Consulsion

The app still has a few bugs which I'm really keen to sort out even though the project is handed in. We hope to get the full remote version of the app working so that it functions how it does in Ben video.

We also got some really good suggestions in our crit today so hopefully we can implement those changes as well and we can get the app to be the best it can.

Even though there are still things that need to be done I couldn't be happier with how the project went. I had an awesome team and we worked really together (even if there were a few sleep deprived conversation where no of us had any idea what the other was saying)
Mostly I'm just happy with how much I have learnt. There was a stage where I thought 'there is no way I can do this I have no idea what it going on' but now I actually feel confident enough to get the rest of the app working.

Link to website and final video
http://nickyhoffmandesign.com/willofsteel.html

Explanation of Name

When we first tried coming up with a name we failed so we did what all modern people do and turn to facebook. There were several suggestions some of which were good and some were silly. Will of Steel did start off as one of the silly ones from a friend who loves making puns about my last name but it was the name everyone seemed to like. At first it was a place holder name but overtime it grew on us. After a while we decided the name really did fit with our app.

As it's based around how little will power people have to create their own decent study habit our app is the one that does it for you. It gives you a Will of Steel so you can stay strong, motivated and get things done.

I wish I had this app while I was building it.

I managed to get numbers get all the pages going to the right places with the different transitions.

Managed to get the right breaks in the right places.

Didn't manage to get the to do list saving thing sorted

Managed to get the study mode state appearing each time you go back to the home page while the app it running. This was one by creating a global variable which has a boolean state. Each time a view is pushed back while the app in running the Boolean value determines that because the app is running it my must and study mode so the study mode view becomes active.

Didn't manage to get the app stopping once it's started. This is an issue we really should have addressed earlier but it was just as oversight on our part. I tried everything I could think of including timers global variables, separate action script class, if statements, this that and everything else. Even though it didn't work if made me realise just how much I have learnt through this project. Half this stuff I didn't even know existed but now I actually understand what's going on when I write a line of code instead of just copy pasting and hoping for the best.

I think the issues is in the fire date of the Notifications. The way Nicky and Byron set it up means that each time the button is pressed all the notifications are sent but arrive at different times. Currently I can see anyway of intercepting this but I think that just because my sleep deprived brain isn't working as well as it could. Even though we have to hand the app in it's current state I'm still going to try figure out how this can be done because I'm confident I can do it after I've had some decent sleep.

Another thing that has been bugging me is the fact that one of out notifications says 'It's time for lunch' no matter what time of the day it is. I fixed this by putting in a date variable so that if it is after 4pm it tells you to get dinner instead. I'm kind of sad I figured this feature on on the last day because it could have been interested to see what other time of day notifications we could of had.

Today while Nicky and Ben are doing the video I have been trying to fix all the little issues with app such as.
1. making all the buttons go to the right pages.
2. have the right breaks come at the right time
3. fixing the the fact the now when you swipe out of the to do list and back in you can't delete the items which are already there (I think I need help with this one but everyone is busy so I will try everything and see what I can do)
4. currently when you go into different view while the app is running it goes back to the start state instead of the study state.
5. stopping notification once they have been sent.

I finally got my swc's! I was able to put them into the to list by they don't align very well. what I've done is and change the x and y position of the swc doesn't seem to be working. I put each swc in it's own group which I can control the size and position of with out changing the size of the swcs. Theses groups are then added to an HGroup so the all line up nicely and then are added to the array.
I've also been trying to change the input font of the text box, it seem we need to do this with CSS which is a job I shall leave to Ben

Today I found an issues with storing the items in the to do list. When you swipe into the view and and swipe out it deletes everything. I fixed this by creating a global variable and storage function so the when the view is accessed again the items on the to do list will still be there

The last few days have been spent focusing on another assignment which was due today so sadly Ubiq has taken a back set but I'm back into it now. The swc for the to do list still haven't been finalised I was given  a shattering tick by Ben which doesn't really fit with the rest of the app (in spite of how much joy it bought us) so I'm just using placeholders at the moment and will sort out the final positing of the assets once I have them.

