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Authoring tools & development platforms:
Requirements for mobile devices-enabled cultural
applications
Daphne Economou, Damianos Gavalas, Michael Kenteris
Cultural Heritage Management Laboratory (CHMLab)
Department of Cultural Technology and Communication
Harilaou Trikoupi & Faonos St., GR – 81100
University of the Aegean, Mytilene, Lesvos, Greece
d.economou@ct.aegean.gr, dgavalas@aegean.gr, ctm04007@ct.aegean.gr
Abstract
This paper identifies authoring tools requirements for the development of cultural
applications tailored for deployment on mobile devices: Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs)
and mobile phones. To address this issue it recognizes and evaluates the development and
design facilities provided by state-of-the-art multimedia application development tools for
PDAs and mobile phones: Macromedia Flash Lite, Navipocket, Java 2 Micro Edition and
Microsoft .Net platform for the Mobile Web. Secondly, it describes the use of these tools for
the implementation of three projects that have been developed at the Department of Cultural
Technology and Communication, University of the Aegean, in Greece, providing cultural and
tourist information. Based on these three case studies the paper extracts a set of PDA and
mobile phone-enabled application requirements and concludes with a set of suggestions
related to the way authoring tools should be exploited in order to gratify application and
designer needs for developing functional, fast & easy to deploy and profitable cultural
applications.
Keywords: Multimedia authoring tools, development platforms, mobile cultural applications,
requirements gathering, Flash Lite, Navipocket, J2ME, .NET Mobile Platform.
1. Introduction
Mobile devices have gained increasing acceptance as platforms for executing cultural
multimedia applications due to their physical characteristics and suitability in these
fields. However, currently available tools for developing multimedia applications for
mobile devices are light versions of state-of-the-art multimedia authoring tools, which
are not tailored to satisfying user, designer and mobile device applications
requirements.
The aim of this paper is to identify a coherent set of requirements for the
implementation of cultural applications on PDAs and mobile phones based on user,
application and designer needs (in section 5). This exercise builds upon the evaluation
of current state-of-the-art authoring tools and development platforms (in section 3)
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420
and on experience gained by using such tools in three case studies developed in our
laboratory (in section 3.2.2). The first case study involves a museum guide and news
reader application executing on mobile phones (in section 4.1). The second focuses
on the use of PDAs for the provision of interpretative cultural information in a
museum environment (in section 4.2), whilst the third is a mobile tourist guide
research prototype (in section 4.3). The case studies have been developed using Flash
Lite and Navipocket authoring tools and J2ME development platform, respectively.
The paper closes with conclusions about this work (in section 6). A table that
summarizes the main features of the four reviewed technologies may be found at the
end of the paper and is expected to be rather useful resource for mobile application
designers and developers that are open to mobile software development framework.
2. Cultural Mobile Applications
Multimedia and the Internet provide unique opportunities to cultural organizations
(Museums, Libraries and Archives, visitor centers, exhibition centers) as they bring
new ways of communication and interpretation. Commonly used technological
solutions in the context of cultural organizations, like projection systems and info-
kiosks, successfully connect cultural artifacts to related information. However, these
solutions are tightly bound to a cultural organization’s physical space. Mobile
technologies allow the dynamic presentation of multimedia information without being
limited by a physical environment. In addition, current mobile devices allow
accessing Internet resources. The WWW represents a medium which is well tried and
tested on cultural organizations related to information and services provision.
Wireless access through mobile devices adds to the Internet connection the element of
‘portability’, i.e. connection with no time or geographical limitations, by devices with
high penetration to the public.
Due to current practical concerns mobile technologies have not been incorporated by
most of cultural organizations for information and services provision. However, it is
believed that they provide a promising media for enhancing the cultural experience.
To address this issue multimedia application development tools are required to satisfy
user, application and designer needs.
The following section presents state-of-the-art tools for multimedia application
development and services provision for PDAs and mobile phones.
3. Mobile Application Development Tools
Typical tools for multimedia application development and services provision for
PDAs and mobile phones are classified in:
• authoring tools
• application development platforms.
Social Applications of Technological Advances 421
3.1 Authoring tools
3.1.1 Macromedia Flash Lite
Macromedia Flash Lite [Adobe Flash Lite] is referred to in this section, although not
used in the case studies examined later on in the paper, as one of the most commonly
used multimedia authoring tools that enables companies to easily and rapidly deploy
content to mobile devices. The explosive adoption of Flash Lite was driven by a
variety of causes. The Flash Lite authoring environment provides the designers and
developers a new level of expressiveness, efficiency and interactivity for content
creation. In addition, the Flash Lite rendering engine (Flash Player SDK 7 to date) is
optimized for consumer electronic devices, enabling consumer electronics
manufacturers, system integrators and browser companies to create high impact
products and services, with full web browsing capabilities. In addition, developers
already skilled in working with Flash MX can easily switch into using Flash Lite to
design applications for mobile devices.
