Dalkey

You may have noticed that the Streets Of Dublin has changed but don't worry, the information that was originally available is still available but at a different location all you need do is select the lefthand tab at the top of the page ... "Streets Of Dublin (Web)"

The Streets Of Dublin began as a hobby but now our activities attract so much attention that we are having problems with some of our hosting service providers and we have ceased to use some of them because their definition of "unlimited" is very limited. Some of the issues do not have an easy solution so we have had to reorganise the Streets Of Dublin and we have had no option but to self-host many elements of the service. The project is still a hobby but now it is an expensive hobby.

We have already made many major changes. The most obvious being a switch to Wordpress from a more conventional website produced using Sandvox and Rapidweaver. As we like both applications We will continue to produce some of the more static sections using Sandvox and Rapidweaver.

Using Wordpress will allow greater flexibility and as a result we will be in a position to offer services tailored specifically for mobile devices . The mobile device options will be available soon.

We purchased an iPad as soon as it became available and we are more than impressed and we now believe that the iPad is going to become very important and that if the Streets Of Dublin is to survive we need to tailor our service so that it works well with Apple mobile devices. However, there is one major problem in that the Adobe Flash Player is not available on mobile devices manufactured by Apple — including the iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad. The flash issue has major implications for us so we examined a number of options but we eventually decided to employ Slideshowpro Mobile as our preferred solution.

SlideShowPro Mobile is an entirely new media player built using HTML5 that doesn’t require the Flash Player plugin and can serve as a fallback for users accessing our web site using these devices. But it’s not just any fallback — it’s specially designed for touch interfaces and smaller screen sizes. So it looks nothing like the SlideShowPro player and more like a native application that’s intuitive, easy to use, and just feels right.

The best part though is that because SlideShowPro Director publishes the mobile content, we will be able to provide the mobile alternative by simply updating the Flash Player embed code in our HTML documents. And just like when using the SlideShowPro player, because Director is behind the scenes, all our photos will be published for the target dimensions of these devices — which gives our visitors top quality, first generation images. The mobile player will automatically load whatever content is assigned to the Flash version, so the same content will be accessible to any browser accessing the Streets Of Dublin.

At the time of writing (August 2010) SlideshowPro Mobile is a beta product.