A Platform Independent Digital Story Authoring and Distribution Tool for Mobile Handhelds

Digital stories are short multimedia presentations, often used to effectively describe personal stories. Recently they have gained popularity on the Web and in TV broadcasting. This paper presents the design and implementation of a digital story authoring and distribution tool for mobile handhelds. The proposed tool is created using JAVA micro edition (ME) in order to incorporate platform independence. It aims at providing the possibility of digital story creation and sharing on the move. The system consists of a MIDP 2 based authoring tool for easy and guided creation and edition of stories, a Bluetooth and Wi-Fi based distribution tool for uploading and downloading stories from and to mobile devices and a viewer for viewing the stories created in the device and those downloaded from a repository. The digital stories are created in SMIL format for compatibility with MMS and with multimedia players in mobile and PC platforms. The paper describes the design, implementation and system integration of the authoring and distribution tool and highlight the associated challenges.