Left to Right: PhillyHistory as seen on an iPhone; detail view of an historic photo; map view of historic photo search.

An increasingly hot topic in technology lately is that of mobile versions of web applications. It seems that everyone is carrying a BlackBerry, SmartPhone, or iPhone these days, and wants to be able to access all their information on the go. In response to this trend, we’ve recently decided to make an investment in learning about and implementing mobile phone technology for several of our software applications. I recently attended a workshop on iPhone development at the 2009 Museums and the Web conference, and decided that working on an iPhone-specific application would be a great way to get started. We decided to start with the Sajara-enabled PhillyHistory.org site.

Basically, developing for iPhone can take one of three forms:

• Adjust an existing site. Essentially, you simply need to make sure that your current site looks good on the iPhone.
• Create an iPhone specific web application. Create a new web application, but tailor it visually and functionally to the iPhone’s layout and interface.
• Create an iPhone application. Write a full application (in the Objective-C programming language) and publish it through the App Store.

Each option has its advantages and disadvantages, but we decided to go with the second option, since it allows us to have a very sleek interface, without the difficulty of rewriting the application in a new language and the overhead of publishing it to the Apple Store. The main disadvantage to creating a full iPhone application is that it means that we won’t have access to the iPhone’s location SDK.

Once we chose a development route, we needed to start thinking about the user interface from a functional standpoint. I first decided to remove some of the more advanced features (such as keyword and topic searching) of the PhillyHistory site, and focus on what Sajara does best: geography-based searching. iPhone UI design generally follows a simple ‘screen-per-function’ guideline, so I decided to include three ways of accessing a geographic search: by neighborhood, by text location, or directly by map interaction.

All three tasks eventually take the user to a map view, which includes the Sajara geographically-based asset search, and shows markers for the results. The map view uses the OpenLayers API for displaying the map and markers, with some hacks and modifications for allowing the user to more easily drag the map around and zoom in and out on the iPhone. Each time the user pans or zooms the map, the new map extents are used to request a new search. Since I was mostly focusing on the redesign of the user interface, I left the logic behind the search mechanism unchanged from the logic that runs the full PhillyHistory site.

From the map, a user can select one of the markers to get the details for that asset. This screen shows the asset’s image, title, date, and other related data.

Developing the Sajara iPhone web application was fairly simple from a technical perspective. The constraints of having a small screen and keeping a touch interface in mind did make the project interesting. Additionally, one of the big advantages of developing a web app for the iPhone is that there is only one target platform, which greatly simplifies testing.

We look forward to continuing to brainstorm about possible ‘next steps’ in expanding our collection of mobile Sajara apps (and beyond). The next steps for this application and research, specific to Sajara, might include:

• Enhancing the map interface to allow for pinch zooming
• Supporting other devices, e.g. BlackBerry
• Allow other types of searching (keyword, year range, etc.)

To experience the PhillyHistory iPhone app, please go to http://www.phillyhistory.org/i