‘The Quest’ for iPad: additional content and first hints on navigation
See also: ‘The Quest’ for iPad: why?, ‘The Quest’ for iPad: the team, ‘The Quest’ for iPad: organising content, ‘The Quest’ for iPad: about editing, ‘The Quest’ for iPad: some more editing considerations and organising it
Pictures? Check… Text? Check… That is the essence but it is not enough. There is a small loudspeaker in the iPad, and you can plug in earphones to get sound. So why not add a few sound clips? During the last four years I covered land issues in Cambodia, I also tried to record sound while taking pictures. Not so obvious: great visual situations take place when busy recording sound, and when taking pictures people say important things. And I have got two hands only…
I either take pictures or I record sound. I never do both at the same time. I switch. Each activity, be it taking photographs or recording sound, needs concentration, and I am far from being a sound engineer, so I need a lot of concentration there. I carry a Sennheiser MKE 400 microphone hooked to an Olympus LS10 in a pouch attached to my belt. I just have to leave the camera hanging from my neck, grab the recorder and I am set. Well almost, the Olympus is a bit slow in getting ready to start recording. But still.
So here I am with a few megabytes of sound: street musicians, crowd noises, people screaming during demonstrations or crying during evictions, birds chirping, roosters crowing or frogs croaking, footsteps in the street or in ricefields… The clips are all catalogued in iView, keyworded, dated, captioned before being edited and mixed in Audacity (it’s a free sotware and sophisticated more than enough for what I need or can do).
Combining Audacity and iView for the sound clips...
The idea is to use the sound only during the slideshows on the iPad, but not continuously. They are sort of ‘surprise hints’ to a sound environment for a particular set of pictures. They will pop-up at certain places, with some sets of pictures, fade into silence and pop-up again somewhere else. And if you don’t like or want them: switch’em off…
There is more to add to the iApp… Robert and I are not the only ones having things to say about land issues in Cambodia. Since the Khmer Rouge were pushed back in their strongholds along the Thai border in 1979 Cambodia has seen an incredible influx of NGO’s. Most were working in the medical field or in the relief of poverty. But after the signing of the peace accords in 1991 and with the arrival of the U.N. mission in Cambodia, quite a few NGO’s working in the Human Rights area were created. Fortunately some of them are extremely active, forming a vital backbone to the civil society. They are, more than the local press, the real watchdogs of Cambodia.
Many of the land grabbing situations pictured in ‘The Quest’ were brought to the attention of the press (and to me) through the network of collaborators working with LICADHO (Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights) or with ADHOC (Cambodian Human Rights and Development Organisation). They systematically are the ones who break the news. So it was only fair to give access to a few of the reports they, and other Human Rights organisations like ‘Human Rights Watch’, ‘Amnesty International’, wrote about land issues in ‘The Quest’ for iPad. The iApp will include a page with links to about 20 downloadable reports related to land issues.
What more? Biographies of the three people behind the iApp of course: Robert Starkweather, Robert Carmichael and myself. A help page: navigation will be kept as simple as possible. But what is simple for us might not be simple for others. A few words and drawings might help…
The bag is now full. All the content is there. It is a matter of giving access to it with the tools specific to an iPad. The organisation of the main feature of the iApp is already set: the sequencing of the 20 different chapters or stories, and the sequencing of the pictures within the stories.
The philosophy for the navigation is going to be: simplicity, consistency and no dead-ends…
Next post: ‘The Quest’ for iPad: navigation and interface