Goal for 2nd Quarter 2009

The Fluid Engage project is off and running and the teams are coming together around some early ideas. We are working out areas where we can experiment, get our feet wet, and work on collaborating across great distances. The goal for this experimentation phase is to have something to show, to help structure our conversations at the Fluid Engage all-hands meeting in Toronto June 22-24. So, this is early work in Fluid Engage.

early iPhone activity

To start with, the Fluid Engage team is working on prototyping a web-based iPhone solution. As per the proposal, the project will move beyond this device to work with other mobile platforms (at this point we are talking about working with Android or Nokia or both). We are starting out with prototyping an iPhone interface, keeping an eye on generalizing our work so it can be reused.

• development is starting with an idiomatic iphone UI rendering using FSS
  • Jacob Farber + Unknown user + Laurel Williams looking specifically from the perspective of fluidproject.org
• also do an analysis of mobile toolkits that might get somewhere on this

• design is working on sketching out use cases and then wireframes for an iPhone interface (not an iPhone app) using the artifacts page from McCord Museum as both a use-case and inspiration for a more generalized solution.
  • claytonhlewis, Unknown user, and James Yoon

early mapping activity

"Mapping" both spatial and conceptual is central to the Fluid Engage deliverables. James has shared a conceptual model for structuring our thinking and mapping work around two axes: an axis of location unaware and aware and an axis of spatial and conceptual ideas.

• design is working on some use cases for mapping
  • (James Yoon + Dale + Erin Yu + Unknown user + Unknown user)

• development is going to implement a simple map + object information layers in Canvas (canvas html 5 element) and Processing
  • Antranig Basman and James Yoon together
    • come up with an approach
    • implement and iterate

artifact activity

As part of an ice-breaker activity, we have begun to take a look at some data from the McCord Museum and work with it in interesting ways that will allow us to create user interfaces that are generally useful to our museum users, and that work great on a mobile device. This space might emerge as the glue between services and devices – look for this to develop further.

• development is building a prototype for browsing through collections and displaying artifact information
  • Armin Krauss + Unlicensed user

Services

The services work will be foundational for Fluid Engage. We are beginning to explore solutions for interacting with existing content, DBs, and other enterprise systems. This space is currently doing explorations into architectural solutions that will serve as a foundation for our future work.

• development is working on transforming some sample data from museums
  • Unknown user + Unlicensed user + Antranig Basman + y z
  • evaluate technologies
    • https://wiki.mozilla.org/ServerJS
    • http://jackjs.org
    • start working with CouchDB
    • Persistence
    • Import
    • Data feed
  • Evaluate existing museum data feed APIs
  • End result: artifact data feed (Unlicensed user + Unlicensed user + y z)

early tagging activity

Tagging is going to prove an important element in the evolution of our thinking and prototyping in Fluid Engage. We are doing some highly experimental development work here as a way to get our community members familiar with and using Fluid Infusion. This early work will get us thinking about tagging in creative ways that we'll apply to our future work.

Fluid Infusion development

The newest release of Fluid Infusion is 1.1 – that product was built within the two years of work on Fluid Academic. Fluid Engage will build upon and extend the Fluid Infusion product. Look for the above work to be transformed into components and add-ons to existing solutions shipping with Infusion. Part of our ongoing work in Fluid Infusion is listed below.

• Jacob Farber and Laurel Williams and Justin Obara work on builder for web - packaging of Infusion a la carte solution
• Antranig Basman Pager clean-up
• bug fixing and a11y testing (Alison Benjamin)

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Areas for thought and Research

Architecture

• Take a deep look at PhoneGap

• functionality, breadth, device support, etc.
• code quality/architecture: is going to be suitable for production?
• roadmap
• what can we learn from their approach?

• Bootstrap iPhone: WebKit in a small app: fetch UI, render it; JavaScriptCore for wrapping native APIs

Mobile a11y

research on accessibility solutions in mobile devices (Jorge Silva) maybe work with Nokia contacts on this . Relates to: AEGIS SP1 deliverable (http://redmine.atrc.utoronto.ca/issues/show/543)

• Accessibility Solutions in Mobile Devices

Decision time

• iphone dev licenses (Jess Mitchell read rules)
• Decide on server-side framework (make a proposed solution to the community)

Future work:

• tagging
• Nokia and Android platform work
• Multimedia component
• Work on wayfinding - location-aware mobile solution