iPhone App for the UF Digital Collections

The iPhone App for the UF Digital Collections is now live and can be downloaded from iTunes here. The App, codenamed SobekPH for the Crocodile god Sobek (even crocodiles are Gators in Gainesville) and PH for iPhone, makes it easy to browse and search a number of the collections within the UF Digital Collections.
SobekPH is a great iPhone App on it’s own, and it’s because it showcases the power and excellent design of the UF Digital Collections. I often try to explain to people how and why UFDC’s infrastructure is so excellent, why that’s so important, and what it then makes possible. Normally, these are discussions where I focus on an elegantly designed backbone and others participate by focusing on the visual interface. Those are useful, but at a bit of cross-purposes. While interfaces rely on the underlying infrastructure, there’s not a great way to show the difference between an excellent design and one that just works when looking only at the interface. SobekPH is another interface, but it’s an interface on a new platform and one that was easy to design and implement because of the power of UFDC’s underlying infrastructure.  Thus, SobekPH is a new interface that shows the importance of the underlying infrastructure explicit.



[Full disclosure: The UF Digital Collections have an amazingly elegant and robust architecture thanks to the incredible programming work done by Mark Sullivan. My husband, James (he goes by Pete) Taylor wanted to learn to develop iPhone applications and we thought the UF Digital Collections would be the perfect first app. Pete got started on the app one Saturday and soon had a working version. I emailed Mark with the details and Mark made a couple of minor tweaks before the weekend was over. Then, Pete spent time optimizing the iPhone code and I made button images for the app and now it’s released and available.]