I also need the timer swc for the short breaks which Nicky is making. I managed to get a timer into the break view so that when the 15 seconds is up it pops back to the study mode page and a sound plays giving the indication that the break is over and the person should get back to work. 

I've also been work of the invite friends which is right now isn't actually working. It's currently just a 'place holder' view and the only person you can invite to in Nicky and you can't actually invite her unless you yell at her from across the room

Today I started adding the swcs to the to do list which created some issues. As they don't behave like normal components Alistair told me the best way to do this would be to create each one as a UI component an add them to their own array before adding them to the 'component array'

While Nicky and Ben have been working on the video I have been working on getting all the assets into the app and smoothing out the transitions and functionality.

I started by taking all of Ben photoshop files and converting the layers into different assets so the could be put into flashbuilder in layers. I also found a way of fixing the white page lag when changing views by embedding the images. We also decided to rearrange the button layout and move the start stop button into the main circle on the front page

More To Do

The next step is removing the items when they are completed by the way of a button press. This turned out to be not as hard as I thought... I apparently am learning and getting better at understanding code language.

To Do list

Today I started working on the to do list. I started working in a separate flash builder file so I could get the functionality working. The first step is finding a way of add multiple items to a list on a button click and then adding the same items each time the button is pressed. I believe this will have to be done using an array. I remember having a brief encounter with array's back in first year coding but have never actually used them...

After asking a few people who each gave my an interesting metaphor to describe what an array is. Byron used a file cabinet while Alistair chose to use a coffee mug where one of the components in the array was a drop off coffee called Jim.

In the end I turned to tour de flex and found an example of a scroll list which used an array to control the items in the list. After looking at this I managed to get it so a text input field and and check box were added each time the button is pressed.

Feedback

Overall we thought the crit went well

A few comments we got were questions on how the To Do List works.
- Ryan / Mauri thought having it come down from the top might be confusing with existing iPhone notifications.  This was something we thought about and Ben made sure the swipe-able area was larger and far enough down the screen to not matter so much. In saying that, Ryan suggested coming from the bottom might make more sense as we had the most recent item viewable, this would mean it didn’t have to re-order.  I think we’ll need to have a group chat about this.

Will of Steel (Kah / Byron’s feedback)

Student productivity / well-being application that includes a task list and break management system.

Feedback:

Visuals: Good to see the progression and experimentation with the application visual. A few mockups of what the website might look like would’ve been appreciated. Perhaps the frame of the visuals could tie in closer to the blue? Or the frame can change hue dependent on the visual theme?

Technical: Good work on the local and push notification. It’s to bring all the disparate elements together into a single application. Right now the app transitions between views only in one direction, perhaps you could make that swipe interaction tie in to the transitions better?

Concept: I would consider an additional tab for the tasks page. That means you will always have either the most recent or most important task displayed on the main screen of the app, rather than long list (even 2 or 3 tasks takes up a lot of screen real estate). The task screen could help with setting a priority and a date of completion for the app as well.

As for notifications – be very, very careful that the application doesn’t cross the boundary from useful to annoying.

Visuals wise – We ideally aimed to have a mock up for the crit but it’s been a busy week for all of us.  Ben is working on this now.

We’ll have a chat about how to incorporate the colour scheme into the frame also.

Technical wise we seem to be on track for the locally run app Nicky is going to work on the settings and I wil get the to do list working.  We’ve allowed time to integrate the push notifications but this is definitely time dependent based on how many issues we have with getting our minimum viable product working.

Right now were going to try get all the technical things work and then work on the transitions between the pages and the styling

Notifications – there was concern expressed on the app being naggy.  This is something we’ve had a lot of discussion about and we’ve talked to classmates about it too.  We think this is a matter of user testing as now that we’ve got the notifications working, it’s relatively simple to change the timers on them.

