Hello! After a brief respite to organize a phenomenal art show and enjoy the changing seasons, we are back in action for the latest work from the Rural Design Collective! We learned from our demos that we gave at our Launch Party and have been ironing out a few bugs based on feedback.

After much deliberation, we have decided to package our previous summer work into a new tool called the “Collection Interface Generator” (genCollectionInterface), a python application developed by Scotty Auble. We think it is exciting in that it works on the XO plus it is accessible to any person interested in creating a localized collection of public domain books. For a sneak peek, you can check out the ongoing work we are doing in the UI Lab. The pages were generated using the program which made it easy to create of custom collection based on our UI work. The metadata for the tooltips came from a .csv metadata file that Steven McKenzie created using Internet Archive advanced search, and the covers were downloaded using the Open Library API. It is a work in progress – we will be tweaking the navigation and other UI details – but we think it is really starting to come together. Our release in October will be accompanied by documentation to explain the Collection Interface Generator, as well as additional information behind our overall concept and method which has developed over time during the 2009 Summer Mentoring Program.

Levi’s work on the icon collection is outstanding – he has developed a versatile set of pictographs that work in a broad range of visual settings. This is the hallmark of a strong icon set, and a great basis of images to release into the public domain. This will be documented along with our code.

The primary usability issue that we are encountering is how to load the DjVu books into the XO Journal as fluidly as possible. There is an interstitial step when the DjVu file is loaded onto the XO and transferred to the Journal that needs to be populated with metadata in order not to disrupt the user experience (you can see this screen here from the GIAB activity). One solution we are exploring is using the embeddable bookreader from the Internet Archive. This version of the bookreader works well on the XO and enables us to emphasize collections which is central to our theme – the only drawback is that it uses JPEG2 files which was not the format we agreed upon for the SoaS solution. We can provide links to the books at the Archive as an alternative format, however, for users with an Internet connection. We will be solving that problem in the weeks ahead – Stay tuned!

Greetings! It is Saturday, and I finally have time to write the blog post for Wednesday (so much for Internet Time . It is becoming somewhat of an RDC tradition to tweak the details and let the ideas percolate a bit before posting to the web, which suits me fine. The best work takes time to develop.

Levi is making great progress with the icons. He has about a third of them completed, and I asked permission to post a few of them today to show the process. To give the icons uniformity, he is starting with a basic visual element – the circle – and building out from there. We are also using the Sugar icon set as a basic palette for look and feel (and eventually, color). As you can see, the set is beginning to work together on its own, and it looks spectacular on the XO.

Steven has gathered the metadata for the UI and made it available in a .CSV format. After brainstorming a bit, we decided to explore building out the web UI programmatically before we solve the puzzle of how to extract the metadata from the .CSV file into the Journal from the stick. We want to ensure that this collection will be accessible in other applications, such as GIAB (now in its 3rd revision) which solves the metadata issue, but does not work with local collections. We are always thinking about how to keep the architecture and data open so other people can use it and we can continue to improve it in the future.

We also conducted a few usability tests on the XO, and made some adjustments to our layout. The most notable change is that we decided to use a liquid layout as opposed to a fixed layout. Simply put, liquid layouts allow the user to have control over a very important personal aspect of their view: the amount of information that they see on-screen. Using our own layout as a basic example, if a user prefers to see more than five books in a row, all they have to do is resize the browser window (go ahead, try it! – you can see a similar design practice in the search result view of Open Library). This is important on both the web and the XO. On the XO, using a liquid layout means that the display refreshes automatically when a user physically flips the monitor from a horizontal to a vertical orientation. We like smart, elegant UI at the Rural Design Collective.

We have also tweaked our collection considerably in terms of categories, which is reflected here. We are still contemplating what the best approach is in regards to collection size and content in general – but that is a design solution for another day. In the meantime, enjoy your weekend!

The big news this week – we are getting set up for our Second Annual Launch Party (which is essentially a fun way for us to demo all of the cool work we have been doing over the summer)! We will be demonstrating our work with digital books, plus creating a few analog specimens in the process. The event will take place at our headquarters on 246 Sixth Street in Port Orford, OR, over Labor Day Weekend. If you are in the area, please drop by. It will be fun!

The primary agenda item for this #rdc2009 Hacker Wednesday was syncing up on “The Sugar Solution.” As we reported last week, we were thinking that modifying the GIAB activity might be the best route to go – but as we delved deeper into the problem, we discovered that offering a straight-forward HTML/CSS solution in the XO default browser from the SoaS stick itself solved all manner of technical problems. For one thing, it does not overload the Journal with the entire index of the bundle. It also enables us to repurpose the design solutions that we are already addressing in our web user interface. Recycling is good, even on the web! We still think that the idea of building this into Sugar is a “Very Good Idea (TM)” and should be pursued … and we plan to look at it in the future.

We are also taking a look at our overall collection. We want to maximize the distribution of material throughout categories that may be of interest to kids. We currently have categories that have 800+ items that may (or may not) hold a child’s interest. We would prefer to have more categories available in this sample collection. We are not librarians (as we mentioned going into this), so we are going to invite some of our area experts to participate in possibly helping us polish the basic material. We also have had a very generous offer of over 600+ new digital books for our target collection that are not available in the IACL. We are working out the details, so more news on that as it develops. We will need to fold those books into our existing categories, and perhaps even add a few more to our existing collection. Everything will be available via the web, either through us or through the original source, but the stick has limitations. Our current limitations are 8G.

Ideally, we want to automate the process of creating customized bundles – but that is another challenge to be met on another day!

We had an incredibly productive week at RDC headquarters this week, working remotely and on-site. James Simmons, author of the View Slides 8 and Get Internet Archive Books 2 (GIAB) Activities for Sugar contributed his considerable knowledge and expertise in this area. Via email, we brainstormed the best approach for making these books accessible – what we are trying to do is unique, in that we are trying to provide a completely offline solution so that children without an Internet connection can enjoy these books. The GIAB program that Jim has written is the online equivalent of what we are trying to do. Ideally, we would like to author our own Activity, but it just makes sense to build on a good code base and tap into a knowledgeable resource. That is how the Internet and open source works.

We have learned that it is not feasible to create a content bundle with too many items because it simply overloads the memory of the XO when it attempts to load all of the contents of the index into the Journal. As a matter of fact, 5 – 20 MB is the recommended bundle size, which is ridiculous when you are dealing with the DjVu or PDF format (Epub, of course, is another kettle of fish – but we will get to that later). There could only be 1-2 books per bundle which (needless to say) would make browsing the collection quite difficult. So, we are looking into methods to either extract a single book from a bundle or store them on the stick as individual files using GIAB as the interface to navigate the collection. Jim even suggested that what we are creating aren’t technically bundles and should perhaps have a different name altogether – such as “Children’s Library Archive”. Jim created a branch for us on github and we will be taking a close look at his code to see what is possible.

We are also making great progress on the web user interface and that will begin to come together in the next week or so. Levi has been developing mockups for browsing the collections, and creating an icon set reflecting the different categories. We want to make it as easy as possible for a user to view the book online or download and install the book onto their XO. We are also looking at AJAX libraries and the best tool to collect the metadata – Open Library API versus Internet Archive Advanced Search.

We view all of this as a work in progress – and have created plenty of work to challenge us in mentoring programs to come!