Tuesday, April 03, 2007

eXe for Mobile Content


One of the areas we are exploring is making educational resources available in a variety of formats, including mobile content delivery. In the 0.23 release of eXe, we've added a prototype of an export function that writes the Notes format used by the Apple iPod. There are several limitations imposed by this format, including being restricted to unstyled text, a strict page size limit, and a design that makes it difficult to include images/audio. However even with these severe limitations, certain types of read only resources are still usable and are now very portable.

The File... Export... iPod Notes menu item prompts for a folder to be used for the export. Within that folder, it creates a new folder with the current eXe package name that contains the table of contents and all of the pages. Simply copy that new folder to the Notes directory of an iPod to make the resource available on the go.

3 comments:

Inge (Ignatia) de Waard said...

This is a feature I would love to explore, because it opens possibilities for low resource settings as well.

Are you planning on developing those kind of notes for windows mobile as well?

Anonymous said...

Is there a more generic free/open standards based approach that would work with a range of phones?

It would be cool to this approach catch on:

http://www.openmoko.org/

Unknown said...

We are increasingly using eXe as one of our online content development tools and have found it very customisable via CSS. We've explored the iPod output and wondering are there any plans for iPhone output, or an app that displays eXe output?