Twelfth Week

Hey, sexy lady!

Prof. Colin will dance Oppa Gangnam Style on Monday, the last lecture! So, remember to bring your cameras tomorrow :D

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The week has been alright, but we haven't made much progress. Yujing animated the splash screen and I didn't do much. :S (I did the settings page, but we need to change it when the graphics are out.) Also, corrected a few bugs on animation stopping when going to home screen.

For this weekend, I ended up reading blood type comics, thanks to Jay who posted the 9gag comic on studying on Facebook. There's also a cute youtube video on this. Haha, if you haven't guessed, I am the B blood type, i.e. the one that doesn't like to study >.<

I found English translations here. I really like this particular comic because it happened to me before. xD (We were supposed to bring items (which represent ourselves) to class, and I really just forgot about it. >.< No wonder some teachers don't like me.) If you can read Chinese, you can also look at the comics here. 

(Just a word of caution though; don't judge people entirely by their blood types. )

It's also end-of-term feedback these few weeks. I'm worried because I don't think I did a good job at the start, but towards the end, when I wasn't so busy with CS3216, it got better. Hopefully I don't do too badly on the ratings. :S Also, hopefully they give comments for me to improve. ^^ In any case, if the feedback is terrible, then at least I know I suck as a tutor. xD

Final Project Presentation

I think it's a bit strange to see a Final Project Presentation when we are not really done with our projects (MVP yes, production quality definitely no), but I guess there's no other slot to put it. Also, I'm glad we had the opportunity to see how the other people in 3216 are doing today. Our presentation went pretty well - I think we're the only group who was well within the time limit, but I think it's because our video was really well-done (three cheers to Kai for spending so much time on it!), so we didn't need a lot of slides to elaborate on our application and its features. The font size was a bit small though, I must admit. >.<

Okie, going through all the app presentations one by one!

Classroom Quest

I'm so used to this being JFDI that "Classroom Quest" sounds so foreign to me. Most of the pages they demo-ed looked okay, but I think it can be a little bit more attractive. I think students are easily awed though, or at least, I think I would be if I had to use such a website for my classes, so in a way, they don't have to make it too cool. Usability is a must, but if it was me in my secondary school days, as long as it works better than IVLE, I'm fine with it. The thing that would concern me most however, is reliability. Mainly because students are actually quite kiasu about their grades. 

Intraix iOS App

To be honest, I didn't really understand the whole Intraix thing prior to the presentation, but when they demo-ed it, it was pretty cool. I like the animated statistics + scrolling (good to steal, so I assume that's what Jon Lew was talking about when he said that we should work together.) The rotatable menu is also quite cool. I also like the colour scheme. Throughout the presentation though, I had this one thought at the back of my head and it was, "Who is the speaker? Has he always been in CS3216?" I guess it's partially my fault for not interacting with more people. >.<

Clickee

Arduino! I was actually expecting the Arduino to fail, not because of the group, but because all the Arduino presentations I have seen have always ended up in... moderate success only. So I have this opinion that hardware is well, unpredictable. But they succeeded in showing us that it works. However, I'm still a bit confused by how they're linking the website with the Arduino controls. Umm, how many Arduinos does it take to light up one lightbulb anyway? (Genuine question here! I want to know whether it's cost-feasible to implement it.)

iMeet U 

The first presentation of the entire session, which must have made it more nerve-wracking. There were quite a few technical errors, but it must have been an awfully lot of work for them to make two separate apps. At this moment in time though, I really do hope that they concentrate on just one, because one good application is better than two buggy applications.

Splinkit 

Besides our group's application, this group's application is another app that seems to have changed/ deviated a lot from its original idea. The UI does look not bad, but I think getting users to use it would be a challenge. I don't really see the difference between this and Facebook events/Eventbrite. It does look nice though. Also, is this the group with the time formatting that is missing a '0' at the back?

CrossView 

The interface of CrossView kind of reminds me of Instagram's interface. I think this group needs to work a little more on getting users to use the programme, especially since in a way, they're being compared to Hush! due to the similarities that they have. I don't think I'll use this app, but that's mainly because I don't share pictures on social networks. 

Hush! 

