During the module "Mobile Screens" in 5th semester students were developing iPhone Apps for the famous poster collection of the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich. Several of these apps explored the territory of browsing on a mobile screen. As a backend for data queries we had a special server that supplied XML data packets with the posters and their meta data as well as meta data and the associated posters.
To test the ability of the server to cope with various concurrent XML requests and to measure how long these will take we started to develop the App "Related". It turned out to be quite a funny tool to browse the collection as well.
Improvements have to be made in the App for resource optimization, several of the already downloaded posters could be reused and are not, the download queue should be managed explicitly and after some time of use posters in memory should be released. This is the implementation part of the ongoing research.
We also test user reactions on an iPad App with no real user interface and long to anticipate what they will do or try to do next with the App.
Magnus Rembold
Dozent in der software-technischen Grundausbildung.
Poster Collection
Erfasst am 20.10.10
5th semester students present their iPhone app concepts for browsing the famous ZHdK poster collection on Friday, October 10 2010.