Android
Josiah Mugambi is starting us off with an overview of the Ushahidi Android application. His phone is synced with the Hatari instance, which maps crime and corruption in Nairobi. The Android app seems to have a number of bugs, including the instance map is not syncing with the Android app’s map. You can help us fix these bugs, or create your own using the source code found here.

iPhone
Wilfred Mworia is here to show some of the development on the Ushahidi iPhone app. Of all the mobile apps, this is the only one that isn’t in production and ready to use. The source code is available on Github, for anyone who would like to help complete it.

J2ME (Java)
Jessica Colaco is showing the J2ME application for Ushahidi. It’s a very basic setup that works on all Java-enabled phones. This app gives us the greatest reach, especially beyond people with specific smartphone applications. The code is here.

Windows Mobile
Unfortunately Dale Zak wasn’t present to give us a demo of the WinMo app. It’s the one that has had the most feedback and iterations to its development, and is the most stable of the whole group. You can grab the code and extend it here.

Ideas

• A way to manage the administrative functions of Ushahidi from your mobile phone.
• Connect the mobile apps into social networks.
• Ability to pull up just specific people’s reports.

What would you do to make the Ushahidi mobile apps better?

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.