3.1.2 Navipocket
NaviPocket v. 2.4 by OPHRYS SYSTEMS [OPHRYS Navipocket] has been
designed to meet the demands of Theme and Leisure Parks, Museums and Cultural
sectors in developing multimedia guides. Navipocket allows the creation of
multimedia applications on electronic message minders of PDA type. It is a software
unit aimed for portable systems (PDA or TabletPC-type) supporting an embedded OS
(Version 1 functions under Microsoft Windows CE 2.xx and PocketPC). The current
version works with Microsoft PocketPCTM 2002 and Windows Mobile 2003. A
PalmOS version will be available soon. The product is a complete set of an “Editor”,
a “Simulator” and a “Run-time”. Within the Editor Module, the user creates a set of
pages. These pages are in text format and are built according to an object-oriented
model. Navipocket supports the following objects: page, button, text area, bitmap and
video. Each object has properties and can be linked with another object.
Authoring tools like Navipocket and Flash Lite accelerate the delivery of advanced
applications and content services. However, they are not open source, they do not
support dynamic content maintenance and they require MS Windows compatible
devices for the development of multimedia projects, and for the run-time.
3.2 Development platforms
3.2.1 J2ME
Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) [Java 2 Platform Micro Edition], released by Sun
Microsystems, is a Java-based framework for developing applications executed on
resource-constrained devices. J2ME has achieved a remarkable penetration and is
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currently supported by virtually all mobile devices. J2ME applications are called
MIDlets; MIDlets are usually packaged in *.jar files, downloaded on-the-fly from a
web server and executed as standalone applications with no requirement for constant
connection to a wireless network.
J2ME inherits the main assets of Java language, i.e. the capacity to develop powerful
applications, platform independence, etc. Hence, developers are not restricted by the
limitations of an authoring tool’s functionality and may implement full-fledged
innovative applications that either execute standalone or communicate with their
peers or service providers, taking advantage of the J2ME’s strong wireless
networking support.
On the other hand, MIDlets programming is not straightforward as it requires Java
development skills. The development of J2ME applications is far more complex
compared to creating content using developer-friendly authoring tools like Flash Lite
or Navipocket.
3.2.2 Microsoft .Net platform for the Mobile Web and the ASP.NET mobile
controls
Microsoft’s entering the mobile market has been characterized by the release of a
proprietary operating system, namely, Microsoft Windows Mobile 2003 [Microsoft
Windows Mobile (2006)] and the provision of developer support to program mobile
devices. Specifically, a subset of the rich .NET Framework, called Microsoft .NET
Compact Framework, provides a runtime engine preloaded in the device’s memory in
order to facilitate mobile application deployment.
The ASP.NET mobile controls [ASP.NET Mobile Controls, 2006] (formerly known
as the Microsoft Mobile Internet Toolkit, MMIT) represent a mobile application
development platform, recently released by Microsoft. In particular, the ASP.NET
mobile controls provide an easy way to build mobile web applications that generate
the appropriate markup language (WML, xHTML, HTML or cHTML) and rendering
for web-enabled cell phones, WAP phones, PDAs, Pocket PCs and pagers. The
programming of ASP.NET mobile controls is enabled by the Mobile Internet Toolkit
(MIT) development environment. The main asset of MIT is that it provides server-
side mobile controls (including user interface elements such as list, command, call,
calendar, etc.) with rich device identification mechanisms; developers simply utilize
ASP.NET pages (for no particular target device) which automatically identify the
device that posted a request1 and render the appropriate content.
Summarizing, the main strengths of ASP.NET mobile controls are: no need to
perform browser checks and deliver the appropriate content based on the target device
1 Accurate information about the display capabilities of the target device is essential for the successful
rendering of mobile controls. At a minimum, mobile controls need the following information about a
device: markup language (HTML, WML, cHTML), browser, number of display lines, cookie support,
screen size.
Social Applications of Technological Advances 423
(this makes an application faster to develop and easier to maintain); developers only
need to learn ASP.NET and .NET mobile controls (no need for markup language
authoring skills); easy to use programming model and drag-and-drop application
development with Visual Studio.NET.
In contrast, the main limitations of this technology are: the target devices are limited
to Microsoft products and operating systems (unlike the J2ME platform-independent
applications); when a new version of WML or HTML is released, developers need to
wait until Microsoft announces support for the new version within its .NET mobile
controls.
