We’ve been asked to talk about what our finals will be for Always On, Always Connected. Mine comes as no surprise: I plan to finish the app that I’ve been working on all semester. Hopefully by the end of this year, I will have my first fully functioning app live and in the app store!
This week for homework we’re just supposed to brainstorm some ideas of physical objects that we might want to connect our phones to through Bluetooth. It was pretty fun watching that connection happened during class, and Bluetooth wireless capabilities, even though they’re old by now, still continue to fascinate me.
However, the result of being knee-deep in thesis right now is that the part of my brain devoted to mobile phones is pretty concerned with the mobile app that I’ve been working on. My mind is all wrapped up questions like Phonegap or Eclipse webview? How much context can I get away with providing through GSON or JSON data? And so on. So it’s been difficult pulling myself away from that to think about things.
Still–if I had to say what sort of things I’m interested in connecting to my phone, I guess it would be something along the lines of the quantified self movement. I see the potential in tracking myself and collecting my own data. And as we talked about in classa couple weeks ago, there’s plenty of room in that industry for open source apps where people get to own the data they keep rather than having it sucked up by relentless advertisers.
I began my user-testing for my app this week, and it ended up being a more (and less) revealing process than I originally anticipated.
Essentially, I sat down with my roommate for the first round of testing a couple days ago. I wanted to start with the sort of over-the-shoulder, informal testing that Shawn had explained in class.
And in fact, we did end up doing this. My roommate went through the app and spoke his thoughts aloud while I took notes on what he said. The app isn’t too complicated, so he seemed to understand the user scenarios very easily, but even still he did provide me with some really useful feedback on the design and user experience of the whole site. Some notes:
So with that in mind, I realized that my app needed to change a great deal before I could do any more user testing on it. With that in mind, I spent the rest of the week beginning the process of shiftinghe app into more of what I want it to be. For instance, I don’t want to be the one providing all the material in the app, so I’m going to need to scrape some feeds to gather it. And I changed some of the MongoDB code to make it so that I only get one quote at a time, rather than the stream that I was receiving previously.
So that’s where I am right now. I only got through the very first part of my user testing, but it helped me realize that my app still isn’t where I want it to be for user testing. So I feel like I’m in a good place.
Pictures below are of what it used to look like and what it is beginning to look like now.
So it recently occurred to me that I haven’t posted all of the homework assignments that demonstrate the things that I’ve learned in Always On, Always Connected up to this point in the semester. I’ll attempt here to show off some of the stuff that we’ve done so far:
Weeks 1, 2, and 3: Luisa and I collaborated on working on a project that we called Document It! It ended up incorporating all of the things that we worked on in the first three weeks: working with layouts, creating and switching between different activities and views, displaying video and images, toast messages, and so on. Working on it was a struggle at first, but we eventually began to get the hang of things.
Week 4: This week I chose to concentrate on webviews. Given my familiarity with HTML/CSS/Javascript, it only made sense! I don’t have just a homework assignment to show for this, since I essentially took the code that I originally messed around with for homework and extended it so that it could morph into my midterm. Check out here to see the video from there that shows how the app works (and if you check out my earlier post, you can click on a slideshow that shows a bit of the code/how it was done).
Speaking of that midterm (and of Weeks 6 & 7), for its creation I also ended up hooking a database to the app and making the website responsive so that it could easily translate across web and mobile. I enjoyed doing that, but what I’d really like to do is wrap the objects coming in from the database in Java code so that they’ll be more flexible to work with (but that will be embellished come finals).
And now I’ll jump back to Week 5. I spent this week just playing around with the canvas.draw. I was actually pretty unsuccessful and I couldn’t get my app to show anything, no matter what I tried to draw (I’ll show some pictures of my code below in case it elucidates why), but the truth was that around this point I was still enthralled by the webview + database capabilities, so when it didn’t work I switched over to working on that stuff more.
Where am I now? As I said earlier, I’m playing around with the Gson library so that I can do more with the data coming in from my database. In addition, I’m debating between switching to PhoneGap, which employs the HTML/CSS/Javascript that I’m already familiar with and as a bonus will work with both iOS and Android systems. On the flipside, though, I’ve already invested time into coding in Eclipse, and it would be nice to get really really comfortable with that environment.
We’ll see where things go from here!
I made some more conceptual progress on my AOAC midterm, which basically means that despite my best efforts, it has been incorporated into the monster that is my thesis.
Link to presentation is HERE.
This is what I really want to make for my AOAC midterm: a quote app–something that gives you a quote a day, specifically from academic, philosophical, and literary works that aren’t typically read or explored. It’s designed to both preserve those works and get the mind juices flowing, but more logistically I’m interested in seeing if and how I can get a database, webview, and connected site all working seamlessly. It’s also perfectly simple enough in scope.
