official Wherigo Player for Java phones - the truth?

[matejcik]

hi everyone,

 

first of all, to newcomers: i'm developing a neat little midlet (phone Java application) called OpenWIG. It's a Wherigo player for cellphones. It is not complete, but it works on a great number of phones (including some Blackberries) and reliably plays a great number of cartridges. If you're looking for something that works here and now, just click the link. or visit this forum's Wherigo Hardware section, where i have my very own thread about it.

please note, though, that my work is not official and tolerated but so far not endorsed by Groundspeak

 

with that out of the way ... i've been looking for some code today and found this (and this).

basically, some time in 2008 Groundspeak was actually building their own Wherigo Player for phones, they even poured money into development of their own Lua virtual machine for JavaME. and that work was completed and released to the general public in November 2008.

that means that there was some kind of project in the works that was apparently never completed. it's either stalled or completely killed now.

fact is, though, that the Lua machine is the biggest part of the player. the rest is basically just tinkering - sure, there are hard parts. but with the source code of an existing player, i could do a working beta version in two weeks of fulltime work. (sure, it would probably be broken on many phones and it would have tons of bugs, but with the state of the official PDA player, i doubt that's a problem )

so what could've happened??

did the money run out one week into the project? were there more important things to do? was the lead developer abducted by aliens?

 

the truth is out there...