The powerful aspect of flash that initially convinced me that flash was the best medium to develop the mapping software is its ability to load multiple video/animation "movie clips" into the flash environment and treat those video or vector animations as objects. Treating them as objects means that i can change the scale, reposition or even animate the moving video just as i would a simple bitmap image (using actionscript). When you combine this with the fact that flash can do all of this in a very small file size or required CPU/RAM flash becomes the only choice.
One of the chief design goals in the development of visual mapping software and a popular request by beta users is the ability to load the video tutorial inside the map itself instead of having to open up a new web page an view content externally to the map page.
Well good news, Ive just completed another milestone and have successfully created a working prototype that achieves this. When users double click on a node instead of opening up a new web page and viewing pages externally users see the video tutorial and instructions load inside the map. Because it is inside the QSLS environment it is associated with the content node (as it is nested in inside the mc) and can be positioned automatically then scaled and dragged around by the user at will.
Of course this is all done on demand so users can actually view multiple video tutorials side by side to compare an contrast techniques or view veins/themes of content in a node cluster.
The really great thing about this whole beta testing and development cycle is that i have managed to make the entire map run off a xml file and the content that is loaded into the environment and associated with each node is also structured using simple xml files.
This means that the content floating in the mapping environment comes directly from the same xml pages that feed my XSL pages on my website. So users can browse content using the regular menus and indexes of my site or view the same styled xml pages in Ziggy without me having to create special versions for web pages that work in the QSLS environment. Since XML is the future of web dev this could become a very powerful GUI. Plus given its ability to efficiently stuff allot of information into a relatively small amount of space it has some promising applications in mobile web services and iphone/UMPC devices.But more importantly coupled with a semantic agent Ziggy could become a great asset when having to deal with semantic search results or websites of the semantic web.
2 comments:
Sounds like what you have been able to accomplish make things a lot easier for the user. This is really a key area of this type of work, since the ease of use is so often a standard by which turns people on to using a system.
On a side note, I found it interesting to see in the "yahoo" news that they are looking into Semantic web searches.
Hey Paul - It sounds like a great project, and next time I read through it I'm gonna have a tech dictionary handy. I think Mike is right - that people will enjoy the ease of use, so understanding or not understanding it will become moot when they are able to simply click and access. I can't wait to see it in action!
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