nuCloud has pushed their summer release for their Interactive Campus Map (ICM) platform to all customers. Instead of a static list of all the features, we realize that people commonly need to see the feature to understand what we are talking about, so we went ahead and put together some slides.
Enhanced Mobile
2.3 builds upon our mobile features as many customers have requested to include mobile image galleries, support for YouTube and Vimeo videos, and other minor improvements to the mobile users’ experience. Mobile galleries were built upon the Photo Swipe framework. Mobile video support works by linking directly to the mobile versions of a video on YouTube or Vimeo. The one element we left out of this release was full support for audio in mobile. We are working on a smaller 2.3.1 release that will include mobile audio support leveraging jPlayer.
Deep-Linking
The deep-linking allows customers to link directly to specific stops or layers on the map in both the regular and mobile versions of the map. This is enabled through URL parameters that can be included on the end of the URL. Based on customer feedback it sounds like this will be used in many ways. These ideas include allowing you to embed different versions of the map depending on which section of your website it will be displayed. For example, you can embed an interactive map of just the residence halls on the resident life section of the website. Also, if you have a page that is discussing a specific location you can link directly to your interactive map, and it will show that specific location upon loading the page. Finally, one specific feature that really excites me is combining the ability to deep link to a stop on a mobile device with QR codes, offering a fun and engaging use for a QR code. By placing a code outside of a location on campus a visitor can scan the code and go directly to the interactive map stop that corresponds with their physical location.
We have also provided support in the backend to allow you to define specific layers to be turned on and off as part of your default configuration.
Everything Else
There are also a handful of UI improvements and features that have been added that you can see in the slides. People ask us all the time what we do related to geolocation, and we did take our first small step down that path by allowing users to input the address and/or latitude/longitude into a stop marker so that we can provide a link to that location using Google Maps. This feature is especially cool in mobile because it asks you if you would like to open the link directly in Google Maps if you have that app installed. From there you are one click away from getting directions to the location.
We are really excited to push all of these new features out to our customers. As always there is no additional charge to our customers to take advantage of these new features. We hope that you have as much fun coming up with creative ways to take advantage of these features as we do coming up with how to build them.