Aug 30, 2012

IGMH mobile/web app open for testing/usage

This story, like any other story worth telling, begins with a girl - a sick one. This girl particular was sufficiently infuriated by the Male' healthcare system's "ineptitude" at information distribution and proliferation to rant about it on Facebook. Naturally, this spawned a heated and interesting debate.

Long story short, we found out that IGMH does, in fact, publish doctors duties and room queue data. Unfortunately, the presentation of this information left something to be desired. You can find it on an archaic asp.net setup somewhere on their website. Ugly doesn't even begin to describe these pages, not to mention the messy markup, and bulky presentation.

The project initially began as an endeavor to liberate the data on these websites. To this end, @NashRafeeg (http://nashath.net) and I (@kudanai) put together a nice little system in python, using BeautifulSoup and Mechanize to scrape the relevant data. We also threw in some interesting caching procedures, as it seemed extremely precarious to fetch on a per-request basis. All this, was then pushed over a JSON API.

**note: please contact us first if you want to use the API

The next order of business, naturally, was to implement a presentation layer. Which you can see in action below.

To to try it out for yourselves, visit: http://igmh.dot.my




Some Known Issues:
The display code is built on jQTouch, an thus inherits its flaws and shortcomings. For example, we rely on -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch to handle the inertial scrolling. This will fail on most android devices and so on. 

also, yes, we know about the "back" button issue.

The page currently doesn't have a timed/manual refresh mechanism (which would ideally be present in the queue data view). You have to go back to home, and then back to the view in order to reload the data.

read about @NashRafeeg's writeup here http://nashath.net/2012/08/igmh-mobileweb-app-open-for-testingusage/