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 <jduche...@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. > > _______________________________________________ > Dev mailing list > d...@lists.osgeo.org > http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/openlayers-dev > -- Benoît Quartier Camptocamp SA PSE-A, Parc Scientifique EPFL CH-1015 Lausanne Tel: +41 21 619 10 40 Fax: +41 21 619 10 00
_______________________________________________ Dev mailing list d...@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/openlayers-dev
