Hi everyone
has anyone thought of creating a wallet for windows mobile? I own a smartphone with this operating system and I believe that we will see this platform on the rise. Will someone pick up the challenge of creating a wallet for this platform? I would even be willing to chip in on the development in case someone starts it up.
Thank you
Vee
I am building a wallet for Windows 8 / Windows Store. The networking API will be open source, as for the wallet app itself I have not decided yet. I assume for it to gain any level of credibility in Bitcoin network I will likely need to make all components open source. It is guaranteed to be a free Windows Store Application.
Porting it to the Windows 8 phone shouldn't be a challenge, the code will all build except for the XAML. The interface will need to be redesigned for a smaller screen. And although it will build I don't imagine a phone user is going to want a 6gb blockchain download over their data plan. So at this point I would need to leverage the community for ideas to get around this.
Currently I am using raw sockets to communicate between nodes. Following the specification seems to be relatively straight forward. Although I see some references to JSON-RPC throughout the forums and it has added a little bit of confusion for me. I am not sure if this is just some kind of wrapper to simplify client development or if it is part of official spec and should be supported. Personally I'd rather stick with sockets.
Hi Gimpy. I suggest having a server with the blockchain downloaded and just let the clients connect to it.
Anyway by chipping in I mean donating for development in bitcoin, not necessarily programming
I thought about having a server with the entire block chain for the mobile users and I still may go that route. I had a concern that this would break the decentralized model of Bitcoin. If my server ever got hacked a malicious user could potential distribute bad information to the clients, perhaps even make someone think that they had received coins when really they hadn't. Private keys would still be safe for the client, but spoofing transaction information could be equally disastrous. I was reading about bloom filtering, and it could serve as an alternative solution.
If you want to chip in you are more than welcome, but before I do any public appeals for crowd funding I'd like to have a prototype going. In the meantime I am going to try and get a grant from the Bitcoin Foundation. I have a small team which includes 2 web developers, a graphic artist, which makes 4 if you include myself. Most of the work will be done by me, but I leverage the others for voluntary work whenever they are available. At some point I hope to pay them a bit to speed up the project.
Second phase of this project is a vendor application. The goal is to have an advanced wallet which allows retailers to manage a product listings, prices, with a secured local wallet so that staff managing the app can't access the private keys, but still have some ability to issue refunds. I am still designing what this may look like. Fluctuations in bitcoin value make pricing difficult for retailers, so I am working on a pricing component which will allow inventory prices to be derived from base values. I'm only in brainstorming mode for this phase although it will reuse a lot of existing code in my wallet app, this project likely won't go into full gear until Q4 2013. The intention with this app is again to release it for free.