The near future

Integrating with the google half of the application will be another hump, but luckily I have already specified what the interface would be: one string for the current user's location to center the map, and a 2-d array with [friend index][friend name, friend location, last update time] to plot friends. I have a little feeling that we should already start specifying interfaces for the more advanced functionality we have speculated on, but it is very difficult because we have to have a fairly specific idea of how it's going to work before we can specify the back-end interfaces. It is great to be future proof, but it is better to have a usable product TODAY.

Depending on whether or not our scheduling works out this week, we should be able to easily complete Round 1 of our development this week or this weekend. So, to make sure we have somewhere to go after that, I am going to be meeting with my friend Beth from Tritonlink tomorrow to see if we can make use of MapLink for the campus-level geography.

In the super-long-term, it is interesting to think about how this could be extended to other campuses, with community input of campus geographies (sort of how facebook started, with community input of available courses at each university and the like). That is far beyond the scope of this application however... if we are lucky we will get to use facebook's SMS functionality but that would be the farthest I see us getting this quarter.