the map shows other incidents by proximity.
• Admins can import KML or GeoRSS feeds, and these can show up on the map as overlays on top of the normal Ushahidi data. (delayed for a couple days, working out some kinks…)
• Admins can now download a CSV file of all their data.
• Admins can now do a “mass upload” of data into the database.
• We’re trying to make it easier to get a fresh install of Ushahidi up on your own server. To this end, we’ve moved the config.php items into the admin area for easier modification by non-techies.
• Improved feedback form, residing in every instances footer, that makes it easy for end users to send feedback to the admin. This shows up in their admin panel.
• Sharing of data between instances of Ushahidi is fully functional now.
• Added a “Comments” tab into the admin area for moderation.
• Added a new feature to track veracity and trust of users by the admin

Find a bug? Submit it to bugs.ushahidi.com
Have a question? Ask it on the forums
Want to pitch in? Start on the wiki or download the code

Mobile phone applications

A small team of dedicated devs put a lot of time into creating the new Ushahidi mobile apps that are available for you to run on your phone. The basic functionality of all the mobile apps are to sync with an instance of Ushahidi. It allows you to send reports with images and location information as well as receive alerts from others who have sent in reports to the site. With this, you can track what is going on in an emergency, disaster or crisis anywhere in the world.

The mobile apps work in offline mode as well, so you can create reports and send them when you reconnect, or you can download and see the incidents that have been reported and still view them when you’re not connected.

Android – Henry Addo, our Ghanaian dev, has been part of the team since January, but he started fiddling around with Android well before that.

Windows Mobile - Dale Zak is an amazing Canadian mobile phone dev. He does a lot of cool stuff out there, and we were extremely happy when he volunteered to create the WinMo version of Ushahidi.

J2ME (Java) – Steve Mutinda is an outstanding Kenyan mobile app developer, he and his firm Shimba Mobile dedicated a lot of resources to see this app come into being. The J2ME app will work on any phone that runs Java, so it should work on the widest number of phones available.

This is their beta release, so there will be some bugs, submit them to bugs.ushahidi.com and they’ll be on them right away.

Major contributors

Projects like Ushahidi wouldn’t be where they are without the help of programmers who volunteer their time, brains and energy to solving some very difficult challenges. A BIG thanks goes out to all the devs who made this happen. Major contributors included:

• Jason Mule (Kenya)
• Brian Muita (Kenya)
• Soyapi Mumba (Malawi)
• Emmanuel Kala (Kenya)
• Henry Addo (Ghana)
• Steve Mutinda (Kenya)
• Dale Zak (Canada)

That same team has built a major campaign, Hope Phones, to gather unused and discarded mobile phone handsets and convert them into funds for use in their mobile health campaigns in Malawi and elsewhere in Africa.

“Hope Phones will make use of the nearly 450,000 cell phones discarded every day in the US. HopePhones.org allows donors to print a free shipping label and send their old phone in to The Wireless Source, a global leader in wireless device recycling. The phone’s value allows FrontlineSMS:Medic to purchase usable, recycled cell phones for healthcare workers.”

This is a fundraising campaign, one put in place to promote a project that already has a track record of working.

Get involved:

1. Visit www.HopePhones.org and donate your old phones.
2. Spread the word:

• Email your friends, family, classmates and coworkers.
• Post on Facebook and become a fan of the Hope Phones page.
• Tell the world on Twitter – use #HopePhones as a tag so we can thank you.
• Let us know if you want the Hope Phones widget for your website or blog.

3. Contact info@hopephones.org if you’d like to help set up a Hope Phones collection center.

Below is an explanation of what he has done, in his own words.

Ushahidi for the Windows Mobile platform, is a Compact Framework 3.5 application targeting both Pocket PC (touch screen) and Smart Phone (non-touch screen) devices.

When developing for the Windows Mobile platform, it’s always a difficult decision whether to develop:

a) light-weight Smart Phone version using Windows Mobile 6 Standard SDK which also runs on Pocket PC devices

-or-

b) separate Smart Phone and Pocket PC applications, using the Windows Mobile 6 Standard SDK and Windows Mobile 6 Professional SDK for each

Going the light-weight Smart Phone route allows you to focus your attention on a single application, but loses of the benefit of richer UI controls like buttons on a touch screen. However, the other option of developing two separate applications leads to code duplication and increased maintainance.

To get the best of both worlds, Ushahidi is targeting Smart Phones using the Standard SDK and Pocket PC devices using the Professional SDK. However each project shares the same underlying classes, reducing duplication. The only code that is unique to the specific platform, is the actual UI Designer classes.

In the attached screenshot Shared.jpg, HomeViewController.cs, HomeModel.cs, HomeView.cs and Program.cs files are shared by both Ushahidi.View.PocketPC and Ushahidi.View.SmartPhone projects. Only HomeView_SP.cs, HomeView_SP.Designer.cs and HomeView_SP.resx (created using UI Form Designer) are specific to Smart Phone project. For the Pocket PC, HomeView_PPC.cs, HomeView_PPC.Designer.cs and HomeView_PPC.resx are unqiue to that project. Most importantly, all the real work and event handlers exist in HomeView.cs, made possible using partial classes.

