The recent announcement by Apple has gotten me thinking.... I am wondering about the viability of running IMR on an I-Pad as InterMapper/Touch (assuming support).
There is some interest here in being able to use IMR as a monitoring tool in remote machine rooms to provide negative (or positive) feedback to staff doing maintenance (reconfigurations) of various sorts. The idea is to have a resident display that would alert staff in near-time of the (negative/unforeseen???) consequences of their actions. The requirements seem to be: 1) dedicated device -- to keep it from being used for other purposes ensuring IMR is topmost/foremost/active 2) continuously on display -- giving status at a glance 3) portable device -- facilitating use in alternate locations in an area to ensure easy visibility when working behind a rack or on the other side of the room. 4) Keyboard not needed and probably bothersome. 5) Touch screen probably (open to discussion/question) better for some/many/most??? types of navigation. 6) Perhaps -- a more user friendly, intuitive, drill-down interface. Alternatives: 1) Personal laptop -- These same folks often have IMR on laptops but don't carry them around for various reasons including having other applications active, portability, form factor, power provisioning. 2) Dedicated laptop -- form factor limits use, generally limited to table top situations -- not well suited to wall mounting, perhaps navigation too cumbersome (open question). 3) Dedicated workstation -- might permit multiple screens but consumes more space and not really portable within a room. There are a variety of cross over points here and I am trying to understand what they are and where they might occur. I am trying to avoid the allure of the "glitzy" and focus on utility. Some considerations: 1) The touch screen navigation would likely focus navigation toward drill-down and make it more intuitive and ad-hoc. There may be some navigational anomalies between a touch screen approach and the traditional mouse approach. Would it be possible to deterministically map (unambiguously translate) between the two forms of navigation and in a way that would minimize frustration when moving between the two schemes and make automatic translation between the two environments possible? 2) Initially map editing would probably not be a feature on the "touch" version. 3) One consideration is that a cursor has a fairly fine selection granularity (although often not fine enough in a crowded map to grab a desired link without several tries) fingers require large areas which tend to be implemented as buttons. This would make the "hover interface line, right click, select status" sequence problematic because fingers do not have degree of granularity. One approach would be to select the interface label rather than interface line, but this runs afoul of the different semantics between hover interface line, select, status and the hover interface label, select status sequence (which by the way I find very confusing). 4) Will drill-down chains become too long (too cumbersome) and if so how might one make them easier(shorter???). 5) This probably means a different kind of InterMapper but most likely it must be closely related to the classic version as maintaining two platforms is out of the question. If one is stuck with editing only the classic version will/can that yield an acceptable "touch" version/experience as a derivative? Much of this revolves around the notion of how would "classic" and "touch" relate or even impact the design of the other? I don't foresee giving up my laptop IMR/classic for traditional use, but I am intrigued about the possibility of touch based drill-down navigation device for use as a "field monitor". Thoughts? For your brain storming pleasure.... -Dave Cooley Colby College
