Week 8, already, seems like time is flying by at an astronomical rate, so workdays are filled and productive. Time will expire in a few weeks, so I must get as much done as I can. Here’s a rundown of the week.
Monday July 9
Today we taught Girl Scours how to solder LEDs to copper tape circuits so they could craft a light-up card with a design of their choice. The girls that I instructed obeyed well and got their cards to work. The first Girl Scout I instructed created a Tardis (from Doctor Who) and maybe the top of it light up with a yellow LED light. We had trouble at first, but then Dr. Siek demonstrated how to use the flux marker and the solder sucker. Then, things were a breeze. One of our solders was not functioning correctly, so that was a minor setback. After those obstacles were overcome, the circuit worked properly and lit up on command. The second wave of Girl Scouts then entered, and the second trooper and I crafted the card with extreme speed. She made a card with a star that lit up at night, illuminating a picnic scene. A bit unorthodox to have a picnic at night, but I was not going to deter any creative spirit. After the solder session had concluded I went to touch up the UI I had created for the application. It’s looking rather spiffy, but perhaps I should omit the clip art. I will have to see what the team thinks, but below is a photo of the progress I have made from the last instance of it.
Tuesday July 10
I had a highly productive day today, for I completed the poster draft as well as a peer review. This morning I spent some time talking to Ray and Arash. We had a meeting discussing our timetable for the week and what specific deliverables we needed to have in order for Ray to implement the back end. Arash is nearly finished with his Voice Memos, and I am nearly done with the camera. The final product for beta testing should look pretty amazing and I cannot wait to test it out. I showed the team my UI design and it was met with some criticism, all constructive of course. I need to iterate on it more and make it look more professional. Perhaps the clip art of the baby was what did me in. The poster I made looks great, and Arash and Ray both loved it. I couldn’t be more proud. I completed a peer review of a great paper today and am excited to see everyone present at the symposium. I also chatted with Dr. Clawson via Slack and we discussed UI designs as well. The week is going to be busy and we are going to be crunched for time, but I enjoy the high pressure.
Wednesday July 11
I made a few more edits to the poster today and handed it in for review from my peers during the workshop. I decided to remain with the green color scheme because in coincided with our applications user interface. I used my photoshop skills to paste images of our application onto the poster itself. The workshop gave us a lot of good feedback that we will be implementing into our poster. We learned that our poster should act as an aid for presentation, but should still be interpretable by conference goers when I am not present at the poster. I had created a style where our information boxes were staggered, but was told that it should be straight in a column format to evoke neatness and control over the board. It was also suggested that we eliminate the features picture from our board and instead create small descriptions under each one of the phones to save some more space. We also need to include future works and a references section. It was suggested we change the orientation of our poster from landscape to portrait, but I do not think we will implement this. James also suggested previously that we utilize landscape. Tom showed us one of his posters that he used to create for a poster that synthesized an application, and we picked up a couple of tips from his design and icon use. Another milestone achieved today was assisting Arash with debugging his voiceNote application. After some code scrutinizing, we identified that he had declared an array of strings, but he had never initialized it as an empty array, so its value was set to NULL. Thus whenever the application ran and that method was called, the program would crash because it received an unexpected NULL value for one of its optional variables. I was content that Ray and I were able to help debug successfully. I have attached a picture of our poster below, version 2.0 is under development.
Thursday July 12
Today I dedicated the entirety of the day to developing the camera aspect of our application. Development has gone well so far, but as we are instructed to iterate over our failures in the blog, I will elaborate on one of mine. The screens viewed on an iPhone are instances of the viewController class, and I was attempting to transition from one view to the next view by implementing a button that would utilize a segue from one view to the other. Despite my integration of action methods that were supposed allow the user to switch from one view to the other after they captured a photo, I was unable to get it to work. I will have to continue working on this tonight so it can be prepared for Ray to incorporate into the entire application by Friday. I will attach a screenshot of the picture screen at the end of today’s update. I will say one of the highlights of today was when I was working quietly in the conference room when an FBI, yes FBI, agent approached me and inquired about someone’s location. I was unable to assist him, but pointed him in the right direction, and he was on his way. I had never met an FBI agent before, but he was genial and blunt. I was also informed that Dr. Clawson was involved in a bicycle accident and may have broken his arm. I am wishing him a speedy recovery. After tomorrow there are only two weeks left. I had better get back to development.
Friday July 13
I finally completed the camera application portion of the application today! I still have to adjust the app to be able to save photos after they are taken, but IK am ecstatic that this portion has been completed. I sent the files over to Ray to incorporate into the application. There were a few errors with optional value unwrapping, but I resolved them and it works great. The camera seems to be really high quality as well, which is nice for the parents to capture high quality photos. The photo editing software we are going to be using for the video is called lightworks. You can find an outline/ storyboard on Rays blog. Sorry for the short post, but it was mostly a development oriented day.