New day, new task, new challenges – Today I started working on a social collaborative tool which will work on Surface, but extended eventually to Flex 3, Silverlight and iPhone. First impression: Visual Studio is an old friend. Still, bad news: Surface SDK is kept locked in a website, having access only those who bought a license. Shame, Microsoft! After installing the SDK I started running the examples, I noticed that many events are new, a lot of new interaction techniques appeared ( the device can track up to 50 different fingers) and also the trackers who can be identified […]
Monthly Archives: July 2009
17 posts
Latest additions :sounds in our application, allowing user to get auditive feedback, background and confirmation for hit sounds for improving the User Experience, creating an immersive experience who tries to transpose the user into the real wood atmosphere, self generating levels, allowing users to improve themselves beyond our ideas about their possibilities: the user gets 60 seconds levels in which he has to hit more and more animals as he becomes better in targeting ( and in ball retrieval :-) ), changed the aspect ratio of the game from 4:3 to 16:9 to bette use the whiteboard's surface
Since last week the Flash application changed- I added support for numerical keys for hitting. We mapped the numerical keys 1 to 6 to the 6 animals positions that can be hit. This way, it is enough to press a key to simulate the throw of a ball.The reason behind this application architectural change is that we needed an smart way to simulate the sensors that were hit, without actually having the entire setup in our workplace.
iMeet application is ready. I am very proud of this application, as it represents my achievements in fast learning and adapting to: new way of programming, as XCode and Interface Builder truly represent the ModelViewController paradigm; new language- Objective-C, which as any language has its pluses and minuses; new device: mobile devices on which I didn’t work since my experience on Sales Force Automation in TotalSoft company, back in 2005, on Windows CE.
Adding the points to the map is not as intuitive as it might seem, so let’s start by creating a new class called POI – point of interest. Assuming that we have the Latitude and Longitude as NSStrings, we check if they are filled. Then I create the CLLocationCoordonate2D which basically is a tuple of two doubles and then create the point of interest.
This week we work also on the User Interface - the Flash GUI. It was challenging sinceI haven't previous experience in creating games in Flash. The application creates 4 spots in the bottom of the scene and 2 in the top to show randomly an new animal each time one is hit. This areas are hit areas designed to respond to phisical sensors placed on the back of the board on which the Flash Game will be projected.
From time to time, you’ll need to show in your iPhone application a view over the entire application without navigating and destroying your workflow of the application. I’ll present the mechanism of modal windows as it is implemented in Cocoa Touch. Lets take a real case: you have a view in which you want to input an address. Near the address you have a button which will show the user the Map centered on the specific address that he inputted. How this can be implemented? The answer is quite simple: you need to declare the view from which you launch […]
One of the tasks in the CSCW lab was to create a map on which the users to see the location of a specific address. So I started working on it, knowing that the newest framework brings a lot of goodies, through which there is also a map framework. But surprise! Apple provides only reverse geocoding, not forward geocoding. This means that you can only transform a pair of Latitude / Longitude to the Map and it will show it to the user. But what to do when user enters an address? My point is that nobody caries with him […]
A game should not have only a great idea, but also nice graphical interface. For this, we created an immersive forest environment where the user to be able to ‘hunt’ some animals. Underneath is the background of the application:
From the last lab we had a week of accomplishments: we set our hardware to Arduino platform completed on Monday a little programming and testing of the hardware platform decided the final idea of the game and also set Adobe Flash as our interface and display application The idea of the game remains as presented a week ago. We will have a screen acting as a pressure sensor (composed from at least 9 sensors to be more precise about the user’s hit point).The Arduino board will be linked with the sensors and will provide via USB the signals to the […]
While working on the CSCW Lab project, I encountered a situation in which the XML-RPC call returned an image, of course encoded as Base64. And guess what – in its known style, Apple doesn’t provide Base64 encoding and decoding – quite lame, given the fact that this encoding is used everywhere in data transfer over the internet – e-mail, browsers, web services – all of them use at some point this encoding to overcome the different local encodings on each one’s machine. Once identified this problem, I had to solve it somehow – but guess what? – over the free […]
During the CSCW Lab, where I had the experience of working on iPhone, I had to connect to a XML RPC server. Some of the parameters of the request had to be formatted as ISO8601 standard. After some reading, I end up using the following code, managing both the conversion of a NSDate to NSString and a NSString to a NSDATE using the above format: NSString –> NSDate -(NSString *) strFromISO8601:(NSDate *) date { static NSDateFormatter* sISO8601 = nil; if (!sISO8601) { sISO8601 = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init]; NSTimeZone *timeZone = [NSTimeZone localTimeZone]; int offset = [timeZone secondsFromGMT]; NSMutableString […]