Latinoware 2012

The app was developed by systems analysts Fernando Mantoan and Anderson Davi.

This is for you if you are one of those people who get lost with printed event schedules. Systems analysts Fernando Mantoan and Anderson Davi – of the Institute of Applied Technology and Innovation (ITAI **), located in Itaipu Technological Park (PTI) – recently launched a Latinoware app for the Android platform.

The app is available at Play Store (http://goo.gl/8Eh79) and allows participants to access on their mobile phones or tablets, the complete schedule of the three-day event. “I contacted the organization staff and they authorized the creation of a simple app to display the lecture grid,” said Mantoan.

As the conference is on free software, the idea of the pair was to build the application and provide the source code to developers to contribute towards achieving an application with more features. “This is just the kickoff. People interested in contributing to the app, can access the repository on GitHub *. All contributions are welcome, whether to report a bug, suggest a new feature or translate into other languages.”

According to Mantoan, the application is divided into two parts. The first built in PHP, targeted directly at reading the HTML on LAPSI and provide the grid through a webservice in JSON format (this application is hosted on Heroku) and the second part is the Android client, which gets data from the webservice and displays the grid on the device.

Starting with this “beta” release, next steps planed are: building a database locally on the device, avoiding querying the backend; implement the feature of ticking lectures that will be attended, add information about the speakers and the detailed description of lectures; and enable exchange of e-mails via Bluetooth or other mechanism.

“The new features are in progress. The main difficulty is to read the HTML directly from the site Latinoware, making it not simple to create these features. But I believe that with the help of the community we will be able to reach a pretty cool app”, he added.

* For those interested in contributing, the entire source code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/fernandomantoan/android-latinoware

** To learn about the work of the ITAI, visit www.itai.org.br