Software Collaboration Discussion (2/8/2011 @ 2pm EST)

[Charlie Moad]

     Based on feedback from the Doodle poll, we are going to have a Skype conference call on Tuesday February 8th, at 2pm EST. I am opting for Skype since we have international callers. Everyone interested should please invite my Skype account (cwmoad, Charlie Moad) prior to the meeting. This will be an open forum on how we can collaboratively push the development of TAP, while also determining how to make TAP extensible for features that are not generally desired.

Thanks,

     Charlie

[Charlie Moad]

Hi all,

     I wanted to take a moment and summarize this call for the group.

In attendance:

• Bart Bruil
• Erik van Tuijn
• Hanno Lans
• Jesse Kochis
• Charlie Moad

     In the near term this group is going to work on the integration of some enhancements created by the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, as developed by Jesse. These enhancements specifically support making more than one tour available in the TAP application. Also, some interface options have been moved from the TAP iOS application into the Drupal CMS, which allows content authors to specify these (e.g. text on buttons, application kill code, etc.).

     The group also discussed multi-lingual support in great detail. TAP already supports multi-lingual content through the Internationalization Drupal module (http://drupal.org/project/i18n) and the native localization features of iOS. It was agreed that this should still be the mechanism in which true multi-lingual support is offered. A downside of this approach is that visitor services staff at museums must set the language of the device from the Settings application. This is actually the ideal approach for deploying on user's personal devices. An alternative approach, which MFA Boston has used, is to deploy separate tours in different languages (e.g. My Tour (English), My Tour (Spanish), etc.). The benefit of this approach is that the user can select their language from within the TAP application. The drawback is that content authors do gain the benefits of tracking translation status from within the Drupal CMS.

     The remainder of the conversation revolved around making the TAP iOS application a more pluggable and extensible platform. This would involve making it easy for developers to pick which navigational method they would like (keypad, geolocation,...), or which analytics package to use (built-in, Google Analytics, ....), and the ability to easily create and plug in new types of stops.

- Charlie

[Glen Barnes]

On 10/02/2011, at 8:11 AM, Charlie Moad wrote:

     The group also discussed multi-lingual support in great detail. TAP already supports multi-lingual content through the Internationalization Drupal module (http://drupal.org/project/i18n) and the native localization features of iOS. It was agreed that this should still be the mechanism in which true multi-lingual support is offered. A downside of this approach is that visitor services staff at museums must set the language of the device from the Settings application. This is actually the ideal approach for deploying on user's personal devices. An alternative approach, which MFA Boston has used, is to deploy separate tours in different languages (e.g. My Tour (English), My Tour (Spanish), etc.). The benefit of this approach is that the user can select their language from within the TAP application. The drawback is that content authors do gain the benefits of tracking translation status from within the Drupal CMS.

Can't you just pop up a language selector when the app opens and get the user to select from there? Then in your localisation code use version of the app strings and tours. I think you can override the default language for an app in iOS.

Glen

[Charlie Moad]

Googling around seems to confirm that you cannot change the localization setting on the fly from within an application. Please share if you can find anything to the contrary.

- Charlie

[Glen Barnes]

There are a couple of options that seem to work (or not work) based on who tried it out:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1669645/how-to-force-nslocalizedstring-to-use-a-specific-language/1670524#1670524

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1245975/creating-a-localized-iphone-app-but-allowing-the-user-to-change-language-for-the

We haven't tried it out yet on My Tours but it is something that we are looking at. It does look like you might have to restart the app for the setting to take affect though.

Glen

[Hanno lans]

@Glen: This is exactly as Bart is developing right now. We program a
start screen with a language selection. We can make this smart, i.e.
only the languages available in the tours will pop up, and when there
is only one language, no language screen will be shown.
If some museums prefer to skip the language selction and show all
tours in all languages, we might opt for setting in the app settings
menu.
There is one issue, that the UI language would not change. We would
suggest to develop the app with as less as language dependent parts
for the user as possible. We suggest to use symbols like '?' instead
of 'help' etc.