Hello,<br>
<br>
At Camptocamp, we are also working on an adaptation of OpenLayers for
the mobile devices (phone and table, under iOS or Android for the
moment). You can check
<a href="http://www.camptocamp.com/fr/blog/2010/12/mobile-web-gis/">http://www.camptocamp.com/fr/blog/2010/12/mobile-web-gis/</a> for more information (and a
demonstration) about our work in this field.<br>
<br>
>From this point, we are discussing internally how we can move on with
this development. If other people are showing an interest, it may be a
good time to start talking together about how we can get an efficient
OpenLayers mobile.<br>
<br>
By the way, have you a demo available? Are you specifically targeting Apple devices?<br>
<br>
Regards,<br>
Benoît<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 4:29 PM, Duchesne, Jimmy <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:JDuchesne@korem.com">JDuchesne@korem.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
Hi to everyone,<br>
(If you think that I should address this email to someone in particular, or another mailing list, I'd be glad to know)<br>
<br>
For over a year now, my team and I have been using OpenLayers thoroughly. We used it as much for internal projects as we did for our clients' projects.<br>
Overall, we're pretty much satisfied with what you guys created. It's an extensive framework that dramatically improves the speed at which we can develop our applications.<br>
<br>
That being said, for some months now, a new need has been brought to us by both our clients and our users. We need a framework for the different mobile platforms.<br>
<br>
So far, we've seen some patches posted on the OpenLayers' Issue tracker that added limited support for the new events that come with mobile devices: touches and gestures.<br>
Those patches were obviously just a start. They did show us that it was possible to use those new browser events, but as they were, they weren't much use.<br>
<br>
Actually, we could have used them, but when you compared the behaviour they had with the one mobile device's users are used to, Google Maps App or <a href="http://maps.google.com" target="_blank">http://maps.google.com</a>,<br>
it wasn't going to satisfy our clients.<br>
<br>
>From that perspective, our goal was this one: To achieve map behaviour comparable to what users get with Google Maps App on iPAD, but with OpenLayers as the base framework,<br>
and Google Maps as the base layer. At some point, the base layer shouldn't actually matter though.<br>
<br>
Considering the lack of time that we had for this development, and the fact that we could not find any similar existing implementation, we finally went for some key features:<br>
- Pan the map with one finger.<br>
- Double touching the map zooms around where you touched the map.<br>
- Double tapping the map zooms out one zoom level.<br>
- Pinching the map stretches the map in real time, with a minimal amount of lag.<br>
- Had to use HTML5/CSS3 there.<br>
- While pinching, you can also pan.<br>
- If you pan or zooms the map, and your fingers leave the screen and touch it again quickly enough, you continue the current map manipulation.<br>
- Map panning or stretching, while your fingers touch the screen acts on all visible layers, whatever their type may be.<br>
<br>
It was very important to us that while the fingers move the map or stretch it, the expected result had to be visible in real-time, like it does with the Google Maps App on iPAD.<br>
<br>
In the end, we actually could achieve all these goals. It means that we could get map behaviour comparable, or even better, to what one gets on <a href="http://maps.google.com" target="_blank">http://maps.google.com</a>.<br>
We couldn't reach all Google Maps App behaviour because of our lack of time though.<br>
<br>
As you may imagine, achieving these features in the amount of time that we had, we actually hacked quite a lot of OpenLayers code. We'll probably take some time<br>
in the next few weeks to make it more portable so we can use it in all our mobile device projects, but doing all this hacking made us curious.<br>
<br>
What are the current plans for OpenLayers regarding the support for most mobile devices? In our case, all those tablets coming on looks like a really promising market.<br>
Do you guys plan on actually putting any effort in supporting mobile devices? Do you think that the current OpenLayers architecture can support such changes, or a new dedicated framework should be developed?<br>
When are you planning on using HTML5/CSS3, since it makes the overall experience more pleasing to the user?<br>
<br>
We're really curious to hear about what you guys think about all this.<br>
<br>
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</blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Benoît Quartier<br><br>Camptocamp SA<br>PSE-A, Parc Scientifique EPFL<br>CH-1015 Lausanne<br><br>Tel: +41 21 619 10 40<br>Fax: +41 21 619 10 00<br><br>