SweetDreams, winner overall of ADC2

Google Android Developer Challenge

There is just one way to begin this post: Thank you!

We would like to thank each and everyone of the people who supported SweetDreams, those who congratulated us and sent emails with their feedback and suggestions or helped us to solve multiple bugs. In summary, thanks to all the people who cooperated with this project, your help is really valuable to us.

From Inizziativa we want to guarantee that we are going to work really hard and do our best for living up to your expectations.

The best way to understand the beginnings of this project is remembering our first brainstorming meeting. We wanted to design an application that could be adapted to our lifestyle in order to be user friendly and truly useful. An application that is able to choose an action basing the decision on data from the environment, so the user doesn’t need to manually administrate it. As some of you already know, SweetDreams is an optimization tasks’ activator that allows you to manage your device resources in a simple manner in order to save energy by deactivating high consumption resources (Wifi, Bluetooth, screen illumination, background applications, volume/vibration).

Which factors do we need to take into account?

The time frame was the starting point. SweetDreams could kick into action the moment the user considered it more efficient. We thought a user could normally determine pretty accurately that time window according to their needs, but new possibilities came into view… What if they are not at home by that time? This question brought us to create the location filter, which made it possible for the users to choose to start the optimization tasks only when they are within a distance range from the location they define as “Home”. And then we came up with new questions… what if the user is at home, but they don’t want to activate the optimization tasks unless they are not really using their device? We thought it might be useful if we added another optional filter for movement detection so SweetDreams could tell if the device stayed in the same position for a preset period of time. And there’s also an ambient sound filter able to evaluate the environment activity by comparing the volume of the ambient sounds with a threshold sample. All those filters can be configured in all the combinations possible, making SweetDreams a great tool.

We are currently troubleshooting and adding new functionality to SweetDreams so it will meet our users’ needs as the high quality and really useful application we want it to be.

We hope we will have a final version available on the Android Market by the beginning of next year 2010.