Authoring tools & development platforms: Requirements for mobile devices-enabled cultural applications

This paper identifies authoring tools requirements for the development of cultural applications tailored for deployment on mobile devices: Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and mobile phones. To address this issue it recognizes and evaluates the development and design facilities provided by state-of-the-art multimedia application development tools for PDAs and mobile phones: Macromedia Flash Lite, Navipocket, Java 2 Micro Edition and Microsoft .Net platform for the Mobile Web. Secondly, it describes the use of these tools for the implementation of three projects that have been developed at the Department of Cultural Technology and Communication, University of the Aegean, in Greece, providing cultural and tourist information. Based on these three case studies the paper extracts a set of PDA and mobile phone-enabled application requirements and concludes with a set of suggestions related to the way authoring tools should be exploited in order to gratify application and designer needs for developing functional, fast & easy to deploy and profitable cultural applications.