Today we had our last class! Everything seems to be mostly done just putting everything together and making sure it runs correctly. The only thing that had to be done today was put licensing in the all the code files. Next week we will meet and each group will give a presentation on how the entire semester went and what exactly it is that we did and how we got to our finished product. It has been a long semester and a lot of hard work but it was an interesting class to take. We finally got to take what we have been learning and use it in a real world project. We got to learn how to deal with a company and take what they imagine there application to look like and actually bring it to life. I think we did a good job with grasping all the pieces they wanted in the puzzle app! I can’t wait to be able to visit the Worcester Art museum and actually use the app that we have been working on all semester and be able to say my classmates and I built this!

From the blog klentblog » cswsu by klent22 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This week we had paula who works in the conservatory come in and play with the ipad and the apps! She seemed to be pleased with the outcome of the puzzle app, a few last minute changes that we will be making are adding the words easy medium and hard to the picture buttons that way the kids can know what to expect when they click on the button! The hard one can definitely be a bit hard because of the black image that takes up most the image. Come to an end I can see what worked in this class and what did not. The class had a good setup, like working in groups to get a task done. What I wish was that it was a little more organized with what the museum was expecting out of this app. It took a while to get the images they wanted and it took a while to get exactly what they wanted out of the puzzle which is what my group was working on. Other then that the project flowed pretty well.

From the blog klentblog » cswsu by klent22 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

As we begin to wind down to the end of the semester the app is finally starting to come together. Today we were able to meet with Tim and let him know what exactly we need to be able to finish up with the puzzle app. We said we needed the home page for our app and the three images he would like us to use for the puzzle. We were able to get those earlier today and they have been implemented into the puzzle. The puzzle is very close to begin done! It looks great! A few small things need to be changed like centering the image selection, but all very small and easy fixed problems. Below I attached an image of what the cover page looks like, this was designed mostly by Tim, with a few added touches from the group. It will be interesting to see if Tim likes it as much as we do! Next week I believe Tim said Paula is coming in, she is one of the people who have the finally say on the project. I hope she likes what we come up!

From the blog klentblog » cswsu by klent22 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This has been a slow week for the puzzle group. We have our working app and we are just waiting on images from Tim. We showed him our app last Monday and he said we made a lot of good improvements and that he has been working on a cover page for the puzzle. Right now that’s what we are waiting for. Once we implement that we will see what else needs to be done to be able to have a finished product. Once we believe our product is done we will tell Joe that he can go ahead and put it all together and give it the right color scheme.

One problem we have been having with the puzzle app is getting it to have multiple images to choose from, we are not sure if there is any easier way to do this or just create three index.html files. We will have to start figuring this out because time is running out and the finished product is going to be due soon.

As for that one problem I think we are at a good place. I am anxious to see what the final app will look like!

From the blog klentblog » cswsu by klent22 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

I wasn’t able to make it to class this work, but I was able to get all the information from my partners. Tim had come to the class meeting, so that he could tell everyone what he liked and didn’t like in the version that we had sent to him. For the puzzle app, he liked the basic design of it, but was wondering if we could have a cover page with a simple message to the user and then a start button and on that cover page you could choose from two different images that you would like to use in the puzzle. Once you clicked start you could begin the puzzle, restart the puzzle or go back and choose a different image. If you completed the puzzle a box would pop up and say something like congratulations you won!. Seeing the puzzle before hand without the cover letter I thought it looked good but now seeing it with the cover page and the buttons it look a ton better! Its very appealing. We decided to take out the difficulty levels because the hard was just too hard for kids to be playing with. So there is one level and that is easy that way it should only take a kid a couple minutes to complete. The next step is to be able to display the multiple images on the cover page. We have only been able to show one for right now. We finally got the images from Tim this week, so we were able to implement them into the puzzle.

From the blog klentblog » cswsu by klent22 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This week we were able to get our puzzle app to work on the ipad with the help of the simple code we found. So we came together to figure out our next steps. We decided to start making it look cooler now. We wanted to add a side bar with possible scrolling features, this would be used to select the image you wish to use in the puzzle. We found a website that had cool ways of doing that and we will try and implement that this week. Another thing we need to work on is the difficulty levels. We have two levels right now that are working with a few glitches, only problem is that the hard level is way too hard. We will need to figure out a way to stop that from cutting it up into way too many pieces. This will be a good amount to aim for for next week!

From the blog klentblog » cswsu by klent22 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This week was a slow week due to being on spring break, but a classmate did email the class with what was wrong with the app. The app looked fine but the puzzle pieces couldn’t move. So after my group did some research we found that the draggable behavior that we have been using in our code is not supported with touch devices. We found this website that allows you to add about 5 lines of  code that will basically allow you to use the code you already have and everything will work how it is suppose too. After implementing this into our code and testing it on the ipad it worked! so the next steps are getting difficultly levels for the puzzle. Will post back later in the week to tell how that is going.

From the blog klentblog » cswsu by klent22 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This week we continued on working on the puzzle, we decided as class that we needed to get a deploy-able version of the app by the end of the week. Some problems we encountered when others tested out our code is that the code worked fine in chrome or safari but it wouldn’t work in Firefox  so we need to find a way to fix that. Another member from the class got the iPad from the WAM with the kiosk pro on it so he could start testing the whole app, he came up with some problems the our puzzle app when using it on the iPad  This are some of things we will need to look more into when we return back at school from break.

We are still waiting to get the images from Tim from the WAM that are going to be used for the puzzle, hopefully we will get those when we return from break as well. For the next parts we will look into the problems that occurred when the testing of the app began.

From the blog klentblog » cswsu by klent22 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This week we were asked to have a working Demo for our class on the 25th. Researching ways to start this demo a team member found open Source code, we thought this would be a good place for us to start. Adding on to the open source code one of the teams members uploaded the code to Github so we could all play around with it and get a feel for how the code worked. As we began playing with it we realized that some of the pieces were “sticky” meaning they were very hard to move and you almost had to grab them from the bottom of the piece to be able to move them to a new location. This was the only major drawback from the demo. So in this upcoming week we will continue working on the demo and fix the buttons so they move easily. Other features that were incorporated in the puzzle were 3 difficulty levels (easy, medium and hard). There is also a working refresh button and a restart button.

Next week we hope to resolve the issue with the pieces but as for now we believe we are on the right track.

From the blog klentblog » cswsu by klent22 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

This week my group and I continued to work on the puzzle app. We tried to fix an open source code we had found that we thought would be a perfect fit for this app but we were unable to do that. We had another person in the class look it over to try and find why the code was producing a black image and not the image we had selected but they were unable to figure it out as well. After all that we just decided to get rid of it and start new. We began searching again for other open sources and we came across some more code. This code we were able to run it, put our own images in it and the images are being produced correctly. Some things that we needed to fix were that the code right now only takes small images. If you choose a large image it takes up more then the page and is near to impossible to complete. We also noticed that if the jigsaw pieces were a light color or white they disappeared into the background, so we changed the background color to help that problem.

One of the assignments for this week was to have a running app that we could bring in for Monday so that the whole application can get put together.  This way the testing groups can start playing around with the actual product. By getting this done we as a class will have an idea where we all stand and what should be worked on next. I am excited to see what this application will look like after everything comes together.

From the blog klentblog » cswsu by klent22 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.