A historical audio and video guidebook for an Android smartphone/tablet John Reid September 2011 Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree
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- 2State-of-The-Art
- 2.2Paper Based Guidebooks
- 2.3On-line Guidebooks
- 2.4Smartphone Guidebooks
- 2.4.1Walking Through Time
- 2.4.2OldMaps
- 2.4.3Edinburgh Wee Guide
- 2.4.4Other Guidebooks
1.4Overview of DissertationChapter 2: State of the Art This chapter will look into the use of mobile devices as guidebooks and in particular those applications which were aimed at or contained historical content. Chapter 3: Tools and Design Guidelines This chapter will describe the different technologies used in the project; from XML and Unicode files to the different visual Android components used and why they were chosen. It will also give an introduction to the Android mobile platform and why it was chosen for this project. An overview of Android development is given including a description of the tools used and the special considerations that have to be taken into account when developing applications to be run on mobile platforms. Chapter 4: User Interface This chapter will show how the interface was designed, from the front screen layout to the menus and pages. A description of its accessibility is given and how the multi-language support was achieved. Chapter 5: Features This chapter describes the features of the application and how they were developed. It describes how maps were integrated into the project and describes why open source code was used instead of the standard Google map component. A description of georeferencing is given and why it was used in the project. The chapter also describes the weather check feature and how the audio and video were added. The ability of the application to geolock the content of the guidebooks to a given geographical area is also explained. Chapter 6: Testing and User Trials This chapter describes the testing phase of the project; how it was tested on the different versions of Android using both real devices and the emulator and gives an analysis of the results from the user trials that were conducted. Chapter 7: Conclusion This chapter gives the summary and evaluation of the project and how the application could be extended in the future. Appendix 1: Questionnaire This chapter presents the questionnaire created for the user testing. Appendix 2: User guide This chapter presents the user manual for the application. Appendix 3: Installation guide This chapter presents the installation guide for the application. 2State-of-The-Art2.1Historical GuidebooksA survey was made of the available historical guidebooks that covered Edinburgh; several paper based, on-line based and smartphone based guidebooks were reviewed with their strengths and weaknesses compared. The following section will present the findings of this survey across the three different formats. 2.2Paper Based GuidebooksThe book “A Guide to the Royal Mile” [1] was used to see how well a paper based guidebook compared to these other formats. Most people would be familiar with traditional paper based guidebooks; they are convenient to use, require no training and typically come in a variety of different sizes and languages for a given town or city. This particular book was pocket sized with clear text and had well laid out chapters and paragraphs. It contained hand drawn maps that could be used for navigation and (since they were numbered) they also allowed the user to reasonably quickly find a page of interest in the book from the map page. Although it was both practical and relatively inexpensive, it was not interactive and some of the content (such as opening hours) could become out of date. 
2.3On-line GuidebooksThe website “www.edinburgh-royalmile.com” was used to see how well a browser could be used as a guidebook for viewing historical information. This particular website was the first site returned when a Google search was performed for the “Royal Mile” (a popular tourist destination in Edinburgh). Since the content was on-line it could show accurate opening times and prices of admission for historical sites however the descriptions of these historic sites were quite sparse. Online encyclopaedias such as Wikipedia could also be used as guidebooks but, in general, there were several disadvantages of using web browsers to display content on mobile devices:
2.4Smartphone GuidebooksThe Android market place [1], the Apple iTunes app store and the “Windows Marketplace for Mobile” [3] were all searched for historical guidebook applications. Not surprisingly, there seemed to be far fewer applications in this field for Android and Windows Mobile based devices than for Apple iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) devices. Although there were several smartphone guidebooks for Edinburgh, few were specifically for historic sites (rather than pubs and restaurants). 2.4.1Walking Through TimeDuring development, the National Library of Scotland (NLS) described an application similar to the one being developed called “Walking through Time” by “WalkThruTime” [4]. This application (for the Apple iOS platform) showed the user three maps of Edinburgh from 1849 to 1960 with a modern map that could display the user’s location. In addition to this, the application could overlay onto the maps one of two available walks and show selectable pin markers to describe locations. However the application required an Internet connection to run. User feedback on the appstore was interesting; users said it could be slow to download maps, one reviewer suggested it was consuming too much battery power and others were misled by the original name of the program thinking other locations were available outside Edinburgh. Trialling the software, it was seen that the historic maps were slow to appear even on a Wi-Fi connection. Additionally, it was found that the application allowed the user to zoom into the historic maps when there was no data available (the effect of which was that when the user zoomed into the historic maps they would disappear). This was because the maps were only available for certain zoom levels and some were not detailed (the street numbers could not be read). Unfortunately the application did not inform the user of this so they could wait indefinitely for maps to appear.
An opacity slider was used to allow the user to see two maps “blended” together; this feature was well received by reviewers and was a good way to display the maps. In use, the application sometimes became confused as to when the user wanted to zoom in and when the user was adjusting the opacity slider (since the slider was directly on top of the map). 2.4.2OldMapsThe Landmark Information Group had a similar application called “OldMaps” [5] that again used maps stored on a web server, not locally. The application was not a guidebook (no information on places was held), it simply showed the user’s position on a selection of old maps at different scales. Unfortunately, when the application was reviewed, an error message was often displayed when viewing these maps, as it seemed that access to many of the online historic maps had been removed (including Edinburgh). For this reason it received very poor reviews from users. In common with the previous application, it used a slider component so the maps could be “blended” together (by varying the opacity of the maps). A good feature of the application was its ability to cover most of the United Kingdom and that it allowed you to type in a postcode to view a particular location.
2.4.3Edinburgh Wee GuideThe application “Edinburgh Wee Guide” by “iSPY” [6] was installed and tested. It described itself as a “location based travel guide and walking tour of Edinburgh”. This application was more historically centred than a normal guidebook and compared old and new photographs of Edinburgh (with text descriptions) and used an image slider to fade between them. The use of the slider bar in this way was very effective. Unfortunately, no historical maps were available in the application but if a data connection was present then it would show the user’s location on a modern map. The user interface was simple and easy to use although since the text in the content pages only took up about 40% of the screen, it could be hard for some people to read. This was an interesting application which was easy and enjoyable to use. 2.4.4Other GuidebooksThere were various other non-historical guidebooks available. “Edinburgh Walking Tours and Map” [7] by “GPSmyCity.com” was a general guidebook to Edinburgh rather than a historical guidebook but it did have some nice features. The data (including the maps) were stored locally, and it gave instructions to the user on how to get to the sites listed as well as displaying the user’s position on a map. The “BrinkGuide: Edinburgh Edition” [8] application and the “Edinburgh City Guide” [9] application by Guidepal were two further examples of general guidebooks which were similar in operation and featured modern maps but were available for the Android platform. Directory: courses -> ITNP99 -> PastDissertations -> 2010-2011 -> Dissertations courses -> Ieor 4600 Mixed-Integer Rounding Inequalities courses -> San José State University Social Science/Psychology Psych 175, Management Psychology, Section 1, Spring 2014 courses -> Kennan's Telegram (Excerpt) courses -> The university of british columbia courses -> A hurricane track density function and empirical orthogonal function approach to predicting seasonal hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin Elinor Keith April 17, 2007 Abstract courses -> Cover page need figure & title by Proposed Table of Contents courses -> Objectives courses -> Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog Download 239.28 Kb. Share with your friends:
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