Wednesday, March 07, 2012

A Cross Platform Guide to Mumbai


The Guardian Mumbai City Guide is the latest of the The Guardian's Google Maps based guides to the world's favourite cities. This time however they are trying something new.

Like the paper's previous city guides the map shows the best places to stay, eat and visit and includes videos and sound recordings taken in the city.

However with this map The Guardian has created an application that is "responsive to the platform on which it is viewed ... if you view the guide on a desktop or laptop, it looks one way, if you view it on a tablet, it looks another way, and if you view it on mobile, it looks different again. Crucially the source behind what you are viewing is exactly the same on all of them, it's just adapting accordingly".

One of the beauties of version 3 of the Google Maps API is that it it works with desktop computers, smartphones and tablets. Even Street View in the Google Maps API works on these very different platforms.

The cross-platform functionality of the API presumably helped The Guardian in creating a responsive application. The menu system (the map sidebar) is where The Guardian have worked their own magic. Check out the application on different platforms to see how the map menu adjusts to suit the platform on which it is viewed.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

the filters don't work at all for me