Final project progress

Our final project is running smoothly, mostly because the target is clear and the teammates are hardworking.

We've met our clients this Monday and listened to their suggestions and requirements. Currently we've done most of what they want. But it is essential for us to get feedback from them to improve our application, which is what we are about to do.

Though the functionality of our application is fairly simple, there are still many things to consider and we have not settled all of them. Things like how to provide the best user experience can only be told when it is used by real users. In our case, the user experience may affect the UI massively and even lead to changes to the data structure (depending on what kind of information to retrieve and how to display them). We have also been warned that the requirements from the client may change from time to time, which sometimes causes misunderstanding and frustration. So it is urgent to get feedback in case of a lot of redesign work.

Another issue is about the framework. Mobile web application framework is a new concept and the related products are not that robust and fast. From our experience, the sencha touch framework is a little slow on real devices due to the performance issue of mobile phones. Anyway, it is acceptable, but not as good as native applications.

In short, thing are going well. Coding, debugging, photoshoping, that is the life of the rest of semester! :)

Final Project

Finally I can tell something about our final project.

Well, it turns out that it is really painful to decide what to do. We cannot do games since one teammate is unwilling to do that; and our first idea is almost killed by evil Prof >.<. There is a glimmer of hope left in our first idea and we eargly went out to seek our clients. However, they seemed not that interested. Damn!

Things started to go better when one of the CVWO teams told us that one of the organisations lacks some automatic mechanism to speed up the attendence taking procedure. Traditionally the volunteers have to mark the attendence on a sheet and hand it to the staff in charge. Then the staff has to go through hundreds of sheets and manually key in the attendence to the computer. Obviously this is a tedious work and it usually takes one or two weeks, which is highly inefficient.

After thinking about the problem, it turns out that building a mobile application to help take attendence is a good solution. A volunteer only needs a modern smart phone. He/she can mark the attendence on the phone and upload the data via WiFi or 3G. The data is automatically stored into database so the staff doesn't need to do the tedius work at all.

So basically, we are going to build a mobile web application to achieve this goal. Firstly, a volunteer has to log in using his account. After that, he can view all his relevant befriendees' names, etc. He only needs to check the names by tapping on the screen and finally submit to the server.

Well this turns out to be not that hard. But probably we will add more functionalities according to their requirements.

Hope things go well in the next few weeks!