Beginnings of Bluetooth

Further developments have been made on the social network application aspect. I added links to movie information on The Internet Movie Database and links to those friends' profiles who are listed. The application outlined below is now working on both Bebo and Facebook. Rather interestingly, Bebo has its own markup language - SNML, but works perfectly well with Facebook's FBML. The process of porting a Facebook application to Bebo is very doable.

In order to make the first steps towards allowing users to request movies via Bluetooth by using their phones as remote controls, I experimented with Bluetooth device discovery. PyBluez (freely available under the GNU General Public License) allows Bluetooth applications to be created using Python. I initially used this to detect Bluetooth-enabled mobile devices and print their Bluetooth addresses and names to console.

The idea is that a users' Bluetooth address would be used to look up their Bebo or Facebook credentials on the mapping database mentioned below, so I altered the program to insert the addresses into a list for storage purposes. In addition, I wrote this to a file entitled "index.html" and enclosed it in html tags. Another program runs this sequence of steps, then runs a local Python web server. Upon opening my web browser and requesting the "index.html" file, nearby Bluetooth addresses are listed. My next port of call will be to make this a dynamic process so that the browser knows at all times what mobile devices will be close to the set-top box.