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...