School year: third bachelor year, first semester.
This is from the days when the iPhone was still a niche thing — it had only been available in Belgium for a few months when this project started. Windows Mobile was still very big, as were PDA’s. Smartphones were a very rarely sighted thing.
Sun still provided so-called Sun SPOTs back then. This was a device containing a thereto extremely rare accelerometer (which is unimaginable nowadays, with pretty much every (smart)phone containing one or even two accelerometers), and contained wireless IEEE 802.15.4 networking. You needed another Sun SPOT, connected to a computer, to be able to access the data on a PDA through Wi-Fi. So that’s what we did.
We had to build something with a Sun SPOT, so we (Nick Gaens, Inneke Ponet and Olivier Sels) decided to build a Tilted Window Manager, where you could launch, quit and select an application by only tilting the Sun SPOT. Until then, Windows Mobile devices would always need two hands for this part of operating the device: one for holding the device, another one to use a stylus. Using We considered attaching the Sun SPOT to a PDA, but that would result in a very unwieldy (and monstrous) device.
In case you’ve never worked with Visual Studio and Windows Mobile: this is an extremely painful platform to develop for. Nothing was efficient, random errors were always waiting around the corner:
The Windows Mobile application was developed in C++/Qt (because we could then develop it on the desktop, which was far less painful than developing directly on the Windows Mobile device — the emulator sucked beyond belief). The desktop/server application that relays the data from the Sun SPOT to the Windows Mobile application was developed in Java.
