Supporting Touchscreens/Mobile Devices for Location and Mapping Projects

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R.J. Steinert's picture

I'm interested in hearing how people are using Drupal to support mobile devices/touchscreens for location and mapping projects. I see two ways one would approach this:

1) Build an app that runs natively on the platform that interfaces with Drupal through a REST interface (Sounds like Heyrocker (Services module) is pushing for the Butler project http://buytaert.net/drupal-in-a-tablet-world)

2) Build support for mobile devices/touchscreen devices into the javascript libraries we are using to display maps to browsers.

3) Other suggestions? :)

I'm particularly interested in option 2. Our two best options for mapping right now look like the Mapstraction js Library or the OpenLayers js Library for considering they have Drupal modules that will build a map using Views. I haven't looked into mobile support in the Mapstraction js but I have found a project for the OpenLayers js library called iOL.js . Unfortunately this project doesn't look like it's received a lot of love yet and hasn't been touched in a while http://projects.opengeo.org/mobile. I found a handful of links to demos but only found one that wasn't a broken link (http://mab.edina.ac.uk/geomobile-test/osm.html from http://mobilegeo.wordpress.com/2010/01/05/testing-open-layers-with-iphon...). Even the original post about iOL.js is gone only to be found syndicated here http://spatialdistillery.scrollie.com/2008/10/ioljs/.

While support for features like pinch, swipe, location, etc. are nice, to get this working on mobile devices we could do something as simple as reformatting the map so the arrows are big enough to press and the map is resized to the dimensions of the mobile device.

Thoughts?

Comments

Mobile geo & drupal

tom_o_t's picture

I'm interested in this too.

OpenLayers out of the box isn't great on a mobile device, though it basically works. I did a quick implementation at http://m.nycwhisky.com/map/today, which works on a mobile device, but is slow and difficult to navigate the map.

same thing

MTrottier's picture

Hi!
I am currently migrating a site to the mobile web.
the site currently use OpenLayers and I did some tests with IOL.js and results are quite well.
there are also touchMapLite which seems to give good results
I have not tested Drupal +OpenLayers +Mobile
does this solve the pan's problem with a map?
I have not found great example of a site "mobile" using openlayers and even less with Drupal+Openlayers+mobile

it seems OpenLayers 3.0 would be better for mobile site but I don't know the release date

Location and Mapping

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