2011 Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool

Although we didn’t check off every item on our feature wish list for msu.seum, I’m very proud of the application we built. The content, design and programming coalesced into a fairly polished alpha application. We reached that point in two weeks thanks to coordination.

Each team did a great job of pulling things together by the end of the two week development cycle. The content, design and programming were done simultaneously throughout the two week period. The content team did research, collected photographs, filmed the campus archaeology fieldschool and carefully worded each of the exhibits. The design team created and implemented the layout and themes for each individual exhibit. The programming team laid the groundwork for Phonegap, jQueryMobile, Google Maps API and the basic page structure of the app.

Committing files to our SVN repository was essential to our coordination, but communication was even more important. In order for the teams to work seamlessly, we  gave updates several times a day about what we were working on. The design team also added a layer of communication into the code that the programming team should have adopted as well: comments. Adding comments throughout the code explaining what each snippet did was helpful for the other teams to quickly understand the source material they were working with. In retrospect, the programming team should have done the same to help the design and content teams better understand the code they worked with.

Given our short development timeline, we realized we would have several phases in development. We’re at a “mature alpha” and we’re feature complete, but some polishing needs to be done. We’ve planned to take the next few weeks to squash bugs, polish and publish the applications to the Android Marketplace and the Apple App Store. Look out for msu.seum on your smart phone within the next few weeks!