Rob Ballou

Creating the SXSW interactive iPhone interface

This is the first SXSW for the iPhone and the first time that I had a mobile device at an event where there was an online resource I wanted to interact with: the schedule. The folks at SXSW creating a useful mobile version of their site, providing much of the same information as on the full site, but I still wanted even more simple to view the list of panels.

Having seen Joe Hewitt’s demo of IUI (iPhone User Interface) and the related Google Code project, I wanted to explore a smooth browsing interface for a large amount of time-based data. So I created one.

The first problem was that the SXSW panel schedule was not encoded with microformats or anything else that I could easily drop into a converter. So I used Python to basically screen scrape the data, thanks to the Python library BeautifulSoup. Once I had the 'soup', I just mashed it into the structure for IUI. This basic interactivity probably took an hour. After releasing this, one person pointed out that I should link to the mobile site for SXSW, which I did (this ended up being essential as the bandwidth was not always the best during the conference).

The initial version didn’t really look at displaying any of the parties. There was Jeremy Keith’s list of parties that worked well on the iPhone so I didn’t feel the need to really do anything except link to his site. But then I realized it would be even more handy if I could interact with those points using the built-in map on the phone: you can zoom in and out, pan around, and get directions. With the new "where am I?" button on the iPhone it became handy as well when you were jumping around town for different parties.

This was a little bit more problematic. Working with Brian Suda, we initially had trouble loading a KML file onto the phone. The problem was that we were using Brian’s GEO microformats to XML XSL script to convert Jeremy’s list on the fly with a link like:

http://maps.google.com/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fsuda.co.uk%2Fprojects%2Fmicroformats%2Fgeo%2Fget-geo.php%3Ftype%3Dkml%26uri%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Faustin.adactio.com

Brian's site returns a valid KML file but this link does not work when you try to access it via the phone (it does work on the main site). The solution was, unfortunately, not as "dynamic" as we would like, but simple: I downloaded the KML file and uploaded it to my box. Google maps was then getting just the path to that KML file and it worked! Brian made some updates to his XSL so we could pull some of the related address information, making the points more useful.

I need to wait another day or so to get a full picture of the traffic for this, but it looks like now that 75% of the traffic to the page was via iPhone. I will update this post when I get a final tally of number of visits. Thanks to everyone that used it, to Brian Suda and the IUI project.

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