City of Williamsburg
The City of Williamsburg was in need of a tourist map which they wanted to correspond over multiple different medias (print, web, mobile). The map was separated into regions and each location had a series of categories it could fall into to be sorted. The first challenge was deciding the best way to make the map interactive on the web and mobile devices. After much consideration I pushed for the Google Maps API because it is so widely used, and has a ton of flexibility. This also allowed extra functionality like geolocation and directions. The next challenge was determining if the mobile apps should be web or native. It was decided to do web based because it could be ported over to multiple devices much easier. However, at the time of development, I quickly found out that the Blackberry browser does not support the Google Maps API. Since this was one of the main target devices, we had to create a work around. So we had a web app which included directions, an iPhone/android web app which supported geolocation(using HMTL5) and directions. Specific to the iPhone was adding a "Home Screen" icon. Finally, I used a catch all mobile app specifically for the blackberry which uses the Google Maps Static API. It would generate an image showing the final destination, as well as directions which were parsed by XML instead of javascript. We directed all users to the web version by a QR code and used browser detection to redirect users accordingly.
Role:
Throughout the planning process I came up with the QR Code, and Blackberry work around. My role was head developer for both the web and mobile map. I used HMTL5, CSS3, JS, PHP, and MySQL. Also the Google Maps API was used both XML and JS based. It was discussed to use a mobile web-based framework, which started becoming popular like Sencha Touch or jQuery Mobile. However the blackberry was one of the main targets, which did not support those frameworks at the time.
Designer: Matt Balla, Marvell AR
Read about "Shop. Dine. Discover."
