Monday, March 14, 2011

Category sidebar - there is no sense without priority

Thanks for many of you that been applying the category sidebar script I wrote a long time ago for v2. Sure It works on desktop but what happens if all the entries don't fit in the limited viewport of a mobile browser?

Web has changed since. Now we have to make pages that can be used by mobile browsers too. The screen size can be equal or smaller to the first Mac.

The idea of 'gategory' is still living strong. I have extended makeMarker so that each marker has a 'cat' property. If you click one category visible, all those markers and their sidebar entries do not simply fit in view in iPhone. Also remember that mobile 'touch' devices do not support scrollbars at all. They simply cut the material! (People are shouting about Flash, hehe!)

We have to bring one more parameter to a marker - that is priority. In my current design, the default priority is the distance from map center.

The smallest mobile screen can display a sidebar with a few (<10) entries. You have to decide, which of those 1000 they are.

Ideas?