Ubiquitous Computing

[fvhguerin352]

Our final poster.

[fvhguerin352]

The final video.

[fvhguerin352]

Test Audio

We populated the server from the client side with birdsongs from

http://www.doc.govt.nz/conservation/native-animals/birds/new-zealand-bird-songs-and-calls/

[fvhguerin352]

A demonstration of the app interactions.  I coded most of the moving elements, excluding the scrolling post list and the jumping to a post in the scroll list.

[fvhguerin352]

Screen shots from our app.  The header and footer bump out of screen when the user scrolls down any of the lists.  

[fvhguerin352]

I have made a drop tab for filtering the different types of posts.  When I finished this I realised for ease of use, I really would need to move the easing and positioning components into another class.  Unfortunately this would take me quite a while and we will present with the slightly harder to implement ones in the Main class.

[fvhguerin352]

Development screenshots of various versions on the phone.  An unusual bug that we got was when we attempted to use the drop shadow renderer and glow renderer it creates a grey border overlaying the app.  We were forced to take this functionality out again.

[fvhguerin352]

The post lists are finally working!  Jenny managed to get them in.

[fvhguerin352]

Despite some problems with the map and run time performance the app, when exported to a standard build runs useably on the phone.  Since I wrote the screen navigation to be scalable our app scales seamlessly to new dimensions, we have our app on ipads now.

[fvhguerin352]

For the last round of development I have focussed primarily on making the app move correctly.  I have made the screen containers, implemented touch gestures, written easing functions, organised the different states the screen positions, created the header and footer, attached them to the scroll container position and created a tab that pops out from under the header. 

All of this works beautifully without the map.  Since the map will always render over the other elements I was forced to re size and re position the map on every frame when the user is scrolling or when the screen is swiped from side to side.  This is quite expensive and makes the entire interaction slow down ridiculously.  After some tinkering I managed to shave down the number of times it is being called but this is not an ideal situation.  at the moment I am not a particularly happy camper.

[fvhguerin352]

The map we are using has to be hosted on a webpage, have a request sent to it from the device and be displayed as a stage web view.  One of the downsides of using this method, which we did not know about until it was far too late to change is the fact that a stage web view ALWAYS displays as the last element on screen.  This means it will display on top of all the elements, including, as in this case, the header which I built.

[fvhguerin352]

A slightly different variation on the same theme.  We would like to test out the different colour headers but the amount of work necessary, on top of that which we have to do in the next few days is too much.  As we proceed after the due date we will probably explore a little in this direction.

[fvhguerin352]

Jenny and I have been continuing to refine our design.  Although we are both very satisfied with our navigation and gestural vocabulary, our layout is not as well developed.  Elements of the page, such as the navigation menu work well, not so much the playlist.  We are considering putting in images in the background of the navigation and playlist pages to liven up the design visually.  We also think that a customisable background for a user profile page is a nice touch.

[fvhguerin352]

The playlist is looking a little empty towards the top in this mock up, it needs more elements.

Jenny and I have also considered further interactions, tapping and holding a post opens up up a share/ save locally option.  We have a couple of reservations about it however, one being that we cant find the space on our posts to put a button alternative to the gesture.  The other is the issue of copyright on the sounds, are all sounds uploaded free to be saved/ used?

[fvhguerin352]

I have tried to space the elements out a little more in this mock up.

[fvhguerin352]

Some ideas on where to go from here, layout wise.

[fvhguerin352]

Debugging Null point errors

http://active.tutsplus.com/tutorials/actionscript/quick-tip-how-to-debug-an-as3-error-1009/

Oh, Joy! Null point errors...