201311mobile

The number of users of geonetwork on a mobile device (phone/tablet) increases daily. To increase the usability of geonetwork on mobile devices, two approaches (or both) can be taken:

• Either make the standard interface more 'responsive'. Which means some elements are hidden or presented smaller if a mobile device is detected.
• Create an interface solely targetting mobile devices and redirect to that interface if a mobile device is detected.

Work is being done on new User Interface screens, these screens use the new Angular JS/Bootstrap approach to correctly degrade on mobile devices. Note that development should include a lot of interface testing on a variety of devices.

A prototype has been developed of a geonetwork-mobile-app. It can be used as a website, but can also be compiled into an App for Android/Iphone stores. It provides a very basic workflow: search - find - display - map. The app currently uses XML services like CSW. It will probably be better if we develop special geoNetwork services for mobile platforms, using mobile-oriented formats like JSON.

Prototype is here: http://gnmobile.genuchten.net