Hush! is more developed and I think the group did a really good job on tackling the question of "how we improved Hush!" Since Hush! (and CrossView) are applications that are already done, I think they have to do more work to convince people that they are not slacking. (In a way, my group came up with something totally new, so people are more impressed by the changes - It's like comparing 0 and 1 for ours, and 1 and 2 for theirs. The first is a infinite amount of change, while the latter is a 100% improvement, although the increment of 1 is still the same). Hush!'s interface hasn't really changed as much (but I'm neither a UI-person or very observant so...) but they do have a list of features that they have added, which I had hoped that they could have demo-ed more. (emoji!) 

With regards to the use cases, I think they should come up with more concrete use cases. I think they don't want to limit their use cases, but because people don't know what to use it for, it might be good to suggest a few possible use cases so that people can relate to it and use it for those purposes. I think there's a slight distinction between having a set of use cases and limiting the use of the websites to those use cases only. And coming up with those concrete use cases makes the audience feel like y'know, that they have done their homework, especially during poster session. (I.e. don't just use the "backmouthing your own organisation" use case.)

Between Two Trees

I like the use of green on the mobile application. The feel of the application is quite okay, but I was a bit confused because Pei Yi mentions the children sometimes when she actually means the parents. (Or at least that's what I felt.) Because she mentioned the word 'children' more than 'parents', I felt like the application was for children to play with, even though I know it isn't. Did anyone get the same confused feeling, or was it just me? 

One UI thingy that I found weird was on the Admin interface, where to add a user, you add the picture first. Logically, we always type the person's name first. Adding the picture usually comes second, so it felt strange to me. But... if it's a client requirement, then yeah. The children are also listed as users, which felt a bit strange since the children don't use the application at all, but it must have been a hassle to type "XXX's parent" instead. 

Some more thoughts on Mini Monocle

Haha, after going through the presentation, I wasn't really thinking any more. Also, I couldn't decide whether Jon Lew's question of "What else do you guys have for the next 2 weeks?" as being sarcastic or not (sarcastic being "you guys have so much more to do", non-sarcastic being genuinely asking what else do we have to do), so I wasn't sure how to answer. But yes, we still have a big component to finish, which is the retain user bit. Sound and animation yes. We also have a couple of bugs to fix (the monocle stops spinning if you go to the home screen, and then back to the application. >.< Cheap way of doing it is to well... just go back to the normal title screen, but prompt them on whether they want to continue their game xD but I'll see whether I can continue it's animation...) 

Also, as a side-note, doing CS2103 has its perks. I think I learnt a lot about software engineering while being a tutor. Today (or yesterday), I learnt about the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition. (There's a better description here.) It does tell us that to even become a novice, we must be familiar with the rules, so that's why I think in CS2103, through CE1 and CE2, we tried to enforce the coding standards. Only in the Final Project, then did we give more autonomy to the students to provide them a chance to hit the "Competent" and "Proficiency" level. I also think there is no such thing as "inborn intuition", but rather because people can apply what they know, they immediately see the solutions to the problem. (To apply what you know though, you need to know a lot of stuff.) So in any case, yes, I shall try and follow this method more with respect to acquiring skills. I think in a way, I don't like following rules, so that's why I like to hit "Experts" as much as possible, but I think I fail quite often because I try and skip too many steps along the way. >.<

To end off, my friend has been seeing Dropbox fail on him very often recently, but we both concur that the Dropbox fail icon is really cute, so here it is! 

Eleventh Week + Final Project Update

IMPT!!

Before I begin, it's important to realise that Prof. Colin has NOT posted for a week. :D That means Prof. has to dance Oppa Gangnam Style during poster session! Kekeke!

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In any case, final project is making progress. We have a sort of MVP. Now we have to make sure that it is intuitive and fun, and to finish up random loose ends. (Bug in linker now. >.<)

Also, the road to developing Apple Apps is also littered with obstacles. Here is a list:

1. Could not run simulator on school's computer because we were not in the _developers group. (Solution: Badger Musa for two weeks.)
2. Could not run the app on the device because our certificates were not settled. (Not really solved, but interim measures were taken. Also asked Haocong, Jesmond, & Mengran for help, but they couldn't solve the issue with the NUS certs. Resorted to asking Apple Support, but Apple Support didn't help much in solving the problem.)
3. No 24-hr access or at least, weekend access to PL1. (Solution: Borrow GUI's Mac Mini, code whenever lab is free, or not free xD. Ended up going to SDE to code. --> Honestly, this sounds ridiculous, but at least they have 24 hr labs for both Windows and Macs, and also permission to install things that they want (permission easily sought from one of their seniors). Why doesn't SoC have the same thing? >.>)
4. Mac Mini's OS is Snow Leopard, i.e. highest Xcode version permitted is 4.2 (iOS 5.0). Not only that, it cannot be downloaded on the Apple website. Had to *ahem* acquire it somehow.
5. Because of differences in Xcode version, storyboard could not work. (Solution: Had to replace some dependencies in storyboard to code.)
6. Accidentally upgraded iPad to iOS 6. Here I mention that it's always good to test on the latest stable version, but how was I to know that our school's computers doesn't support iOS 6? >.< (Solution: Ask Colin for a new (or rather, older) iPad.) In any case, I'm going to suppose the school will install the latest Xcode on those computers next year for CS3217. 

