Conductor's Pocketwatch

I plan to develop the app for both operating systems, but I need to choose one to start on. I already have both the Android SDK and Xcode (Apple's combined SDK and IDE), but I have no experience developing apps for either OS, so maybe you can help me decide.

In favor of Android first:

• I'm an Android user myself, so I could test easily.

In favor of iOS first:

• My impression is that it's easier to develop for (especially with Apple's new Swift language).
• I like Xcode.

So, should I try to learn Android development first because it'll be easier to test, or should I start with iOS and test in the simulator? Any other factors I haven't considered, such as ease of access to location and calendar data?

Before going any further with this project I decided to see if there are any patents that cover it. I searched for the names of each of the companies involved in making the film, along with keywords about the watch, and found nothing. Then I searched for several keywords with no company name and found this IBM patent. At first I thought it was pretty much identical to my invention, but as I read through it I realized that there are some important differences. IBM's invention's only goal is to notify the user that they should prepare to leave their current location in time to get to their next appointment, based on both the travel time and the time required to prepare to leave, while mine's goal is to continuously indicate how late or early the user can expect to be, and is not planned to take into account the amount of time required to prepare to leave. IBM's also estimates travel time based on the user's past travel times between their current location and the destination only; I'm planning to store travel times along with mode-of-transportation info between many waypoints along the way so that those segments can be combined as necessary to estimate travel times for journeys the user hasn't made before.

I'm somewhat hopeful that if IBM does think their patent covers my invention, they won't mind enough to take action. Does anybody know if they've ever released a product involving the system described in their patent?

Furthermore, it's a US patent; I live in Canada, and IBM doesn't seem to have an equivalent Canadian patent. Possibly relevant Canadian patents include:

• RIM: CA2734326 A1 (automatically facilitating notifications to others that the user will be late)
• Nortel: CA2379613 A1 (notifications triggered by events and predetermined locations)
• Highwaymaster Communications: CA2212330C (determining ETA of a vehicle to a location, based on location and route (including speed) info received from a dispatch along with the vehicle's current location, and sending a lateness notification to said dispatch if necessary)

Of these, the third seems the most relevant. However, despite having over a hundred (mostly redundant) claims, the inventors didn't seem to envision using such technology for anything other than vehicular applications in a fleet setting.

Phase 1: the phone app

Here's my current rough plan for the phone app part of the project. It will consist of a service and various user interface modules. One of the UI modules will be the main app that displays the watch and allows the user to access settings. The service will enable other UI modules such as the homescreen widget and lockscreen widget. It will also provide notifications through the system notifications mechanism. The service will keep track of the user's movements, possibly importing historical movement data from Google Location History (if that has enough detail to be useful), and maintain a database of the user's travel time between different points on the map. It will also pull event data from the user's calendar and give that, along with its predictions of promptness, to the UI modules for them to display to the user.

However, at first, I will develop a single monolithic app as a prototype. Once that's working, I'll split the modules apart and, I suppose, provide an API. (I have no experience whatsoever with APIs, so I'm really not sure yet what I'm doing there.)

Phase 2: the hardware device

The hardware device will connect to the phone app using Bluetooth or Bluetooth Low Energy. It will use a Switec automotive instrumentation stepper motor to turn the needle to indicate the user's current promptness. It will have a small OLED or LCD screen in the bottom quadrant to display info about the upcoming event. It will also, of course, have a rechargeable battery and charging mechanism.

Phase 3+: more ways to reach people

I would like to expand to other devices in the future, such as smartwatches. People with smartwatches would probably prefer to use those over pulling out their phone (let alone a standalone pocketwatch); that's why they have them, after all. I'm also open to other ideas about where to go next.

Over Christmas break 2012 (I think), my family and I watched The Polar Express (adapted from the children's book of the same title). The most interesting part of the movie for me was the Conductor's watch. It looked like this:

source: http://outnow.ch/Movies/2004/PolarExpress/Bilder/dvd-film.ws/17

While watching, I started to think about how such a device could be made. What I came up with was that it would need GPS, the user's schedule, and knowledge of how quickly the user can traverse the segments of the journey to the location of the next event on the schedule, as well as a processor and a user interface. Much later, I realized that it would be far easier to start with a smartphone app, because smartphones commonly already have all of those things. Then, with the phone app in place, it would be possible to simply connect the physical watch to the app using a wireless connection, so it wouldn't have to have those things too.

There is an official pocketwatch you can buy, with the Late/On Time/Early face, but it's just a regular pocketwatch that only tells you the current time of day. It looks like this:

(The site I got the image from is no longer available.) Anyway, it looks quite similar to the one in the movie, though not completely identical. I don't intend to make mine look that similar, but it will be trivial to swap out the image to get the appearance you want.