On my terms

Bluxone 0.4.40 is out.
Check out the post at the BluXone Blog for more details.

Just a while back when I was running though my daily chores, Daman showed me this post by someone (Read it here).

To say the least, it made me happy. It feels good to know that some people around the world are using what you have made and are liking it as well. On top of that, this person has written about it in more detail than I ever could. Go through it, its interesting. I think I should take some tips from him on how to describe your product.

BluXone has witnessed a whopping 1000+ downloads in the last one week. This is really a proud moment for me. The response has been very encouraging. I have been receiving inputs on how to make it better, I have received bug reports along with loads of encouraging words.

Definitely calls for a party here and a nice one at that. Didnt i tell you parties keep me going :D. Just kidding.
On a serious note, there are a couple of bugs that have been reported which need urgent attention. The release of Bluxone for Series 60 3rd Edition is also getting due. I am sure that will further improve the number of downloads and will make BluXone run on a complete range of Nokia smartphones.

So far so good.

Finally, I have managed to find time to set up the BluXone blog. From now onwards, all my posts related to BluXone would land up there.
Do check it out.

http://www.bluxone.com/blog/

Do read Harshdeep’s post on BluXone as a precursor to this post. He has written a great description of the application. Read It

At the core of BluXone lies an application level protocol which enables the devices to communicate seamlessly over Bluetooth. The motivation to create such a protocol came from the fact that Bluetooth puts a lot of restrictions on the number of simultaneous connections a device can have, and in the manner they can communicate with each other (Master/Slave). This protocol acts as a time sliced multiplexer between the Master and the Slave functionality, and emulates multiple live connections by regulating the network traffic in small data chunks.

This protocol enabled BluXone to provide a TCP/IP sort of seamless connectivity over Bluetooth. However to test BluXone for all such network scenarios was a big challenge. Neither I had the devices, nor the manpower required to test all the scenarios. Plus I was not even sure how much the users are going to care about this feature of multiple active connections simultaneously.

Because of all these reasons, I made BluXone restrict this multiple connection behavior from a top level, atleast in the first release. So what that essentially means is if you are currently downloading a file from another phone, and you want to download another one simultaneously it will ask you to wait till the download is complete.
However, if the users really want that kind of networking support, I would definitely work towards maturing it, and make it available in the later releases.

BluXone opens up today for Limited Beta Release.
Its a cool Bluetooth networking software for Series 60 2nd Edition Mobile Phones.

Quoting the website,

BluXone (Blu-Zone) is a bluetooth application for your Series 60 based Mobile Phones. With BluXone, you may now use your mobile phone to:

• Share favourite songs, videos, pictures and ring tones with others
• Creat personal profiles for others to view- share your likes, dislikes, thoughts, actions, emotions
• View profiles of others around you and chat with them
• Make announcements - all users in your range will get to know what you have to say
• Free to download and free to use!!

Try it out on your phones, and let the team know how do you like it. Your inputs would help the BluXone team shape the product better, and reach the public beta soon.

This was a big one. I had started to think that the alpha level testing of BluXone is about to get complete, just when I met this bug. Harshdeep, one of my friends, who is very fondly testing this app in and out was extremely annoyed by this. We were just trying out the routine functionality sitting in the office, and but nothing seemed to work. No media listings, no device discovery, and a lot of fake devices were getting discovered. We went out in the open, and everything worked fine. On some more investigation I figured out that the iMacs sitting around us were disturbing my little baby. The problem was lying in the piece of code which used to check for valid peers. However that looks fixed now, and I am a relieved man. Had this been left uncovered till the release, it would have been an embarassing bug.

No, not me. I have completely lost hope of getting back in shape. Its about BluXone. Yes, its getting in shape. Everything is functional now, and I am just spending a lot of time in testing it out.If you are wondering what it is, BluXone is a P2P Media Exchange software for Series 60 based Mobile Phones, with a good amount of social networking support. I will not give away all about it at the moment. Lets just wait for some more time, and you will have it full on your mobile phones.

By the way, my first few users seem to have liked it. That came as a good encouragement. Raina is a big big critic of mine. When I showed it to her, she had this golden smile on her face. She was kind of surprised by what her dumb boy friend has done. It was a great feeling when she said its great, and better than what she expected. She also gave a lot of inputs on what more I can do to make it better. One thing about her always amazes me. She has no technical background or anything, but still great ideas just keep flowing out of her head. She would keep speaking and commenting on my work, and I will be collecting all the great inputs. Hehe. I would say she wouldn’t have even a little bit of idea how much she has contributed to my work.

Even Harshdeep had nice things to say about it. He kept playing with it like a little kid, and told me its very professionally done. Now that felt good. It was always one of my big targets, that even if I am doing it alone, i have to make it top class.

Umm, so I guess thats enough of self-praise. I hope other users like it as much when I complete it and put it on web for everyone to use.