Catalogue Tech

If you don't want to create the iPhone catalogue yourself but rather delegate it to us, don't hesitate to contact us.

An assisting web service is in the make but isn't final yet.

To provide an eletronic catalogue for the Filmfest App, three things have to be done:

Create the the Download

The Filmfest App wants one monolithic xml plist of a certain structure. As those plists cannot be validated in meaningful ways, I encourage you to

prepare a plain xml file that's valid against this xsd schema,

validate e.g. using xmllint:

xmllint --valid --schema filmfest.flatv1.xsd mycatalogue.xml

transform to a plist using this xslt trafo, e.g. using xsltproc:

xsltproc flat2plist.xslt mycatalogue.xml > mycatalogue.plist

As your visitors might access this via low bandwidth connections think about gzip compressing the plist:
```
gzip --best < mycatalogue.plist > mycatalogue.plistz
```
preparing optimised movie stills is optional but recommended:
- 150×100 pixels of size,
- png image format (jpeg does too, but then the iPhone has to think a bit harder),
- 16 bits per pixel (6 per color component) are sufficient.
If you don't, the iPhone crops the movie stills to the largest fitting region with aspect ratio 3×2 and scales to 150×100 pixels.

Place the download badge

Put the "Download to your iPhone" badge on your festival's website.

Link to the Catalogue

The Filmfest App registers itself as responsible handler for certain URLs. So every other iPhone App, most importantly Mobile Safari, delegates such links to it.

This requires the App being installed on the iPhone prior downloading the catalogue. You can either tell your visitors to do so and refer to the filmfestapp.com homepage or even better directly to the Filmfest App in the App Store. Do not use Apple's "App Store" badge if you didn't sign the according license agreement.

The URL prefix to use is filmfest: — so the complete linked download badge may look somewhat like

<a href="filmfest:http://www.myserver.com/mycatalogue.plistz"><img src="download.png" alt="Download to your iPhone" /></a>

P.S.: There's a trick to get the App and download with just one touch.