But we’re supposed to come up with two ideas, so I suppose my backup would be something that’s related to what I’d like to do for my final–some sort of app that helps strengthen math skills in a simple and visually compelling way (ostensibly I’m talking about children’s math skills, but let’s be honest–I could probably use some help, too).
I like things. I like the Internet. I also like human beings, and coincidentally enough I happen to be a fan of the Internet.
But. No matter how many interaction designers reverently gush about the unlimited potential that will be unlocked, like manna, once all of our things are finally able to “communicate” intelligently with us, I still feel that a point needs to be made. Connecting our objects with the Internet and allowing them to relay information and respond to us does not necessarily mean that we are more connected with one another.
Now, there may not be a problem with that. But let’s at least make sure that we’re not conflating the two things. Let’s reinsert agency into the question, because I maintain that true human connection comes in different spices and flavors. We get to define what it is, and we get to define when it is meaningful and when it is simply superficial. Just because the introduction of certain technologies have been used, by some humans, as tools to better connect with others doesn’t mean that the further advancement of those technologies will yield the same results.* And the sooner we are able to acknowledge the truth, the sooner we can get down to the business of actually fostering those connections that we so deeply desire.
* Which is not to say that it could not, only that it does not inherently.
For my class “Always On, Always Connected,” we were asked to respond to the PBS video, “Are Cell Phones Replacing Reality?”
I mentioned briefly in class last week that I happen to work with some teenagers, and that my observance of their near-incessant cell phone use was one (of many) factors that contributed to my desire to take the class. Well, after watching the PBS video “Are Cell Phones Replacing Reality?”, I decided to return to my initial inspiration. So I asked the young people I work with to elaborate on their opinions of the role that cell phones play in their lives.
Never think that you know how people will respond to something. It turns out that in the three months that have passed since the last time we talked about the topic, they had all independently developed violently distasteful feelings towards their cell phones. All of them felt that cell phones were a necessary inconvenience, and thus they were more annoyed with their phones than anything else. In fact, one of them had, as of two weeks ago, “accidentally” broken his phone so as to be free from it.
Interestingly enough, the thing that they seemed to dislike the most about cell phones wasn’t their ubiquity, or the five million trillion functions that they serve, or the state of constant half-presence that they seem to encourage. What they rebelled against was the very idea of being plugged in all the time. They were against the tedium of constantly being expected to answer phone calls and text messages.
The story ends happily–most of them were able to overcome their consternation once I introduced them to the wonders of Airplane Mode. But I found it very telling that for them, the worst part of having a cell phone was the very feature that is inherent to all cell phones.
All of the projects that I mentioned a couple posts ago are proceeding along well (the end of the semester is always a rough time because so many things are due, but I’m excited to see how all of the final products will end up). But I thought I might write a little bit more about how Molecules in Motion is doing.
A couple of weeks ago, our class headed to the New York Hall of Science to do some prototype-testing on middle school students. We were nervous at first, because come on, let’s be honest…kids can be honest. In some cases, brutally honest (trust me, I have a sister who is in middle-school, so I know this firsthand!).
As it turned out, the students were really nice and extremely helpful. They were amazing at articulating what it was that they liked about the game, and where they thought that it could use a little work (they suggested adding music that speeds up as body activity increases, more challenging elements, and a fun narrative). And rather than being brutal, they seemed to be trying hard to be nice to us, which was sweet.
One of the great parts of the whole experience for our group was seeing how much fun the students had when they played the game and actually let themselves get into it. They tried it in groups of twos and threes, but later, we could see the whole bunch of them grouped up together, talking excitedly about what they had liked, and we definitely heard our activity get mentioned (score!).
We took lots of photos and video but in the interests of the students I’m not posting any of it online. Instead I’ll leave a couple pictures of the different splash screens that we were considering. We ended up going with the more colorful one, but at this point in the process that could always change.
Next steps: implement some of the changes that we were advised on (specifically adding supplemental materials, making the game more challenging, and beefing up on the science that’s conveyed). Also need to start implementing the Kinect code. We have to do it in these next couple of weeks because soon we’ll be back at NySci, testing our final products.
So in terms of our solar panel project, we’ve made some significant progress. Here are some of the outdoor conditions in which we tested our panel.
And here’s what we’ve learned:
1. There is some current going through solar panels that are placed in shaded conditions.
2. This may not be enough current to charge the battery (standard lead acid motorcycle battery) used in current camera traps.
3. But it may be enough to trickle charge batteries for other types of cameras. Or even cell phones, like an Android.
So now our next step is to figure out how much current and voltage an actual Android would draw when it’s being used.
