Revamping the Design

Today was a productive day. I’ve begun to flush out the final design in Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. I’m using Photoshop to draw out the initial sketches and using Illustrator to “turn” it into a vector image.

My original idea consisted of having four highways. Two of them would be curved and three of them would have perspective. As I began to draw, I ran into problems with the curve of highway. Imagine having to draw a curve that had grid lines with perspective. It is doable in Photoshop but not very easy to do in Illustrator.

After spending the whole afternoon, drawing, pondering, and sketching; I’ve decided to forgo the perspective and do a straight up aerial shot. Therefore, when looking at the highways, you would be looking straight down at them.

I’ve decided to do this for a number of reasons.

First, I wanted the highways that are straight and curved. If I wanted to keep perspective, all the highways would be straight with no curve.

Second, if I kept the original design, placement of the events (with the pictures) on the “grid” might cause more problems in regards of coding.

Lastly, time constraint. I have only 9 more weeks left to implement a prototype. The keyword is prototype. As much as I want to have the perspective, it’s just not feasible. Besides, I know there are other and more efficient ways of drawing the curve with perspective. I will look into it for version 1.1!

In case you aren’t aware, I do have plans on turning this into a real working application at some point in the future.

It’s also important to note that in the original design, there would be a “billboard” on the Day View that would cycle through all the events. I will keep this idea.

A quick list of things to be done within the next two weeks:

  • Finish up Final Design work (to be done by this Sunday 3/16)
    • Draw all the views
    • Draw in fake events to ensure that it will work
    • Prep the 4 highways to be imported into Flash/Flex
    • Post final design to blog
  • Programming (to be done by Thursday 3/19)
    • Begin pseudocode
    • Figure out what classes are needed and how it will be structured
Published:
March 13, 2008 – 7:10 pm
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By Kim
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How many?

As I am here at work thinking about how I would build my application, I found something to be concerned with.

  • How many events does a user put on a calendar?
  • A user may put schedule for 2 appointments that will overlap.
  • But what about more than that?
  • What if a user has many events?

These are some of the questions that are floating through my head.  Even though, this application is ONLY a prototype, I cannot help but be concerned with it.  Granted the user can filter out events by selecting what type of events to display, but I am worried with information overload.  It is not useful to have a whole lot of information presented to you at once.  If anything, you would see a preview and can select the view/area for more details.

I will need to examine Google Calendar and Palm Desktop to see how they handle a lot of events.

Published:
February 28, 2008 – 8:17 am
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By Kim
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Getting back into the groove

I’ve got a lot of work cut out for me over the next week. I haven’t done much capstone stuff in the past two weeks due to Wedding plans and Laptop problems. But everything is squared away and so I am ready to begin.

The design process is finished and now begins the implementation part. I’ve been looking at current articles on the integration of Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex. The challenging part is developing the framework for the prototype as well as finding a way to implement the events on the “highways” via code. It’s especially tough for me because I am not a strong coder and it takes me a bit. I am hoping I can use both Flash and Flex but as a backup will use just Flash.

I also need to catch up on some reading. There are a few books that I have that I need to read and make notes. I will post a more thorough list of what I will be doing exactly tonight.

Side note:  After looking at the previous post with the sketches, I decided I need to sketch some more to better demonstrate what the events will look like.  I will make 4 sketches with events placed on each view.

Published:
February 28, 2008 – 6:41 am
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By Kim
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Some sketches

Here are some sketches of what the prototype will look like.

I will post some more this week…

Published:
February 27, 2008 – 9:22 pm
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By Kim
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It’s Week 10

This past Saturday, there was a Capstone Dinner session with Elouise and her kids, Matt K., and Paul W.  I showed some of the last sketches to Elouise.  I am happy to say that I have the go ahead to begin the implementation process!  She did request that I do a sketch in Photoshop/Illustrator to show what the actual prototype will look like.  I am hoping to finish that by the end of this week and will post it online.

As far as timeline goes,  I’m right on track.  Woot!

Published:
February 19, 2008 – 6:26 pm
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By Kim
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