Dale has been an influential member of the Ushahidi community, dedicating many hours of his time to release top quality code for the rest of us to use, and working with the others in the dev community to get things done.

It’s because of that latter trait that we started talking to Dale and asked him to join the Ushahidi team in a part-time role as Mobile Project Manager. In this position he’ll be working not only on the WinMo app, but also coordinating and helping the others around the world who are contributing to the Android, iPhone and Java apps.

If you’re interested in taking part on the mobile apps, start with these links, and then get in touch with Dale.

• Ushahidi Mobile on our Wiki
• Ushahidi’s Github code respository

Welcome aboard Dale!

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)

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.