iSpot & EML project blog

Richard G. has been working on new functionality to remove the Flash image upload facility and replace it with a standard HTML form field for uploading a file/image. The reason that we decided to make this change is that although the Flash upload facility is useful by allowing users to upload multiple images in one batch, it is a barrier to usability as not everybody has Flash enabled. The largest usability barrier is for users of browsers on mobile devices many of which do not have the ability to use Flash. Implementing this change to use a standard HTML form will now allow users of mobile (and ‘standard’  computers) without the ability to use Flash to upload images and observations to iSpot. Each time an image is uploaded a new file/image upload form field is presented to the user to enable them to upload another image.

The changes Richard has been making have been quite involved and Richard has also been looking at the EXIF data that accompanies the uploaded images. This will be used to help pre-populate the ‘Add an Observation’ form where possible and also to make use of GPS data if it accompanies an uploaded image.

This work is almost complete now and is going through some final testing and tweaking.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 11th, 2010 at 5:56 pm and is filed under Progress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.