Presentation

We had a group meeting earlier to discuss what needed to be in the presentation.
We made a 14 day plan and pinpointed our achievements and what needed to be done.
Nicky set up the presentation while worked on the app so we could it during the presentations

We're also gonna demo a push notification JUST BECAUSE WE CAN

Stop Start

We also have an issue with the start button. It works fine, but if you click it more than ones, the function runs multiple times.
I.e. If you click it four times, you’ll get the first notification four times. The only plus with this is it makes you seem really popular because your phone keeps going off giving illusions of your phone receiving lots of text messages 
A lot of people did this as there is currently no overstate on the play button. I think the best way to stop people from pressing the button multiple times would be to create a start state and a stop state. Once the button is pressed the app goes into 'Study Mode' and the play button is replaced by a stop button. This way you can only send the notifications once and then notifications could be stopped when you leave study mode. The switching of states and changing of the button will be easy enough but stopping the notifications when the button is pressed will present more of a challenge.

What We Do With Out Byron?

NOTHING

While I was busy soldering for another paper Nicky took over figuring out how get push views working - her solution - ask Byron (it's better than Google for answering flash builder questions)

Rather than having one view that pushes different data, we now have two completely separate view.  The pushing data was posing issues.
There is now a separate actionscript class setting up a singleton which controls the data in the notifications.
The notification is sent went a button is pressed and then where it is pushed to is controlled by a switch case in the main mxml. Doing it this way means we can have multiple notifications being sent at different times and then have them pushing to different views.

It's good to know Nicky and I were close! I feel like I've gone from staring at code having know idea what's going on to actually being able understand things. Even though it's still a vague understanding it's nice to know I'm actually learning and getting better

The next step is getting the awesome design that Ben has been working on into the app,sorting out the notification timing and get the functionality working smoothly

Scope and Time

The three of us made a decision today that before we continue with the remote notifications and facebook integration, we’re going to get everything working locally first.

As much as we really want to get all the push stuff working but were not sure if we have the time. We think it would be best to get whole app working locally and then get the facebook integration and push notifications if we get time.

We had a lot of issues getting push notifications working and now we’re 12 days behind where we’d like to be.

So we’ve had to pull back and decide what’s most important which is having a working app.

So we’ve decided on our minimal viable product which is to have locally run app that functions.  We decided this was a lot better than having a remote app that only half worked and wasn’t complete. We only have 2 weeks left and we could probably get the remote version working but only if we give up our other papers, forgo sleep completely and find a giant supply of bribe chocolate.

Pushing Views

Now that we have notifications we need to send them to different views. Getting one notification to push to one view has been easy enough but getting different notifications to push to different views or different states within a view has been a bit tricker.

Currently the only difference between the notifications is what they say and their fire time. I'm currently trying to figure out some way of distinguishing between the two notifications so different views can be pushed. I think the best way to do this will be to create a global variable in a separate action-script class.

I HAS A PUSH NOTIFICATION

Today Byron gave me the new certificates :D AND THEY WORKED!!!

Also it turns out the example code in the documentation was WRONG. It was set up to check if Urban Airship was supported and then would initializing Airship which would be possible because it would only initialize if it was supported and it would only be supported if it was initialized. There's nothing like a good paradox in some example code.

After sorting this out we used airship to send a notification and it arrived straight away followed by some very girl squeaks of excitement from me, some manlier squeaks of joy from Byron, a high five and the whole media lab looking at us in confusion. This was then followed by a high five from terry and one from Kah.

Conclusion
Push Notification = High Fives

Now the next step is setting up the database and facebook integration. Should be so easy(sarcasm is hard to convey in writing)

ALL THE NOTIFICATIONS

Today we had more success! Managed to get multiple notifications showing up and various time intervals. The next step would be getting the notifications to push to different views as currently they all go to the home view

GO NICKY!

