BGS Smartphone Conference

Yesterday,  Nick Thorne gave a presentation to the British Geological Survey Smartphone Apps, Maps and Augmented Reality Conference about the anyTide app.

This was a great opportunity to discuss the process of taking anyTide from concept to a published app. In particular, the steps of elaborating the user experience in terms of identifying how the user flows from one activity to the next. In the case of anyTide, a key factor was the requirement for offline operation. This drove the split of functionality between  client and server.

Server side was fully implemented in PHP and mySQL (including GIS extensions). Client side in Objective C, with some custom C library extensions.

Slides will be available on the BGS smartphone group here.

It is clear that as more and more public sector data becomes freely available (e.g. OS OpenSpace, and BODC), more apps will spring up to make us of it.