Another unique aspect to Ushahidi project, is the implementation of a light-weight MVC framework. There are a lot of benefit to adopting a MVC technique, unfortunately typical WinForms development is rather weak in this regards. So, to avoid tightly coupled forms, I’ve implemented a NavigationController that is responsible for maintaining a stack of Views, as well as a central place to cache existing Views. In the spirit of MVC, a ViewController is responsible for populating a View with Model data, and upon exit responsible for saving the View data back to the Model. It’s the NavigationController’s job to show the View upon being pushed onto the stack, or hide current View after bring popped from stack.

Using this shared solution and MVC technique, we are able to develop a flexible application with a platform-specific UI, while sharing the same underlying code behind.

It’s with that thought in mind that groups like InSTEDD, Ushahidi and FrontlineSMS (all of the OMC group actually) have continued to talk and figure out ways that we can truly layer our technology together in a user-friendly way that makes sense to non-technical people in the field. From the beginning, we baked in FrontlineSMS support to Ushahidi. We’re moving into a phase where we start to integrate in tools from InSTEDD as well, with hopes that we can make a connecting mechanism between instances that can sync over just SMS, not only the web.

The FrontlineSMS example

Last week a couple of us started playing with FrontlineSMS Forms, a new service on the FrontlineSMS platform, which allows for dynamic forms to be created on a FrontlineSMS hub and then sent to a Java app running on a phone in the field. Point your WAP enabled mobile phone at Forms.FrontlineSMS.com to get the mobile client.

Creating the dynamic forms on the computer:

Using the J2ME forms app on your phone:

This allows for a nice controlled data gathering environment. Nothing new there though, as we already have OpenRosa. Ken tells me that integration with the OpenRosa/xForms standards are in the cards for future iterations.

What’s exciting about seeing this development is not just that it works well, or that it’s completely customizable, but that it’s already being tied up in this modular fashion that I mentioned above. Just today FrontlineSMS:Medic was announced – which is being run by a bunch of university students like Josh Nesbit. (If this simple approach works, it could make a bunch of the smart adults selling multi-million dollar solutions look a little silly).

This new FrontlineSMS:Medic program is integrating with OpenMRS – where they will build an SMS bridge so medical records can be edited, updated and requested via SMS in the field. That’s exactly the type of cross-application functionality that we need to encourage and see put into use in this field!

Where is it all going?

What I’d like to be able to do is take the LEGO approach and grab FrontlineForms OR OpenRosa, layer on Ushahidi for visualization and maps, and then sync it all via Mesh4x using SMS.

Most of all, I hope we get beyond our own app-centric view. If we can just get to a point where we provide simple, modular solutions for real-world users then we’ll all be a lot further. Let the user decide what works, which tools fit best for their specific needs and how to integrate it. An ecosystem approach that encourages curiosity and customization, and one that doesn’t tie a user to one specific system forever.

So far, the Ushahidi Mobile Team is working on J2ME, iPhone and Android apps. MMS messaging for images and videos is also being tested out, and we think we can get that into the first build too.

[Please continue to provide feedback on Ushahidi's mobile app interfaces and features]

Ushahidi J2ME (Java application for all GPRS phones)

I’m in Kenya this week, and was at a local tech conference. Of course, you can’t go 2 steps in any tech circle without meeting up with an Ushahidi developer, and I wasn’t disappointed. Steve Mutinda, the outrageously talented J2ME developer had been at it again. He sauntered up, whipped out his phone and started showing me the newest mobile phone integration for Ushahidi, with maps, lists, and full database integration.

(more pictures in the Ushahidi Flickr group)

This is one of the wonderful things about being part of an open source project. When you attract really smart and driven individuals, they tend to put out some amazing work.

Ushahidi iPhone application v0.3

Chris and Joe have been hard at work, using great feedback from the last post we did on the iPhone design, they’ve changed up the interface and have provided some notes on the changes. We’re going with this version for the first actual application, which Wilfred has begun working on already.

Changes, by image number on the image above:

• #1 Homepage has clearer, more obviously clickable buttons. Removed “13 events near you” text on the homepage to make it faster (not sure this is necessary)
• #2 Changed dropdown text to “all incident types”
• #5 Cleaned up the typography, simplified and removed some text.
• #6 Removed the three-part list (was at the bottom) in favor of just putting A) photos B) summary and C) two big buttons, “Read Incident Reports (1)” and “Add Incident Report.”
• #6 “email/sms/add” (triple button at the top) removed for this release. It’s just poorly specified how that should work, it’s probably complex to develop, and it’s not essential.
• #7, #9 Simplified the “edit location” button and made the camera icon much bigger.
• #10 Changed text of the buttons on the pin-dropping Gmap interface.
• #11 Added direct link to ushahidi.com

Ushahidi Android application

Rounding out our smart phone tri-fecta is Henry Addo, our Ghanaian developer, on the hot new Android mobile phone platform. Though I don’t have any screens to show, Henry is taking his lead from the iPhone design. We do this with all three operating systems to ensure some uniformity in design, features and actions.