Recess Week: Assignment 3 crazy coding

It's now Thursday, less than 48 hours to submission. And I'm writing this in between bites of my breakfast roar.

Been coding from noon-11pm from Sunday everyday - 4 days non-stop. Our progress is really slow... The HTTP endpoints are there, but the front end is not using them for some reason.

Things I think we're still struggling with - localstorage, base64 encode, picture upload, authentication, cache. How to mergesort DOM elements too?

It seems like every form submission, data load is still a new page request. Only the GET requests are wired up so far. Are we really able to deliver by tomorrow?

At least this time I mostly like the UI we designed. Hope the final product looks good. And hope it ACTUALLY WORKS.

The journey thus far...

Feeling overstressed and overworked. It's a wonder I haven't snapped yet.

That random phone call this afternoon, I really hoped it was something from one of the oil majors. But no, it was citibank.

Work to do right now:
- Apply to SRC and any other companies that already are open
- FYP & first presentation
- CS3216 HTML5 project
- CN3121 control / simulink project
- CN3135 safety / hazop project

Week 5: Pitching session, assignment 3 planning, random reflections

So it's week 5 already. Well, almost week 6, but there's always the one-post-a-week thing that I'm trying to keep up with. Time flies really fast when you don't know what you're really up to.

This week, we had this final project pitching session that was at this new place in BIZ (LT19 was it?) Thought some of the projects were worth doing, but most of them, I realise I'm nowhere near capable to do them.

Many of the presentations did not capture most of our attention. I'm going to be rather direct here... Like after 1 week, most of the topics have already left my mind. Except for a few, like the CELC presentation which was done in a very surprising way and rightaway caught our attention, which seemed worthwhile doing. Others somehow seem to be rather mundane and non-world-changing.

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In any case, we have been brainstorming for ideas for assignment 3. One of the major items we had to fulfill was to do an app that NEEDS to be done on a mobile device (so to me it implies we have to utilize something that is "first-class" on mobile phones). Since I'm still carrying a nokia, I haven't really experienced what it is like to carry a smartphone daily, so the "mobile experience" is rather lost on me. Out of so many features that a smartphone has, what is it that is a "first-class" feature on phones?

Our group settled on an app that somehow should link to the camera that is built in to almost every smartphone nowadays. Wonder how we are going to build it actually...

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Random reflections.

Somehow I've realised that I've a "laser-like" focus on my ideas so far, in the brainstorming phase. It seems to be both helpful, yet crippling at times.

Usually when you try to brainstorm to get ideas for an app, or to flesh out the features of an app, you tend to go off in different kinds of scenarios, some doable, some far-fetched. For assignment 1, when we were thinking about Let's Goal (we didn't call it that yet), we had some epic features (to me) that we thought about. However, I sort of went in to the google doc and started to wonder if those features were really necessary, and started to "kill" them off. Even before we thought through them and possibly analyze the impact of their directions.

So what really happened was, I came up with this thing called a "mission statement" for the app. I tried to make sure that every feature followed the "mission statement", so that we don't stretch ourselves too far, doing things that don't even value add to our app. Also the saying "do one thing only and do it well" somehow stuck in my head, so every feature that we suggested, went through this culling process.

Why was this not good? Probably because of conflict avoidance, if someone comes up with a great idea, but it doesn't help our core, then it may be hard for the person to take it when we reject it when we have a huge pool of directions to go for, and we have to start cutting features. This person might be anyone, even me. And I'm rather emotional when under stress, so yea it was sort of an agreement, a contract with the group and myself.

However, idealistic intentions aside, I never really put this through to the UI/UX design. We had a clearly defined mission statement, with the words "do one thing and do it well" next to it. But somehow along the way, as we got into development, that went into the back of my mind (I blame myself since I pushed for this). And the flow was done based on features and program structure, and not more on a seamless user experience.

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So why do I bring this up now? For Assignment 3, I realise I'm starting along the same track. I've countered an idea before I completely heard it out, and that's really not good for team dynamics. There's the other extreme, when everyone hears everything out, and decide to include everything in the app (from booking plane tickets to making a simulator), because everything sounds wonderful.

Where do we draw the line? And who can tell me what features are really good for our apps? I have no idea...

Week 4: presentation oh my tian

The title says it all. 20 seconds per slide is just SO STRESSFUL. I wonder how many strands of hair have dropped off the last few days. Need to eat more also if not I cannot see myself at the end of the sem (my characteristic length is less than the wavelength of visible light, need electron microscope to view).

Anyway, rubbish aside, since the stressful part is out of the way, just going to repost what I said on Facebook over here:

CS3216 presentation went better than expected. but style-wise seems to pale in comparison with the rest of the groups... not class enough.

And so 2nd assignment is over. mostly.

Well, mostly. Cause we have this blog assignment to do. So here goes.

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The app I'm supposed to blog about is called "Color", an app that is supposed to "short-cut" the record, download, upload and publish/share sequence. Will not talk about presentation effectiveness or such here, since I can't remember anything about the actual presentation style.

Some of the important things about the app and the sharing that I remember from the presentation:

1. The app is broadcasts its recorded videos to friends, with 1 minute limitation.
   This seems like a reasonable limitation, since storage isn't free. And as mentioned during the presentation, we need restrictions. This is like bandwidth caps on mobile broadband; if not we'll end up with the tragedy of the commons.
2. The app can probably be built with technologies that the group suggests, which include H-264 video and AAC audio encoding.
   Can't comment much, but I think these are the current standards. It's good for the app to use these encoding standards to ensure good compatibility right now, and in the short-term future. I do wonder if the phone is actually able to implement the encoding though (think iPhone has dedicated cores for graphics? that may help there).
3. The app has a clean and uncluttered UI that is usable and direct.
   Of course, UI design is very important. If the system is oh-so-awesome but the UI is very rubbishy, then no one will use it. People who get into the app will get frustrated easily I guess?
4. Also, the potential improvements that the group suggested seemed like a natural extension of the app.
   Other than the 1 minute restriction. We do have to set a constraint on the maximum amount of the data that we can transmit, to avoid degradation of the service that we provide. Video effects and simple editing (eg trim and crop) may be useful to allow the user to post-process the video before it's updated.

This app, like many of the other apps out there seem to simplify a (longer) process down into a few clicks/taps. The viability of such apps seem to be over a shorter span of time, since web services and mobile platforms come, evolve and go so quickly. To stay relevant, it must be able to integrate with the popular services that are commonly used at every point in time.

The app seems to take a measured direction to its limitations, for example the 1 minute limitation is probably in response to two effects - one is the service capacity, and another is the fact that users' attention spans are rather short in this social age. However, the 1 minute restriction may be able to be extended to a longer time (eg 5 minutes), and with proper post-processing tools (like crop and resize) it can re-export and upload the clipped video.

From my understanding of mobile apps (I don't have a smartphone), this app is rather similar to apps such as Instagram in spirit, which seems to implement a similar cycle: capture, add effects, upload and share. I believe that the functionality to add effects would be a very natural extension of the app.

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This session is actually very interesting. You get to see all sorts of awesome apps, and also how other groups design their slides. Good learning opportunity for the design-crippled? Only if I wasn't so nervous...