Abstract
The aim of this project is to create an application that can provide location based alerts on Android mobile phones. While a time based alarm application alerts a user at a specified time, a location based alert application alerts a user when he/she is in the proximity of a specified location. The application lets the user specify a central location of a region and a radius around it and alerts the user when he/she enters the circular region. Both GPS and network provider can be used for providing location based alerts. Users can use GPS for getting more accurate location information and use network providers to preserve battery life and to get location information indoors. The following are the main features of the application. (1) Alert List. The application stores location alerts in file system and displays them every time the application is opened. User can add new alerts, edit/delete existing alerts and set multiple alerts for different locations. The application is not required to run in the foreground for receiving the alerts. (2) Weekly Reminders. User can choose to receive alerts on specific days of the week. (3) Favorite-places List. User can maintain a list of favorite places and use the list to enable location alerts for those places when needed. (4) Interaction with contacts-list. The application interacts with native 'contacts' application and lets the user choose address of any of the contacts for setting a location alert. (5) Enable/Disable alerts. The application provides options to turn on/off alerts and to set radius. Though there are existing mobile applications that provide location-based services, this application has some unique set of features that differentiates it from other applications. For instance, the application maintains a list of favorite places the user would like to visit and helps user set location alerts for the places in the list. The application further enhances user experience by letting user set location alerts for any of the contacts in native contact-list application. The application also helps in improving performance by implementing an efficient algorithm for setting weekly reminders that saves battery life. The development environment consists of Windows 7 OS, Eclipse Java IDE with Android plug-ins, Sun Java SE Development Kit, Android 2.3.6 operating system (Gingerbread), Android framework API level 10 and Android based handset (Motorola Atrix 2).