How do you build an interactive experience for a traditional museum audience that can be viewed on anything from a iPhone to a 30 inch LCD touch screen?
The questions I asked myself what can we implement to quickly and easily build and deploy engaging interactive experiences? Well that got me thinking and looking online for available solutions. The first path I investigated was Adobe CS5 Indesign with it’s new digital publishing tools. This had all the winning potential for two reasons
- We could harness the in-house skill set which already exists in the museum.
- I had recently won a copy of CS5 at an Adobe event held in Perth, WA.
Not long after getting started all the wonderful ease of Adobe software was making this a dream. I was creating my own Wired magazine and there was no coding involved. Then came the hiccup, the dream was a nightmare. This wonderfully easy to use software had a draw back, the cost. It was not a small one off cost either, it was a big monthly fee that I knew would be totally out of reach for the Museum. US$495/month, well that is great if you are a large publishing house or magazine business selling thousands of copies a month, but we are not.
Back to the drawing board, although I thought this could be a blessing. The Adobe solution didn’t match my personal support for open standards, a build once deploy everywhere mentality. Many of the recent sections added to the Museum’s website have been built using responsive web design (Ethan Marcotte) to flow content depending on screen size. This could be solution for the Museum but I wanted to make something special, something that felt like it had been crafted and cared for, something that could be or replace a traditional book or exhibition guide, something that doesn’t feel like the web.
The hunt was back on, this time my trail lead to epub format. If this can be shown on an iPad or a Kindle then it must be open and a possible solution. My research lead me to the Baker Ebook Framework, success. This was an open standard which would work on anything, play on anything, deploy on anything, yet it lacked the rich magazine design I had been experimenting with using Indesign. There must be some middle ground, there must be a way to have a rich magazine layouts that are based on open standards like the Baker Ebook Framework.
I couldn’t believe it when I found the Laker Compendium it was everything I had been looking for. Stunning graphics, clean UI, intuitive navigation, worked on iPad, iPhone and some web browsers and it’s free. A price I could get onboard with. A true starting point for building an economical digital magazine. Not everything worked though, this was built for primarily for iOS but had only experimental browser support, meaning this would need to be wrangled into shape. But this thing is built in HTML so getting it to run on a browser wouldn’t be impossible. Wrangling turned into rewriting and new scripts to enable the same iOS touch event animations on all platforms.
I finally had it a solution that looked great, could work everywhere, on any device and which felt special and professional without massive monthly fees. With this frontend framework in place the next step is to start building real interactive experiences that engage, excite and educate.
The Museum web team are also developing a Digital Publishing System in Drupal to allow users to dynamically and rapidly build a deploy their own digital publication. More details to follow shortly.