Thanks to GUI (Edward Chua) and Haocong (Haocong lent us his developer's certificate!) for their help, we managed to code out a MVP. Kai and Benjamin tested it on Saturday although they worked until really late on Saturday morning. Partially my fault also, because an unexpected problem turned up when deploying on the device. >.<

Eldwin says that my situation was very interesting as a whole. To quote him, "I've never seen anyone face so many obstacles developing for iOS in my life!" The good part is, I'm not the type to bang on my head on the table or cry when faced with such problems, so even if there are more problems (which I hope there aren't), I'll still do my best to solve them. Either that, or I get angry at the people who are causing the problems. >.> 

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Eleventh week's talk was the Entrepreneur Roundtable. I missed the first speaker because my lesson ended late, and I went to get dinner also with Yujing. I found Darius' talk interesting (the timeline part interspersed with a lot of other events was funny. Why is it that "co-worker gets a girlfriend" always turns up in such stuff? xD) A lot of them told very personal stories and it was enlightening to hear how they went through ordeals etc. 

Under Colin's and Su Yuen's insistence ("Why did you not talk to him?!"), we also talked to Bjorn about our app. He was pretty skeptical about our application (parents are lazy and won't bother too much about it), but after consulting Colin and thinking it through, I believe most parents work quite hard for their children, although it's true that there are always black sheep around. In any case, I got more inspired to test out the application after the consultation.

Speaking of consultation, our app crashed in the simulator during our meeting with Colin, Su Yuen and Angad. Mostly because the camera simulator was using a deprecated function. I won't bother fixing that part because it's not as if our real app would use a camera simulator. =.= But I was pretty sad about it crashing, since I spent the previous weekend on it.

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Recently, I made a personal website for myself. It's done using Twitter Bootstrap so it looks pretty generic, and the toughest part was overlaying my name over the navigation bar. =.= Okay, the other toughest part was organising the content - what I wanted to include, what I didn't want to include etc. It has a simple and clean interface and I pretty much like it for a v0.0.

But I can't wait to tear it apart for v0.1. I'm not disappointed in v0.0, just that it's not really 'me'. To be honest, I don't really like simple and clean interfaces. Here, I will diverge a little and provide a link to a very old pdf on how culture affects UI design, and I think, "This must be it." 

As an example of how culture affects UI design (besides the obvious Arabic right to left thing), I present to you the Rakuten website, Japanese market versus Global market version. At first (and that was when I was in Secondary school), I thought that the Japanese page was really hard to read (partially because Japanese was, and still is, hard to read for me), but I got used to it over time. However, recently, when I look at the global page, I find that it's a lot more readable, (No more flashy advertisement at the very top, less colours/headers/options, making it a lot cleaner) but I still won't use it, because the Japanese page, while it isn't really sparkling clean, it's a lot more appealing somehow, with all its colours and arrangement of content. (Concrete example: The navigation bar in the Japanese page is entirely red, while the global page just has a red line drawn on top.) I personally think it's okay if other people prefer the global page rather than the Japanese one, because that's their opinion, while I have mine. (Well, as long as they are not being Eeyores about it; making Piglets like us look small. xD Yes, I have been reading "The 德 of Piglet".  ^^)

I think I grew up more on a flash-based website design rather than pure html/js/css stuff, so I end up loving websites with that type of look more. I also really like the idea of personalising the site, rather than making it generic-looking, so yes, I dislike my generic-looking v0.0. (Actually, generic-looking isn't anything bad, and as an example, Google has a pretty generic interface and people still like to use it. The only bad part is that I link "personal", as in personal website, with the word "personalised".) To end off, here are some trends and examples of sites that look good (imo). I think these designs have a holistic approach here, rather than every element being designed separately. In any case, I shall attempt to make sites as good as these, when I have more time/ ideas.