Case Study: Navigation App for an Automotive Head Unit

Requirements

The customer requested an all-in-one Dashboard widget application to display traffic around the current location or clock and to have direct access to the main features of the ASTEROID Smart and Tablet. It was decided to assign one developer to work on the development of this hands-free traffic application.

Challenge

The main challenge for our specialist was to develop a responsive automotive application, that will allow the user to have fresh information about road traffic around his location or current date/time, give him control on embedded Media Player, like switching to Next/Previous tracks, changing the volume, and shortcuts to Voice Recognition system and Applications.

Volume section: should control a current volume for the media player, supports double-clicks (on multi-click will increase volume dramatically).

Maps section: should refresh map picture in the background each 2-30 minutes (depends on settings) or on-demand with a special button.

Player section: should have a Media Player basic controls.

Shortcuts section: Music and Contact Voice Recognition shortcut, Application menu shortcut.

Solution

A special Intent service was created, with all operations running in the background, to keep the user interface responsive. This service is making all required functions like listening for location changes, working with REST service to get map traffic data, loading images in the background. And this service is refreshing a widget only in case if needed, on a new event only.

Results

The final product of development - is a fully functional Dashboard widget application for Asteroid devices. The main features of the application:

Displaying traffic data using Bing traffic service, refreshed by schedule or on-demand;
Current date/time;
Increase/Decrease a media player volume;
Basic controls for music playback: Play/Pause, Next/Previous buttons;
Shortcuts to Voice Recognition system and Applications menu;
Day/Night mode - switching into inverse schema;
The application is translated into 21 languages.