Sim Card Registration

I just saw news clip today with regards to mandatory SIM card registration for prepaid subscribers. Well, I have no problem with that. In fact, it's about time that we have to do that. It protects consumers and public in general in several ways, such as mobile phone theft, credit theft by telcos, national security etc.

As usual, the idea is not bad. But the success of such measure can only be known through effective implementation. And through effective implementation we don't mean manual registration of SIM cards by any retailers, specially small retailers. As the telcos will always be reluctant in implementing SIM card registration for prepaid subscribers for reason that it will cut through the bulk of their revenue, an automated approach will help to carry out the enforcement of SIM card registration.

One that will make sense is for the telcos to open up an API that will be called by third-party developers to create in-store Qt-based registration software which can be based on Personal Information Management(PIM) specifications. The API can be deployed as a web service, remote procedure call or even through instant messaging via Jabber. Of course, every registration has a corresponding transaction fee which can be charged from the cost of the SIM card. Also, failure to register prepaid SIM card within one hour of activation will prompt a server-side action to invalidate the SIM card.

There's a lot of opportunities and possibilities that goes with SIM card registration. These are just a few of what I have in mind.

The Essence of Full Screen Mode

What's the big deal? For what is mundane to game developers has become a great boon to desktop programmers. Full-screen mode brings your user to an exclusive dimension that provides a non-distracting journey around your application, it keeps your user glued within the context of what really matters most, the intended output in the shortest possible path.

Implementing the Full-Screen Mode

I've waited for years for Java to implement full screen mode, but until now, it's still flaky, cumbersome and not consistent in different platforms (so much talk about cross-platform). Some kiosk developers even go as far as "cheating" with the browser by enabling full screen mode in Internet Explorer via Javascript, Flash and other gazillion-of-html-code nonsense only to end up being locked in one operating system and limited possibilities.

The Qt Solution

MainWindow::MainWindow(QWidget *parent)
: QMainWindow(parent), ui(new Ui::MainWindow)
{
showFullScreen();
}

Is a very simple one-function call to solve the problem and let the developer focus on other important functions, allowing them to finish projects in a short period of time. Qt provides consistency across different platforms.

Mac? Linux? Windows? It's hard to tell!


Programming the rest of the widgets that are needed by a full screen application is no different to programming a typical Qt desktop application. There are no other tags to maintain, no screen size to worry about, just do the proper layout and everything will go into the "right" places. That's less code, create more.



So, want to try this on HTML?