On Thu, 14 Mar 2002 13:01:45 -0000, Tony Crockford <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

>>Going back to the BL demo, I gave up after 10 minutes when
>>my win386.swp
>>file had grown to about 30mB and my resource meter was
>>behaving oddly,
>>but then I don't have an ISDN line, just an antique 56k
>>modem on ordinary
>>old BT.
>
>I persevered out of curiosity and it only took about three minutes
>to get to the interactive map. (56k modem, win2k)

Yes, the demo was never designed to cope on a modem as it stands, none of
the loading is theaded yet so nothing is displayed untill everything is
loaded, and with the large world map in there thats a huge delay.

>Bit dull, I thought, really.  :(

It is a shame that I had to remove the sound files and the image base-map
from the demo.  However, because the basemaps were served by our web map
server you can still see them via an alternative, image only, intface.
I've included a link at the end of this e.mail, sorry its so HUGE, but at
least it should get you to exactly the right place.

>It could have been just as effectively done using html a bit of
>JavaScript and some image maps.
The ability to zoom and pan around the map quickly is quite tricky in
JavaScript, and features like the timebar and text filter would have taken
quite a bit of work.

>The map was too small, but the page didn't fit my 800*600 window,
>the thumbnails were tiny and the *big* images took too long to
>download, with no way of knowing that was what was happening, I
>clicked more than once (and got a lot of new windows!)

Indeed, in the environment for which the demo was designed the big images
appeared instantaniusly so I did't put any work into a progress indicator,
but one would be quite easy to do.

>Of course the whole premise is that as a user I know where in the
>world I want to look for something.  I'm not sure that's a fair
>assumption to make - the map of the world is unfamiliar to a lot of
>people - why not a simple list of places?

There were a couple of arguements against this, the first most of the
manuscripts were located at places with quite obscure names, or at
locations which no longer exist (as towns).  The second was that they
wanted to show patterns.  For example, if you display manuscripts and type
chinese into the small box in the lower left hand corner then change the
limits on the time bar you can see how the spread of chinese activity
changed over time.

>I admire the technological achievement but question the wisdom of
>the approach.  I don't really like Flash, but if ever there was a
>good project suited to it's talents this is one, especially as Flash
>gives feedback on loading times and it can get somewhere interesting
>while loading stuff in the background.
The same can and has been done with Java applets, I'm not a Flash expert,
but one of the goals of the pilot was to be able to pull artifact
locations, names, descriptions and photos directly out of a database so
that it could be updated automaticaly and I suspect that sort of connection
would be tricky in Flash.

>I hope the feedback has been useful, sorry it isn't more positive,
>perhaps I'm not representative of the target audience - who are they
>exactly?  I guess they will know what Or.12551A means when it pops
>up over a marker on the map.

Indeed, as I say this was an internal demo that was not realy designed for
public access as it stands so whilst the oriental office members know
the 'presspack marks' they are of little use to anyone else.  However, as
they just come out of a database column they could be almost anything.

James

p.s. here is that URL I mentioned, it is large, but if you can paste it
into a browser you should see the map of Calcutta that you can explore,
though without the photos of the city available.

http://www.cubewerx.com/demo/cubeview/cubeview.cgi?
clickMode=zoom+in&layerToQuery=%28none%29&featureCount=5&themes=%28unthemed%
29&layers=calcutta&styles=%28default%
29&newScale=929.6875K&newX=88.383170293&newY=22.568557588&newImageWidth=600&
newImageHeight=300&newImageType=image%2Fpng&zoomFactor=2&newSrs=4326+%
28WGS+84%29&serverUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ccg.leeds.ac.uk%2Fcgi-bin%
2Fwms&layersToPlot=calcutta%
2CDemis&currentY=22.5685575879454&currentX=88.3831702927683&currentScale=929
.6875K&currentImageWidth=600&currentImageHeight=300&currentSrs=EPSG%
3A4326&currentImageType=image%2Fpng&imageClick.x=295&imageClick.y=154