4. Case Studies
In this section three case studies are presented. The first involves a Flash Lite-based
application executing on mobile phones, the second evaluates Navipocket as an
authoring tool for the development of a cultural multimedia application on a PDA and
the last evaluates J2ME as a development platform for the implementation of a tourist
guide on a mobile phone.
4.1 The mobile phone used as museum guide and news reader
Presented here is a prototype mobile application used to promote museum services via
a mobile phone. As a case study we have chosen the natural history museum of the
Petrified forest situated in Lesvos, Greece. The original concept of this project was to
build a lightweight, robust application to promote the museum including its location,
descriptive content of its collections and a latest news section to mobile devices. The
case study originated via a promotional campaign of the museum; the museum’s
executives seek for distributing multimedia-enabled informative content via their
internet web site targeting mobile devices. Flash Lite was chosen as the development
platform, mainly because the developers were already skilled in working with Flash
MX Professional and therefore could easily switch to Flash Lite to design
applications for mobile devices, thereby enhancing dramatically the production curve.
At this stage, the museum case study does not incorporate any location-based
services; this does not though represent a critical omission since this application
targets mass deployment for promotional use away from the museum and not for use
as a guide system during a museum visit.
Several usability aspects have been taken into account in the design of user interfaces,
e.g. (a) no scroll bars are used since they were found difficult in use for small screen
sizes; (b) menu buttons are selected via navigational phone buttons and not via users
softkeys; (c) the main functions buttons incorporate the same design for all
navigational functions. Figure 1 illustrates several screenshots of the application
developed in Flash Lite.
The application includes a news reader facility, whereby the news section is
periodically updated using HTTP to the news feeder of the museum’s website. The
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size of the application is directly related to the content size. The final application size
is 454 KB when incorporating images and a short video and 256 KB when omitting
the clip gallery and the video.
Figure 1. Screenshots of the museum guide application taken from a mobile phone
emulator.
The prototype’s development phase highlighted several assets of Flash Lite tool, such
as the acceleration of development and deployment speed (especially for developers
familiarized with Flash MX Professional), the advanced content development and UI
design tools and the satisfactory support for every class of mobile devices. On the
other hand, Flash Lite poses a heavyweight run-time environment resource overhead,
it includes restrictive facilities for developing entirely new content and services and
has limited networking support.
4.2 Fables on pocket PC
The “Fables” prototype for the Museum/Library Stratis Eleftheriadis Teriade in
Lesvos, Greece, is the first attempt in Greece of using PDAs to aid the museum visit
[Micha & Economou (2005)]. This project uses PDAs to provide enriched multimedia
interpretative information for the collection of “Fables” by Jean de La Fontaine (see
Figure 2), which have been illustrated by Marc Chagall and are exhibited in part of
the Teriade Museum.
The development process of the “Fables” prototype demonstrated that Navipocket
offers a number of advantages. Navipocket is available free of charge, its runtime
environment requires low storage and memory overhead, it offers rapid multimedia
content and UI creation and it requires effortless familiarization of developers with
the authoring environment.
However, several drawbacks of Navipocket have also been revealed. Navipocket
depends on specific operating systems and devices hardware’s, the tools for the
design of expressive UI it provides are restrictive, the multimedia formats supported
are limited which results to large-sized applications, dynamic content update is not
supported, and it lacks of specialized libraries for implementing extra functionality
(custom solutions for specific customers could be supported by OPHRYS on
demand).
Social Applications of Technological Advances 425
Figure 2. The layout of the “Fables” prototype application
4.3 myMytileneCity: A mobile tourist guide
myMytileneCity [Kenteris et Al. (2006)] is an electronic guide implementation for the
city of Mytilene, Greece. This research prototype first enables (through a dynamic
web site) the creation of mobile tourist applications with rich content that matches
user preferences. The users may then download these customizable applications either
directly to their mobile device or first to a PC and then to a mobile terminal (e.g.
through bluetooth). Thereafter, network coverage is not further required as the
applications execute in standalone mode and may be updated when the user returns
online. Our prototype has been developed on the top of J2ME. Representative screens
of the myMytileneCity web site and mobile application are shown in Figure 3.
The prototype development revealed that J2ME offers advantages like: low
application development cost (practically free of charge); lightweight storage and
memory footprint for both the runtime environment and the application; potential for
developing any type of content and powerful services not restricted by the
functionality of an authoring tool.
