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.