Exhibit on iPhone

[David Huynh]

[Apologies for cross posting, but presumably not everyone interested in
Timeline, Timeplot, and Exhibit has moved over to the simile-widgets
mailing list. Please do so soon as there is definitely development on
that new mailing list.]

Hi all,

As an experiment I borrowed the data from slef's exhibit (slef, hope you
don't mind) and created a quick mockup of an exhibit on the iPhone, in
the iPhone's browsing style (tested on Firefox 2 and Safari 3):

http://people.csail.mit.edu/dfhuynh/projects/iphone-exhibit/iphone-exhibit.html

I don't have an iPhone to test it on :( but I did paste that URL into
this emulator (using Safari):

http://iphonetester.com/

and it seemed to work fine.

Perhaps this experiment might give rise to something that makes it easy
to browse small collections of data on the iPhone. Examples:
- a small museum wants to let its visitors browse through its collection
- a large conference organizer wants to let the attendees browse the
conference's program
- an instructor wants to keep the roster of her class at hand
- a scientist wants mobile access to her list of materials? clinical
trial data? experiment results? ...
Generating a faceted browsing interface on the iPhone for an arbitrary
collection can become trivial.

David

[bfr]

Works OK, seems a bit slow, doesn't seem to be sized right, doesn't
seem to
resize on orientation change.

Back buttons don't seem to work right. Having picked a Genre, such as
Comedie, move to detail, then click Genre button at top, takes you
back to
the Projects folder.

Using a real iphone.

On Apr 6, 1:16 pm, David Huynh <dfhu...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> [Apologies for cross posting, but presumably not everyone interested in
> Timeline, Timeplot, and Exhibit has moved over to the simile-widgets
> mailing list. Please do so soon as there is definitely development on
> that new mailing list.]
>
> Hi all,
>
> As an experiment I borrowed the data from slef's exhibit (slef, hope you
> don't mind) and created a quick mockup of an exhibit on the iPhone, in
> the iPhone's browsing style (tested on Firefox 2 and Safari 3):
>

> http://people.csail.mit.edu/dfhuynh/projects/iphone-exhibit/iphone-ex...

[David Huynh]

bfr wrote:
> Works OK, seems a bit slow, doesn't seem to be sized right, doesn't
> seem to
> resize on orientation change.
>
> Back buttons don't seem to work right. Having picked a Genre, such as
> Comedie, move to detail, then click Genre button at top, takes you
> back to
> the Projects folder.
>
> Using a real iphone.
>

Thanks for testing it! I guess I'll have to buy a real iPhone to really
make this work :-)

David

[slef]

Very cool! It looks good on Safari. On my iphone
I have the same comments as bfr: slow, too small etc.
I thought of doing something like this when I was
making my iphone interface: http://slef.org/b/i
but I think you definitely need some processing of the
data on the server side: you don't want the iphone to
download the entire database every time you go to the
website. Also the size of the javascript library should
be as small as possible.

My iphone interface is very simple and uses the iui
javascript library for iphone. http://code.google.com/p/iui/
All pages are generated statically.
The watchers of the festival (including myself) found
it very useful, but for the next version I think it would be
nice to have a slightly more advanced interface, with
similar features as the full exhibit.
I think the same views/lenses/facets structure would
work fine, with for example with tabs at the top for the
views, and a button to add a filter from a facet.

Stefan.

[slef]

I just saw a message about Backstage on the mailing
list archive. This would be particularly useful on mobile
interfaces like the iphone where you want to send the
minimum of information.
Where could I find some more info about Backstage?

Stefan.

[David Huynh]

Backstage is in very early development. There isn't any information
except what you have already found on the mailing list archive.

You're right that it would be helpful for generating iPhone exhibits. I
actually haven't thought of that since it didn't occur to me that
Exhibit is that slow on the iPhone. However, I also think that it'd be
good to slim down Exhibit so that it's sufficiently fast on the iPhone.
Then you can actually have the Exhibit code local on your iPhone and
carry data sets (JSON files) with you on the iPhone and use them even
without any network connectivity. That would also be nice for the OLPC.

David

[bfr]

Except that - in its current form - you can't carry anything in the
way of web or document content on the phone itself.

[Bruce Robertson]

FYI here is a site that works well on the iPhone (Washington State DOT
traffic webcams)

http://toddla.dyndns.org/iphone/WADOT.php#_home