MOB I LE COMPUTI N G TECH N 0 LOGY AT VI N D I GO
Ramón Cáceres, Jake Donham, Bob Fitterman, David Joerg, Mark Thomas Smith, Tim Vetter · 2002
Developing widely useful mobile computing applications presents difficult challenges. On one hand, mobile users demand intuitive user inter- faces, fast response times, and deep relevant content. On the other hand, mobile devices have limited processing, storage, power, display, and communication resources. Vindigo has taken a technology-intensive approach to meeting these challenges and has created personal navigation tools that many people find useful in their every- day lives. Vindigo's ,Palm OS application, intro- duced in March 2000, has hundreds of thousands of users and continues to attract new users rapid- This article presents some of the technology behind Vindigo. To provide context, it first gives an overview of a typical user session. It then dis- cusses special demands and constraints placed on mobile applications, and enumerates design principles drawn from these considerations. The rest of the article describes technology devel- oped at Vindigo according to those principles. Throughout, it emphasizes techniques that have proven effective in delivering location-based ser- vices on today's handheld devices. ly.