Genera for Swift 
(or should that be Swift For Genera?)

Read Me: Version 0.1
Create Date: August 8th, 2016
Author: Simon Sherrin - Senior Developer, Museum Victoria


Welcome.

This is the latest version of Museum Victoria's Genera platform for iOS. The current version is written in Swift, and targets iOS 8 and above.

This project supersedes the genera-ios project on Github. 

Design elements in this project - icons and layout -  include the work by Simon O'Shea, David Bleja, Simone Downey and Mischa Brus




//What's Changed:



//Data Changes
- Data format is now JSON 
The format of the datafile has been changed from Apple's plist format to JSON, and the expected filename is now "data.json". We did this for format consistency across operating systems.

- New data sections
There are two new sections in the datafile:
1. supergroupList
2. galleryImages

SupergroupList is an array of supergroup objects (see below). GalleryImages is an array of image objects (see changes to image object below).

Supergroups have been extracted to a separate section to remove the duplication in the group entries. 

The latest MV field Guide - for Gippsland lakes - included an separate image gallery. Although not part of the base Genera spec, the code has been left in for this build. If there are no images in the galleryImages list, the gallery function is hidden in the app.


- Supergroup object
Supergroups have three fields 
"superGroupID": Identifier for the supergroup
"label" : Name of the supergroup (e.g. Vertebrates, or Humanities)
"order": Position of the supergroup in the supergroup list (inferred if blank)


- Group object - new field
"superGroupID" - the ID of the supergroup that the group belongs to.


- Image object - extra fields
Images now have two extra fields:
1. "alternateText" - an accessible description of the image
2. "licenseType" - license information for the image.
Licence type is not currently expressed in the interface.

- Audio object - extra fields
Audio entries now have two extra fields:
1. "alternateText" - an accessible description of the audio (e.g. Transcript)
2. "licenseType" - license information for the audio file.
The Alternate Text and LicenseType are currently not expressed in the interface.

- The array of "speci" objects is now titled "data" instead of "objectData"

- In Speci object the array of audio objects is now called "audio" instead of "audioFiles"


//Setup Changes
- File Locations
Content - images, audio files, html templates no longer need to be "added" to the project within XCode. When you add files to the following directories, they are automatically included in the project.

Images -> genera-swift/Images
Audio Files -> genera-swift/Audio
HTML Templates -> genera-swift/Templates

Any subdirectories you create under the Templates directory - e.g. for CSS, javascript and CSS Assets - will be automatically included in the project. The app expects the iPad About page to be "about-ipad.html" and the iPhone About page to be "about-iphone.html"

Basic Introduction
A basic introduction to the concepts behind the Genera project can be found in this paper, presented at the Museums and The Web conference in 2012:  https://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2012/papers/creating_a_mobile_app_ecosystem_the_genera_pro.html