CAM iPhone App

Challenge:

Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis wanted an app that would be easy to update and manage while offering customized views based on the users location. The content needed to be pulled from the existing content management system, repurposing as much existing content as possible. It is currently available for the iPhone, but the long term goal is to have it available for Android users as well.

Solution:

Since the app will need to work for iPhone and Android users, I decided to use HTML/CSS and PhoneGap. After researching a number of javascript frameworks, I settled on Backbone with Zepto while utilizing iScroll to handle the fixed navigation on top of the scrollable content window. We anticipated submitting the app before iOS5 and its CSS “fixed positioning” fix was released. 

The home page features location based content. The content can be targeted to users within a mile of the museum, within 100 miles, and greater than 100 miles.

The CAM content management system is the TOKY in-house CMS, Eero and much of the content on the app is driven from the content on their website so there isn’t any content redundancy. Events and Exhibitions are pulled in without any extra effort. App only content is also managed in the CMS. The app retrieves JSON from the CMS. This worked perfectly with Backbone and allowed the app to be developed quickly with the required flexibility for future growth.

Additional Credit

Jay David, Designer