On the other hand, several inherent weaknesses of J2ME have also been brought into
the spotlight: although experienced in Java programming, our application’s
development team met difficulties in familiarizing with the main features and
particularities of J2ME platform, which seriously affected their learning curve and
decelerated the application development; several development phases, which are
typically straightforward when using an authoring tool (e.g. UI’s layout design),
required serious programming effort; the inclusion of special features within J2ME
applications (e.g location-awareness) require the usage of specialized (optional) APIs,
which certainly increase the overall applications’ overhead.
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(a) (b)
(c) (d) (e) (f)
Figure 3. (a, b) Screenshots from the myMytileneCity web site (selected user’s
content items and selection of mobile device’s profile when ‘checking out’),
(c, d, e, f) Representative screens of an emulator executing the myMytileneCity guide
mobile application.
5. Authoring Tools and Development Platforms Requirements
It is evident, that the development tools reviewed in Section 3 have different features
and devices target groups. The scope of this section is to present the requirements for
development tools tailored to design and development of multimedia applications for
small devices. These requirements are listed below:
acceleration of application’s development and deployment
reduction of development effort and technical knowledge (e.g. programming
skills) required by designers; familiarity of designers with the tool’s workspace
provision of tools for designers and developers that allow a new level of
expressiveness, efficiency and interactivity for multimedia content creation and
intuitive UI design, personalized according to the user profile (such design could
exceed customer expectations and optimize content delivery)
Social Applications of Technological Advances 427
support for a broad range of mobile devices (ideally, support for PDAs, smart
phones and mobile phones)
restriction on the resource overhead posed by the run-time environment
(supporting libraries, APIs, etc.)
seamless connectivity of applications to services with minimal programming
effort
platform independence of applications from underlying devices hardware and
operating systems
capability for parsing and handling any content type format
potential for developing entirely new content and services that overcome the
restriction set by rigidly defined content templates
capability for dynamic customization and over-the-air update of existing
applications content and functionality
increased deployment base of tools’ runtime environments, i.e. management
software and media players installed by the major device manufacturers
minimization of cost for both the designer tools and the runtime environments
support for location-based services, i.e. availability of resources and services
depending on the end user’s physical location
support for ‘push model’, namely for pushing content to mobile terminals with
minimal user intervention the moment an important event occurs
support for disconnected operation, i.e. ability to run applications in standalone
mode even when the mobile terminal is out of any network’s coverage area
need for large development community base, which may assist the exchange of
development experiences (e.g. through developer forums)
availability of add-on application libraries, which may accelerate the
implementation of custom services.
Table 1 at the end of this paper summarizes the features of the available development
tools (Flash Lite, Navipocket, J2ME and .NET Mobile Platform) within respect to the
above listed set of requirements.
The synopsis of Table 1 proves that the choice of the appropriate development
technology is not a straightforward task, since the four reviewed technologies vary
significantly in terms of their merits and weaknesses. In particular, the selection of a
candidate development technology should depend on user and application needs, such
as:
Table 1. Features of mobile applications authoring tools (Flash Lite, Navipocket) and development platforms
(J2ME and .NET Mobile).
Flash Lite Navipocket J2ME .Net platform for the Mobile Web
Development and
deployment speed Relatively fast Very fast Slow Relatively fast
Technical knowledge
required
Flash developers can instinctively
adapt. Users with no prior
knowledge require a lengthy
training period.
Effortless (2 hours maximum
required to understand the UI
for an experienced web
designer)
Advanced Java programming
skills are required
ASP.NET and .NET mobile controls
programming skills are required, yet,
no markup language authoring skills
are needed
Content development
and UI design tools Very advanced Restrictive Not integrated, requires addi-
tional design automation tools,
e.g. J2ME Polish [J2ME Polish]
Very advanced, through the ASP.NET
mobile controls
Targeted mobile
devices PDAs, smart phones, mobile
phones PDAs PDAs, smart phones, mobile
phones Pocket PCs, PDAs, smart phones
Run-time
environment resource
overhead ~ 6 MB ~ 1 MB
Up to 100 KB for storage
(CLDC/MIDP and kXML), total
memory footprint of
approximately 128 KB
4,4 MB footprint for the .NET
Compact Framework
Applications
connectivity Feasible, requires programming
effort
Not enabled, customized
according to customer
requirements
Feasible (through HTTP),
requires programming effort Feasible (through HTTP), requires
programming effort
Platform
independence Mobile devices with Flash Lite or
Flash Player SDK technology Requires Windows Pocket PC;
executed on PDA platforms2Execution on any device
supporting CLDC/MIDP Targets devices with Microsoft
operating systems
Accessible content
format
Handles proprietary file formats
in addition to either ‘external’ or
integrated multimedia file formats
Handles proprietary file formats
in addition to bitmaps and mpeg
files
Any (text, XML, WML,
cHTML, HTML, XHTML,
serialized objects, etc.), but
requires specialized parsers (e.g.
kXML parser [kXML parser]
for analyzing XML content)
The appropriate content format
(HTML, WML, cHTML) is generated
depending on the target device
(Microsoft should first announce and
incorporate support for specific
markup languages versions within
.NET mobile controls)
2 The release of the latest version of Navipocket Simulator has recently been announced by OPHRYS, planned for July 2006. The new release will
only support a PDA manufactured by OPHRYS.
