[OpenLayers-Dev] OpenLayers for Mobile devices

[Benoit Quartier]

Hello,

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 http://www.camptocamp.com/fr/blog/2010/12/mobile-web-gis/ for more
information (and a demonstration) about our work in this field.

>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.

By the way, have you a demo available? Are you specifically targeting Apple
devices?

Regards,
Benoît

On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 4:29 PM, Duchesne, Jimmy <JDuchesne at korem.com>wrote:

> Hi to everyone,
> (If you think that I should address this email to someone in particular, or
> another mailing list, I'd be glad to know)
>
> 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.
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
> 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.
>
> 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
> http://maps.google.com,
> it wasn't going to satisfy our clients.
>
> >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,
> and Google Maps as the base layer. At some point, the base layer shouldn't
> actually matter though.
>
> 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:
>  - Pan the map with one finger.
> - Double touching the map zooms around where you touched the map.
> - Double tapping the map zooms out one zoom level.
> - Pinching the map stretches the map in real time, with a minimal amount of
> lag.
> - Had to use HTML5/CSS3 there.
> - While pinching, you can also pan.
> - 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.
> - Map panning or stretching, while your fingers touch the screen acts on
> all visible layers, whatever their type may be.
>
> 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.
>
> 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
> http://maps.google.com.
> We couldn't reach all Google Maps App behaviour because of our lack of time
> though.
>
> 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
> 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.
>
> 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.
> 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?
> When are you planning on using HTML5/CSS3, since it makes the overall
> experience more pleasing to the user?
>
> We're really curious to hear about what you guys think about all this.
>
> _______________________________________________
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>



-- 
Benoît Quartier

Camptocamp SA
PSE-A, Parc Scientifique EPFL
CH-1015 Lausanne

Tel: +41 21 619 10 40
Fax: +41 21 619 10 00
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