UseGIS News Update 12-12-2011

News, views and tidbits that have caught our eye at UseGIS over the last week.

The AA

Our latest project is a maps-based walking iPhone app for the Automobile Association (The AA).  This will allow people to download and view over 1750 of the best walks in Britain, along with 1:50,000 and 1:25,000 scale Ordnance Survey mapping.  Once downloaded, both the walks and the mapping will be stored on the iPhone so that they can be accessed even when the phone has no connectivity – ideal when you are out and about on a walk and have no signal!  The App is due for release early in the New Year.

iPhone vs Android – which pays best?

While we are in the subject of smartphone apps, here is an interesting article by Rory Cellan-Jones on Android and the economics of apps. We also believe that there’s more chance of being able to charge for an iPhone app than an Android variation – the whole ethos of Apple is to give the user a fantastic experience and people who buy iPhones are more likely to pay for an app because they tend to have more disposable income. However, if you’re target audience tends to purchase Blackberrys, then there’s really no reason to develop an app for either the iPhone or an Android device – not initially anyway.

Google MapsGL

Have you noticed the latest version of Google Maps yet? Named “Google MapsGL”, Google have harnessed  “the power of Web Graphics Library (WebGL) to create far richer visuals and animations.”

“WebGL is a new technology that brings hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the browser without additional installed software. With WebGL your maps experience is much better with 3D buildings, smoother transitions between imagery and the ability to instantly “swoop” into Street View without a plugin.”

Not all browsers or computers can handle WebGL at the moment, but we’re excited about the future possibilities for displaying maps over the internet. Kudos to Google for taking the step.

Bath Spark

Last week saw our first Bath Spark event as we attended the Xmas Meetup.  It was a great evening and we were impressed by the large number of people from such a varied range of tech industries.  One of the most interesting topics of conversation was a proposed tech and creative co-working hub based at the Guild Hall in Bath.  A dedicated place in the city where tech people can co-work and meet up is a great idea and certainly a project that we support.

Being located in both Bath and Exeter, we get to meet and mingle with two sets of tech communities. This week it’s the turn of the Exeter Web Developers to have their Xmas Meetup, so we’ll be popping along for more socialising and festive drinks…it’s tough, but someone’s got to do it!

AnDevCon – San Francisco – Day 2

The most interesting thing that came up today was the vast number of devices that Android developers have to potentially deal with. 286 (and counting) devices now use Android in one flavour or other (and I do mean “flavour” – with a choice of OS releases named after Google’s favourite desserts such as “gingerbread” or “ice cream sandwich”).

The number of devices itself isn’t that interesting, but the variety of screen resolutions and densities, and the ideas and techniques on how to deal with them in one, easy way, is. Android has “layouts” that define rules which say when to change, for example, a 3 column layout on a tablet, into a 2 or 1 column layout when the same page is shown on a smaller screen. But I can’t help feeling that this is just another way to solve the same problem that we’ve had for many years in the web arena, which is only now being solved with the introduction of CSS3.

CSS3 is the way to go for anyone wanting to allow users to view the same web page on multiple screen sizes. In the past, before smart phones came along, web sites tended to be designed for a minimum screen size of, say 800 x 600. As time progressed and technology improved (i.e. screens got bigger) web sites started to support resolutions of 1024 x 768 – but very few  sites use much more of the real estate available to them on bigger resolution screens. Instead, the designers preferred to keep the width the same and simply centred the content and added flexible margins either side.

Now, in defence of this approach, I’d like to say that the main reason for doing this is that eventually, it gets much harder for the human eye to follow the flow of content if the space it takes up goes too far across the screen. One of the reasons we have serif-based fonts, short paragraphs  and multiple columns of text in newspapers is to aid the eye in being able to easily read it. Equally, if there are too many columns used for an article you end up with the same problem. I think this is down to the fact that the eye is good at focussing on information in portrait. So, with the advent of widescreen monitors, which are really designed to allow us to watch movies on our computers, we have to fill this extra width either with multiple columns of unrelated content, or blank margins.

Anyhow, getting back to CSS3 and the present day, what does all this mean now that we’ve got to support much smaller resolution screen sizes?

Well, smartphones have all sorts of tricks up their sleeves to help us to view existing web content – the iPhone certainly has a great way of allowing you to double-tap on a portion of the screen to zoom into that area – making it easier to read. But that’s only part of the solution.

CSS3 introduces @media tags that act in a similar way to the layout controls available in Android. These allow you to specify CSS rules that should only be applied when the screen (or printer for that matter) that the page is being viewed on supports certain resolutions. This allows you to decide what to show and where to show it. This means that the same web page can be rendered in a completely different way depending on the screen resolution – from the largest Apple Cinema display (2560 x 1440) down to the smallest Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 mini Android phone (240 x 320). As long as the device has a modern browser that can render CSS3 properly, you only ever need one set of rules.

A good example of this in action is The Boston Globe (http://bostonglobe.com).