CatchBob Enhancements

The development of CatchBob is moving forward. As real-time data communication is not longer required (the players will pull the data), dealing with TCP got easier. No mneed to keep stateful connection in an uncertain network environment anymore. Basically, the iPAQ connects to the server socket every time the player wants to be located and wants to coordinate with the others and closes the connection at the end of the transaction. The server keeps a thread pool of sockets. Solution for real-time communication would have been to use UDP (which could have been a headaches to deal with on the EPFL campus).

Today’s improvements are:
- The access point sniffer object was moved from a Timer to a Thread.
- A drawable map replaces the semi-structured communication context menu.
- A sound notifies that a scan has been performed
- The best signal strength is displayed

Still to be done:
On the server
- Store the last player’s positions and orders
- Enhance the communication protocol to include multi-users and exchange of orders (strokes). Acknowledgements?
- Positioning algorithm to user signal strength
- Log all the communications
- Update the access point database which includes 128 access points out of the 160)
- Socket Pool

On the iPAQ
- Proximity sensor to remplace the signal strength bar
- Log all the user interactions with the application
- Log all the scanned access points
- Zoom-in on the map
- Test non-blocking sockets (See Asynchronous socket communication)