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After experimenting with what this software can do and how to use it we will try out the new sketches on our own phones. For this workshop no prior experience with mobile media is required.

indian

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1. LINKS TO MOBILE PHONE APPLICATIONS IN DEVELOPING REGIONS
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See who has access to mobile phones world wide on this map

PROJECTS USING SMS

Frontlines
Frontlines is a free software that makes it easier for NGOs or little grassroot organizations to coordinate/communicate among all members

You can find more projects using text messages for humanitarian work here:

TEXTUALLY

USING WEB

Inveneo
Unveneo is huge in Africa. They provide free internet to rural african areas for healthcare (tele-medicine) and microcredit systems.

USING MMS
Cell life
Cell-life works on effective mobile-based solutions for the management of HIV/Aids

Used for:
* Human rights monitoring
* Disaster relief coordination
* Natural resource management
* Election monitoring
* Emergency alerts
* Mobilising task forces
* Field data collection
* Conducting public surveys
* Health care info requests
* Agricultural price updates
* Organizing protests
* Mobile education programs
* Coordinating fundraising efforts
* Providing weather updates
* And more

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2. LINKS TO MOBILE PHONE ACTIVISM
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VIA MMS/Mobile Video

Witness

Video is democratic tool: it is a relatively easy medium to learn and you do not need to be a filmmaker or a journalist to master it. Video advocacy, however, is a time- and labor-intensive process that requires significant commitment of human and other resources. Witness facilitates these processes.

Organizing via mobile phone

Mobile Active
A resource for activists using mobile technology worldwide.

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3. LINKS TO MOBILE PHONE ART PROJECTS
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Really old (2001), but still one I really like:

DIALTONES (A Telesymphony)
(By Golan Levin, Gregory Shakar, Scott Gibbons, Yasmin Sohrawardy, Joris Gruber, Erich Semlak, Gunther Schmidl, and Joerg Lehner)

“..Telesymphony is a large-scale concert performance whose sounds are wholly produced through the carefully choreographed ringing of the audience’s own mobile phones. Before the concert, participants register their mobile phone numbers at a series of web terminals; in exchange, new ringtone melodies are automatically transmitted to their phones, and their seating assignment tickets are generated. During the concert, the audience’s phones are dialed up by live performers..”

telesymphony

Mobile Feelings – Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau
“Mobile Feelings” is an artistic project that explores the ambivalence of sharing personal information with an anonymous audience. Instead of communication via voice or images to people we know, “Mobile Feelings” lets people communicate with strangers through virtual touch and body sensations including smell and sweat using specially designed mobile phones.

BINKENLIGHTS

The upper eight floors of the building were transformed in to a huge display by arranging 144 lamps behind the building’s front windows. A computer controlled each of the lamps independently to produce a monochrome matrix of 18 times 8 pixels.

During the night, a constantly growing number of animations could be seen. But there was an interactive component as well: you were able to play the old arcade classic Pong on the building using your mobile phone and you could place your own loveletters on the screen as well.

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3. LINKS TO MOBILE PHONE GAMES
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3 friends I know from NY made this little game:

PENULITMATER

Someone received textmessage with a sentence of a story and added another sentence. Only the last sentence was sent to the next person. Only if you went to their website (http://penultimater.com/) you could read the whole weird outcome.

Another game I really liked is by another guy I know from NY called Mushon Zer-Aviv. It is called:

YOU ARE NOT HERE

..”You Are Not Here (.org) is an urban tourism mash-up. It takes place in the streets of one city and invites participants to become meta-tourists of another city. Download a map, take your phone with you and go tour Gaza through the streets of Tel Aviv or Baghdad through the streets of New York.”

BOTANICALLS

“…Botanicalls allows thirsty plants to place phone calls for human help. When humans phone the plants, they orient callers to their habits and characteristics, including how they like to be watered and cared for.
Botanicalls opens a new channel of communication between plants and humans, in an effort to promote successful inter-species cohabitation and understanding…”

Asterisk
Asterisk is an open source telephony platform for free. You can use it as a phone, only a phone that can be connected to a database or a website or any other source of digital input and output. A phone that can be programmed to do certain things at a particular time or behave in a certain pattern.
In “Botanicalls” the plants were not able to dial a number. But a sensor triggered the start of an Asterisk phone call online.