She made the local notifications work. Currently when the send button is pressed it fires a notification after a 15 second delay. They also run in the background and can be displayed as a pop up or banner depending on the setting on the users phone

Batphone reference - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9B6DMShBV6k

Local Notifications

Today we tried local notifications. We got an error. What a surprise

That Awkward Moment When You Have the Wrong Certificates

As it would seem, we don’t have the correct certificates to run our app.

Frustrated Nicky and Emily are frustrated

We’ve now got about 5 staff members involved so hopefully at least one of them can help us. It seems like we have everything we need to get them working so once we get the certificate fingers crossed we start getting some push notifications.

If this doesn't happen push notifications are gone and we a going with plan B. We’re going to stick with a similar idea, but there will be no interactions between different users of the app doing everything through local notifications. Then we can actually start putting some of the deign Ben has been doing into the app

Actionscript

Apparently we look sad and desperate so people are willing to help us. Alistair had a crack at deciphering our code for us tonight. He created a new actionscript project (rather than a flex mobile project like we were using).

Despite his best efforts, he also had no luck.

Another day, still no push notifications….

Tomorrow’s plan:
Hopefully Byron is free to give us one last hand (while we provide him with chocolate) and see if he can figure out what’s going on.
If it’s not an easy fix, we’ve decided we need to change our idea.
As attached as we are and as awesome as I think this app will be, we really can’t afford to spent any more time (ours, Kah’s or Byron’s) trying to get this push notification working.

A New ANE

As we can't access the sever information in our current ANE and link it to Urban Airship we decided to purchase the specific Urban Airship ANE developed by milkman called EasyPush. We followed the tutorial and read all the documentation (several times) but we don't think we've linked it to the APNS (apple push notification service).

Nicky and I sat down and tried to decipher the code we used with the first ANE and went through the milkman documentation trying to find the relevant terms

I got to do some design!

Today Ben and I swapped roles for a bit. I think he felt bad about our my work we were putting into the code and wanted to see if he could help. While he did this I worked with some of his design files looking at different ways of bring colour into the app.

Ben ended up have less success with the code than I did so we swapped back.

Even though not much was achieved getting to work with the actual design of the app reminded me why we were doing this and boosted my enthusiasm for the project which the constant errors had slowly been beating out of me.

Still no push notification/server luck unfortunately. Were having trouble figuring out how to ingerate our server into our app with our current ane. It seem like the creator of it built a lot of this into the ane it's self which by the sound of it would be horrible to code (apparently this sort of code made Ben Jack want to jump out a window, can't even imagine how we would cope with it)

Happy note for the day - design looks good hopefully we will be able to put it in an app

Nicky and I are in the Dark Place

We did have a big group discussion on the possibility of changing our idea.  As much as we all really like this idea and want it to work, we’re pretty much running into every possible problem we can.
However in a brief conversation with Kah about the background task possibly not being an option, I think we’re feeling a bit better about it.

In setting up our server, we hit more issues – of course – turns out we can’t access our Cpanels at uni.  After some Kah provided chocolate we tried setting up an Xampp local server. As soon as Kah left, it wanted an administrators password again.

So we’ve called it a day.

Ben’s design end is looking good! He’s making progress! At least one thing is going right 

App Scope

After chatting to Byron today, he discovered that push notifications weren’t really what we were after – we could have done with a simple local notification. (I think this caused me to hit my head on the table in frustration)
In good news – because we’d done this already, he reckons we’ve done most of the ground work to get the facebook friend interaction part we initially wanted working – so that is the new plan!
It will check to see if any friends are within 5 or 10 minutes of a break, ask the user if they want a break with any of the selected friends, send the selected friends a notification to accept of decline, and send the user a response. 

Today was better

Today I was looking in the Sever side of Urban-Airship and spent a lot of time on Google. Unfortunately due to other project I haven't been as on to it as I should have been but at least I have awesome team mates.

Today Nicky managed to get timed Notification working with a some help from Maurizio.

