I was about to post the minutes of our most recent meeting when I noticed I hadn’t posted those of the previous meeting. So not only are we presenting historical maps, we’re blogging historical meetings. The paperwork must be done!
Present: Chris, Ian, Karlyn, Dave, Peter, Petra, James.
JISCRI Programme Meeting
Peter, Petra and Chris attend the JISCRI programme meeting in Manchester on Sept 3 & 4. The meeting was useful in providing hints for development and for finding what other people are working on, especially in the Geo area.
In one sesssion, each project had to give a 45 second pitch. Walking Through Time were voted 2nd out of 56 projects, which backs up our belief that our proposal generates a lot of interest.
Work Package 3
Our third development cycle, titled “Server-side Technologies and Data Ingest”, achieved the intended goals:
• Ability to Upload GPS route data
• Ability to add new locations
• Extensive Investigator field-testing, including route data and location information.
• Simple note tagging reinstated
• More work on UI – follow-me functionality, simplification of UI
Work Package 4
Our fourth cycle was on User Engagement and Advocacy. Originally we were planning to involve the M.Sc. students at this stage but they were too involved with finishing their dissertations, so instead the investigators did more concentrated field testing themselves. This gave useful feedback to the development team.
The meeting with the Historical Society is planned for the 18th. This will be led by Karlyn and will give us feedback from non-academic users.
So far, the key problem is speed of presentation. The new iPhone 3GS is fast enough. iPhone 3G is a bit slow. Dropping from 3G to EDGE as you walk around makes performance too slow. The problem is primarily on the client rather than server-side; we’re downloading too much data for slower networks. So our work in WP5 will have to address this. This is where agile management is giving us a win; we were planning for WP5 to be led by the feedback we received in WP4 and this is what is happening.
Work Package 5
As noted above, WP5 will concentrate on speed. We will try using the new Google Maps API, which is supposed to be faster. We will otimise our Javascript and HTML files to reduce their size. We might also switch to a larger server.
Possibly we could also provide a bare-bones version with less functionality to download.
In addition to the performance work, we will also continue to improve the admin interface in response to feedback.
AOB
Ian will develop a route for testing.
James will see whether the historical maps provided by the National Library of Scotland are available as a WMS.
James will find other groups that could test, potentially elsewhere in the UK.