ONLY USING SMS

Friends of mine distributed cards that had a tiny detail of a larger picture on it. They asked people to take a picture with their phone camera and send it via MMS to a mailaddress. From the webaccount the pictures got automatically sent to a website that assembeled all the details to one larger picture.

Textmarks

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TRYING OUT MOBILE PROCESSING:
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To get started, you have to do 3 things:

1. Install the latest version of Java on your computer.

2. Download and install a Wireless Toolkit (WTK) for building mobile phone applications. Note the location of the installation.
Windows: Sun Java Wireless Toolkit for CLDC
http://java.sun.com/products/j2mewtoolkit/

Mac OS X: Mpowerplayer SDK
http://www.mpowerplayer.com/products-sdk.php

3. Download and install the Mobile Processing IDE.

You can download it from this website:
http://mobile.processing.org/download/index.php

After that start Mobile Processing. Choose Preferences from the main drop-down menu. In the Preferences dialog box, go to the Mobile tab, and enter the location of the WTK.

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FIRST STEPS
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Mobile Processing is an open source IDE (integrated development environment) and set of libraries for programming in Java.

Instead of programming with straight Java we are developing Java Microedition (Java ME), the flavor of Java that was developed for mobile phones.

When you run mobile processing you will see this window

The empty white space is where we will write our code. Don’t be scared of the word “code”, Mobile Processing’s libraries make it easy for us to use.

The “play” button in the left upper corner of the window let’s you watch the application you wrote (your code) in action: the emulator will automatically open and show you a little screen with some fake mobile phone keys. Now you can check how what you did would look and work on your mobile phone screen.

The next button is a “stop” button, the one right to the stop button creates a new file. The arrow to the right let’s you open a new file, the next one saves your precious file.

The bottom that shows an arrow to the right let’s you EXPORT you file. This means that your code will get compressed and exported in order to store it on your mobile phone.

If you open the folder “Mobile Processing” on your computer and find the folder with the name of your file, you will now see that mobile processing created a folder inside called “midlet”.

It contains the beautiful .jar file, which we were all waiting for, cause this is the actual data we are sending to our mobile phones.

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MY FIRST MOBILE PROCESSING APPLICATION
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Thanks to my best mobile media teacher ever, Shawn Van Every, for all the information, resources and help he provided me with!!!!

I’m using his ITP class wiki for this introduction.

Just try to copy and paste this code into the window:

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

import processing.core.*;

public class HelloWorld extends PMIDlet
{

PFont font;
String hi;

void setup()

{
font = loadFont(“Impact-20.mvlw”); //Create this font first + exchange the double quotes
textFont(font);
hi = new String(“Hello World”); //exchange the double quotes here as well
}

void draw()
{
background(232, 185, 223);

text(hi,10,25);

}
}

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Now safe the file as “HelloWorld”.

This application will simply write “Hello World” on your mobile phone screen. But first we have to define the font we are using. We are using “HelveticaNeue-24”. You can import this font by clicking on “Tools” in the menu bar. There you choose “Create Font..”. A window will open that looks something like the window you see here. Search for “HelveticaNeue” in the list of fonts. Write the size of the font “24” into the size field. Check the 3 boxes, to make sure you include all those letters and signs, then press “OK”.

GREAT!

If you press the PLAY button now, you should be able to see your first Mobile Processing Application
in the emulator.

If yes, CONGRATULATIONS!!

You can now click on “File” in the menu bar, choose “Examples” and check out how they work.

IF IT DOES NOT WORK
check if you have defined the path to your Emulator (MPowerPlayer for Mac or Wireless Toolkit for PC you downloaded before) in the preferences. If you are on a Mac you can do that by clicking on “Mobile Processing” in the menu bar, choosing “preferences”, clicking on “Mobile” (next to “General”) and browse your computer for the MPowerPlayer or Wireless Toolkit. If you have found it, press o.k.

Now your “Hello World” application should work.

SENDING YOUR FILE TO YOUR PHONE

The best way is probably to use bluetooth. But you can as well connect your phone via cable to your computer. If you have a rather new phone you might want to use mobile web to send it.

So whatever transfer method you choose, first of all press “Export MIDlet”.
Now you can find your .jar file in the Midlet folder of your project folder.

We called our first application “HelloWorld”, so you will find it in the “HelloWorld” folder within the “mobile processing” folder.

ON YOUR PHONE