#striddleapp

[striddleapp]

February 5th 2015

It is officially the end our MSc in Creative Digital Media in DIT. Our final project Striddle has been a work in progress for the last 9months. We came from non-developer & non- UX UI backgrounds and created, developed and designed a user generated product. We created an app from start to finish which we are extremely proud of. Can it be improved? All apps are a work in progress, it's something that can be constantly updated and refined. Striddle was submitted to the App Store last week and we were officially accepted this evening. If you would like to download the app, Please do so here on this link.... 

 https://appsto.re/us/DR4v5.i 

 Being accepted onto the App Store was the icing on the cake today as we also received the results for our final project. "Striddle" won us a 1st and we are ecstatically happy. A big thank you to all our testers, friends and family who helped us on the journey of this project. A special thank you goes to our mentor Evin McCarthy, his help and guidance was a really appreciated throughout this whole process.

Thank you all. 

Philippa & Katie

January 14th 2015

Today is our final presentation for Striddle. We will showcase our app, the trailer and our process throughout the project. Having spent so much time writing our document and building the app. We feel at ease going into this presentation. We feel we have worked very hard to accomplish everything we have achieved and now it's our time to show that. We have created our presentation slides , practiced our speech and are ready to show everything we've got. Striddle is here!

We are also submitting our bound Technical Document today ready for grading.

Now all we have left to do is wait for results early February and if we have pass we should hopefully graduate with a Masters in Creative Digital Media from DIT. Watch this space!

[striddleapp]

10th December

Today is submission day for the artefact. We got the last minute tweaks in to the build and delivered the files to DIT. A final test-flight of this build was sent out to our testers.  Now we have to continue our marketing campaign, create our trailer and write our technical document.

We have been working on our document the past few weeks. We are trying to work on our design and code methodology chapter, this will be the most significant chapter for us as it describes Striddle in significant detail. 

11th December

We had the DIT "Meet the Masters" Showcase for our Apps & Games Today. This is where the Creative Digital Media class of 2014 displayed their projects. There was a great turn out and lots of industry there to offer the advice on our projects. It was an interesting night of showing people "Striddle". Feedback was positive for the app...our layout impressed many which was great to hear.

http://www.istory.ie/meet-masters

15th December

Today we are working on our promotion trailer, we have been storyboarding and writing the copy. We've created assets in illustrator ready to be brought into After Effects. We want to apply slick object transitions to our illustrations and then move into a screen video. We are looking at different methods of recording our screens as we don't want to have the pointer seen when you initiate transitions. Reflector & Quicktime Player seems to offer the best services for what we need.

illustrator assets:

[striddleapp]

September Sprint 1

Today we had our 1st official sprint back in college to showcase the work we've been doing on our app. 

We wanted to show that we have been working with Twitter Api and trying to manipulate the data we need to use in the app.

In July for our summer sprint, we had a login and timeline info coming in but this was using one single user account with specific api tokens, so it was only working with one fixed account. See below

We decided we wanted to show that we had our user login using OAuth.io working where any person can login to the app and have their data flow in. We have been trying to get the diamond plugin to work with this data so we can display it the way we want. 

We also wanted to show that we have managed to pinpoint bringing in media/images with our tweets...which in essence is allowing us to show the media we want to display in our app. Here we have an issue where the loop breaks when there is no image and a text tweet comes in. We have been working on If and switch statements to see if we could remedy this.

We needed a demo to show on the device today, we had all of these elements working on the IOS simulator but we had issues getting our authentication working on the device, we believe that it is due to it not registering our click. We have taken on a big project for two people with no coding background...but we are dedicated and we will conquer all our issues. We are being assigned mentors for our project and believe with their knowledge we can learn how to overcome any problems we've been having. 

[striddleapp]

We've been busy creating our app landing page for Striddle. If you want to receive updates about Striddle and it's release on App Store, check out our page here www.striddleapp.wordpress.com. Our domain will be changing but for now Wordpress are providing us with their great free service.

We have been working hard on getting our plugin to work with the twitter Api this week. We are focusing on bringing in media with our tweets and Katie is using her coding skills to push the barriers with javascript, working through switch statements and loops, we have elements working so far and we are trying to push on further so watch this space!

We have also been working on our menu systems. We have a functioning version working using jQuery mobile and its UI elements, this version doesn't look like our original mockups as it has a horizontal navbar instead of a vertical one. We have created our custom diamond buttons and we've been testing these custom items with jQuery mobile and with pure  HTML & CSS.

We have our official 1st Sprint mid September and we want to have our build on the device ready to show. We will be working on this next week.

[striddleapp]

2nd Testing Session

Today we had our second testing session for our UI which proved very helpful again. As designers and developers we spend so much time with our project, we know it inside out but you can become de-sensitised and not see what your users can see and feel.  

Feedback came back that if the focus is geometric/diamond design, why not keep that theme running through our Icons in the app, currently our menu icons are circular so a re-do of our icons will be created and tested. We also need to revisit our site map and possibly leave out our menu screen... aesthetically it looks good but after you have logged in for the first time it is no longer needed as our our static menu takes care of this feature. A suggestion for this was to make it an introduction how to page for when you first login to the app.

Overall aesthetic is positive for the app, it looks unique and that is what we are aiming for. Particular attention needs to be paid to our lists page and how we display it. Multiple options were discussed so a re-design will be implemented and tested again soon. We decided to test a monochrome and green palette for this session and our users reactions were positive.

 Another useful testing session over...more changes to come for Striddle!

[striddleapp]

Life as newbie developers!

So Today we are still trying to work with our code to bring in users data through our authentication...our code should work in theory!! We are testing a new method through Xcode now, hopefully with positive results. Persistence is key and we will conquer the Twitter Api!!

We have downloaded our Diamonds.js plugin, next step is to test this with our Striddle Twitter account and see if we can get it working the way we want. 

On another note, we have reworked our UI after our testing session and implemented the changes into new prototypes ready for testing. Here we have our new take on the list screens, tweet display and navigation.