Potential for
developing entirely
new content and
services
Development restricted by Flash
Lite authoring environment
Development restricted by
Navipocket Creator’s
functionality
Capacity to develop rich content
and new powerful applications,
inherited by Java programming
language
Capacity to develop rich content and
new powerful applications, inherited
by .NET framework
Support for dynamic
application update
Applications may synchronize
with the backend infrastructure to
dynamically update content Not supported Applications may synchronize
with the backend infrastructure
to dynamically update content
Applications may synchronize with
the backend infrastructure to
dynamically update content
Run-time
environment’s
deployment base Most major manufacturers Not supported Very large deployment base
(virtually all modern mobile
devices) Not supported
Cost ~€10 for Flash Player, ~€700 for
Flash Professional and ~€4800 for
streaming support
Free license given by OPHRYS;
free license also for the new
Navipocket release, however
purchasing the OPHRYS PDA
is required
Free Free license for the .NET Compact
Framework, ~€700 for Visual Studio
2005 Professional
Support for location-
based services Not supported Not supported
Yes (precise location
identification though the
optional ‘Location API’ [JSR
179])
No inherent support, approximate
location identification through mobile
operators networks, increased number
of SDKs for developing location-
based services (e.g. Microsoft’s
MapPoint [Microsoft Map Point Web
service])
Support for ‘push
model’ Not supported (possible only
through WAP) Not supported Yes (in MIDP 2.0) Not supported
Support for
disconnected
operation Yes Yes Yes Yes
Developer community
base A starting community Very limited Large community of developers Large community of developers
Developer libraries Not many Only custom libraries for
specific customer needs Large scale of libraries for
developers to choose from Large scale of libraries for developers
to choose from
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• the technology literacy of developers and familiarity with relevant multimedia
based application environments
• the urgency of project completion
• the application requirements regarding network connectivity, dynamic updates,
supported services
• the targeted devices
• the project’s budget.
6. Conclusions
This paper reviews state-of-the-art technologies for developing mobile applications
that enhance the visiting experience in cultural organizations and support tourists
traveling experience. Based on this review it suggests authoring tools requirements
for developing cultural applications on PDAs and mobile phones based on user,
application and designer needs. The requirements gathering process is based on three
case studies, that focused on the use of PDAs and mobile phones for providing
cultural and tourist information. These case studies were based on the use of Flash
Lite and Navipocket authoring tool and J2ME application development platform,
respectively. The prototypes implementation contributed to the evaluation of the main
assets and shortcomings of such development technologies.
In conclusion, in order to satisfy application and designer needs for developing
operational and profitable cultural applications, future releases of authoring tools and
development platforms should be directed in combining existing technologies’
strengths.
7. References
Adobe Flash Lite, last visit: 8/12/2006, http://www.adobe.com/products/flashlite/.
ASP.NET Mobile Controls (2006), last visit: 30/11/2006,
http://www.asp.net/mobile/.
Java 2 Platform Micro Edition (J2ME), last visit: 30/11/2006,
http://java.sun.com/j2me/.
J2ME Polish. Last visit: 15/11/2006, http://www.j2mepolish.org/.
JSR 179: Location API for J2ME, last visited in 10/7/2006:
http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=179.
Kenteris M., Gavalas D., Economou D. (2006) Novel Method for the Development of
Personalized Mobile Tourist Applications, in Proc. CSN’2006: the 5th IASTED
International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks, pp. 208-212.
kXML parser, last visited in 10/9/2006: http://kxmlrpc.objectweb.org/.
Social Applications of Technological Advances 431
Micha K., Economou D. (2005) Using Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and to
enhance the museum visit experience, in Proc. PCI-05: the 10th Panhellenic
Conference on Informatics, LNCS 3746, pp. 188-198.
Microsoft Map Point Web service, last visit: 30/11/2006,
http://msdn.microsoft.com/mappoint/.
Microsoft Windows Mobile (2006), last visit: 30/9/2006
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/.
OPHRYS Navipocket, last visited in 10/7/2006, http://www.ophrys.net/audioguide
fran%E7ais/navipocket.html.