Ben is doing really well with the design and very good at taking what Nicky and I say and incorporating it into the design.

Byron also sorted our certificates for Airship

Urban Airship

To get controllable push notifications we think we need to use Urban Airship but we couldn't get it working :(

Talked to Byron he thinks we have the wrong certificates (again) and said he will try sort it tomorrow.

AND it broke

Came into uni today, opened EXACTLY the same folder from the scratch disk, reloaded the sdk and native extension, linked the working certificates and we got a new error!

An hour later after multiple closes and reopens of flash builder we go back to exactly where we were yesterday. 
Turns out, this checkbox for the native extension was unchecked. We didn’t have to check it yesterday so it must have just decide to uncheck it's self just to keep us on our toes. It's fixed now and we have learnt the importance of checkboxes

The prettiest blue bubble ever

So after getting what feels like all the errors flash builder could possible produce I made something work.

Today I managed to get a Notification working using an ANE made created by Piotr Koscierzynski. When you press the register to APN service it app registers with the Apple Push Notification Serive and send a notification. The app is currently currently through a server set up by Piotr so we would have to set up our own and get the Notifications running through that.

Issues...

Over the weekend, Nicky went through a bunch of ANE tutorials and narrowed it down to one which we think we can use.  We had a read through and thought it sounded straightforward enough.

WE WERE WRONG!

Nicky and I spent an entire day trying to get the push notifications working with the native extensions, we needed an updated SDK (as 3.1 is not up to date enough for the ane), and new certificates and it STILL won’t work.

Hours of work and lots of errors later we decided to call it a night

On the plus side – Ben’s going well with the design and has managed to get css styling sheets working

For Monday

Had a chat to Kah post-presentation in regards to notifications.
We don’t have a lot of control over how notifications appear on an iPhone on the lock screen and will have to stick with the standard apple blue bubble. We thought the best way to incorporate notifications with our design would be to show the basic notification (hopefully with an ignore button and a view button) and when the phone is unlocked, have it direct to the app which will show our notification – the design and interface we want.

Nicky and I have been looking into Native Extensions and now it's time to get coding. Ben is going to continue working on the design which we will later integrate with our flash-builder code.

Different Types of Students

Notice how the design student is the worst

Good Student

Average Student

Bad Student

Survey

We decided it would be a good idea to do a survey of people's study habit to make sure there is a need for our app and what things we should be focus on.

Most people thought they had very average study habits and only occasionally take breaks away from their computers.

The worst stats came from the questions regarding meals.

We're very glad we did the survey because it showed there is need for our app. The basic idea around it that usually someone will sit at their computer struggling to get something finished and will only take a break once the task is complete unless someone else suggests a break. Unfortunately when everyone is busy and stressed there is no one there to make this suggestion. Our app aims to be the voice of reason which says 'hey take a break you feel much better and be a lot more productive after some rest'

MOSCOW

Must Have

- Notification Break System
- Goals List
- Settings (naggyness, silent mode)

Should Have
- Links to Weather
- Snooze function
- Help Page

Could Have
- Gps Location (for notifications)
- Rewards System
- Blocking of other apps / internet / do not disturb mode

Won’t Have
- Connection with friends to coordinate breaks (Scope)
- Anything distracting (such as countdowns)

Rough Timeline

Oct4

Base Code
More Defined Design
Defined App Model (based partially off survey results)

Oct 11
Basic App Functions working
Started User Testing

Oct 18
Edited Layouts from user testing (if need be) – design done
Majority of App coded

Oct 25
Almost everything done – slight troubleshooting
User Testing Complete
Video Creation

Roles

Ben – Design, UI
Nicky – Research, Flashbuilder Coding
Emily – Flashbuilder Coding, Editing design to fit coding

All = User Testing

Notification Settings

Rather than allowing people to set how often breaks are (as that kind of defeats the purpose) we thought we’d have settings as to how busy you are. If you are not busy, the breaks would be more frequent to keep you health and well being at a maximum but when you are really busy, they would be limited a bit more. Such as a shorter lunch break.

