Drew Cogbill | Thesis Blog

There were some issues with Pigeon numbers and pins beginning with 0’s, which have now been resolved.

Pigeon can also now skip a message when 7 is dialed.  I’ve got something like 20 contacts now, and want to be able to skip through messages to play my favorite one for someone to hear or to find new messages.  This could be useful if you have 3 contacts as well.  Soon new messages should be cued to the top of the message pile.

A little under 50 people have signed up and been testing Pigeon so far.

The simple online presence of Pigeon now allows you to both sign up for the service and sign in if you are a member to add contacts and accept or decline contact requests.

I’ve created a simple implementation prototype of Pigeon online sign up.  The script currently does not completely validate the form values.  It checks if a member number exists, but doesn’t check if a 9-digit Pigeon number is given and a 4-digit PIN is given.

Both online and SMS sign up don’t allow you to record your Pigeon name, so the phone system will need to prompt you to record it at log-in.  Currently, if there is no Pigeon name recorded on contact playback the system will fail.  This needs to be corrected. (Edit 7 Oct 11:36am) You are now prompted to record your Pigeon name at login if it doesn’t exist.

Pigeon will now properly play back the public messages for all of a user’s contacts.

Direct US Phone: (713) 574-9488

Skype: +99000936 9996079967

Asterisk “the world’s leading open source telephony engine and tool kit.”

Redial: Inteactive Telephony is a NYU ITP class that teaches Asterisk with an online syllabus.

(Thanks Mike!)

cogbill_21_sept_brief

Now you can add contact on Pigeon if you know the member number of your desired contact.  Figuring out how to accomplish this was a bit more complicated than the sign up code.

Here’s an old map of my database schema, which I have been referring to and helps to explain my logical organization: dbschema.pdf.

The contactLink table is used to join to members together and make them contacts.  I had to change my plan for organizing this table to make it easier to approve or decline contact requests.  There needs to be an option for ignoring a request and dealing with it later, but for the purposes of quick prototyping, this option was put on hold to get the main funcitonality going.

In my old prototype, I had faked the ability to leave messages for only your contacts.  Only this functionality needs to be added for a round of interesting user testing to occur.

Phone access:

• Direct local (713) 568-7265
• Skype +99000936 9996079900

contactsadding.zip contains all of the Pigeon code up to this point.

The following are rough implementation prototypes exploring system maps.

This is a edit and expansion of a previously developed system map for Pigeon.  The contacts, direct message, and groups sections are new and have yet to be technically implemented.  As this is a phone based system, the numbers on the map represent the digit to pressed to access that feature.

The beeping system would have quite a different system map.  I decided to consider registration via text message from mobile phones for the system for now, so the system has two cases, if the incoming is a SMS or a call.