According to research your are only supposed to spend 6 hours a day at a computer. While this is probably the best thing you can do for your health it is not a realistic approach for students. We understand that student do need to spend long hour working hard but the aim of our app is to make these long hours healthier. It's not about reducing work hour but about maximising the productivity during these hours and creating less stressful and happier work habits

Sound Settings
We really wanted to have sound but this is not practical if you’re using the app at uni which it is intended for.
So we though of a couple of settings
Either you could change the volume and vibrate, or you could tell it where you are, ie home or uni. Home would have noise, use would vibrate, and maybe a silent mode also.

Initial Concepts

In our team Ben have take on the role of lead graphic designer will Nicky and I are going to focus more on the research and coding side of the app.

He showed us two concepts based on the zen theme.

The are two of the themes Ben came up with. I think the first one is take the zen theme a little too literal and I'm not a huge fan of the realistic rock and sand aesthetic. However I really like the second theme! I think its simple yet interesting and is pretty exactly what I had in mind when the zen idea was suggested. 

Zen Theme

As our app is amid at mental health and wellbeing we want to create a relaxing theme. The idea our of Zen was suggested

Group Notes

- notifications need to not be naggy

– could incorporate humor?

– potential to chose the personality (emily’s american alter ego)

- create goal system in a list with check boxes

– tick of check boxes at end of day

– all completed = reward

– uncompleted = roll over to next day

– importance system

- use iPad and iPhone?

- auto update/sync with each other?

**Focused on improving work habits by reducing stress and increasing productivity**

Style

- zen (need to convince Kah – perhaps an abstract take?)

- clear, simple, clean, minimal, not distracting

Survey the class to find out

- how often they take breaks

- would this help them?

Run as a background App

- would need a stop function to turn off

- a clear function for the goals (ie if you open after holidays so you don’t have to delete one by one)

Is It Important

We decided to make a list of all the things we wanted in our app and decide how important and how difficult they would be. Things with a very hard difficulty rating and which were of low importance were scraped. This helped to give us a better idea of what we wanted the app to be and how hard it would to achieve the different scopes

Better Work Habits

We have decided to go ahead with the health and well being app aimed as student study habit. That main reason for this is because it concerns a large majority (if not all of us) in this class. It would also help prevent injury such as RSI (repetitive strain injury) and would help improve your study habits with regular breaks. Another contributing factor which cause us to settle on this idea is the fact that it is something we would use and benefit from having.

We're all rather excited about our idea and our initial discussion have  led to a rather large scope
- time based reminders to stretch eat and walk
- quirky comments using weather such as
-”It’s warm outside – take a lunch break in the sun” (using real weather data)
- “You had BurgerFuel for lunch yesterday – why not try Subway?” (using gps locations and maybe user input)
- “You only had 4 hours of sleep last night – time to head home” (using time from the last time you touched your phone and when your alarm clock went off)
- blocking distracting apps such as facebook, tumblr and youtube but notifying you on your break
- offering rewards such as chocolate bars after your goals have been achieved (goals would be set at the start of the day)
- reminding you what assignments you have due and what is required (ie you have an essay due in 3 days – have you written a draft?)

The app has the potentially to be a full on organisation app however we are going to start by focusing on the working hours of it and the health side as we know as students we have really bad habits. We need to figure out a realistic scope but think we’ll present an idea that can be expanded on.

Initial Idea

We were told to build an app around something that we care about. The main thing the three of us felt strongly about was student health and wellbeing. As media student we find we often don’t take very good care of ourself. We spend long hours sitting at computer and don’t do things like take regular break and eat when we’re supposed to. We’re interested in making an app which will promote better work habits and hopefully lead to more productive students

Project Three - On the Contrary

Group Project With

Nicky Hoffman and Ben Hartley