Week 11 - Location Manager + new interface

So my main job this week was to get the Location Manager working, by Location manager I mean getting the users current location updating and then updating the view accordingly.

GOOD LORD WAS IT EVIL, well, not so much evil as extremely fiddly and difficult to set up. But after 4 days of trial and error and lots of coffee I got it working.

So with that done, back to the visuals, Still having trouble animating the pins, but here a few screenshots...notice the Tab-Free interface, it blends with the map more in my opinion...





The app is really coming along nicely, Am currently working on Animated pins and getting them to actually represent users locations, other than pre-made ones we have been using.

More updates soon

Week 9 + 10 - Functionality & Presentation

Quick cap for week 9 - We spent the week making the presentation, graphics and making sure our app worked to give a fully functional demo.

So this week we gave our presentation and working demo :D

Presentation went fairly well, some nice feedback. We should have prepared better as there were a few conflicts. One being that 'apparently' my email about the testing of the tab-free interface never got received. So I looked a little weird, but I did show the lecturer previously so we did not lose marks for it :D

Here are the slides from the presentation (some of the images are a little dodgy) but you should get the gist





















More news soon

Week 8 - Map Conundrums continued

All-righty, so good news, I finally fixed the resetting pins bug. Essentially I was trying to override one view, with another that was actually inside the view. A little complicated but fixed now :D

So the pins were working, this week the next step was to optimize the marker class that controls the pins, the map view and the map view contents.

Interestingly enough, well not interestingly so much as predictably, my code was quite the opposite of optimized. The main issues arising were memory leaks, I was not releasing or been attempting to sort out any memory objects I was creating, so a lot of crashing and bugs occurred.

We are all still debating amongst each other about the UI in general, but Matt and I are strongly for a 'tab free' option for the interface. We are basing the entire interface around a map, so we really want to keep the focus on the map and its locations.
Its still in progress

So pretty much, this week has been getting basic functionality, chat, map pins, view changing etc ready for the presentation, which Kim is working quite hard on. I also took our new interface idea (a sketch of the tab-free interface) around to a few people and students, and they generally liked the new concept better than the original tab view.


New info soon :D

Week 7 - Map Debugging

Okay so this week's main goal for me was to get the map view working without resetting the pins back to the default red view every time the view changes or you click it.

Essentially the problem was I had to keep re-assigning the Annotation view class we are using to style the pins to re-load each time a view changed.

So logically, if I were to tell the app to re-load the MKAnnotation view each time we change the map view or click a pin, it should fix the problem...I was wrong.

I won't get into nitty gritty details, but essentially after a week of unsuccessful attempts, I realised that I needed the latest release of the SDK :(

SO a bit of a wasted week per se... well actually I won't call it wasted as I learnt more about Objective-C, however I will post updates during next week as I debug in the new SDK.

fingers crossed :P

Week 6 - Enter the map view

Very productive week, was during mid semester break..so we did not really get a break but we did get the servlett, xml parser and map views mostly working.

Matt and Dom are in-charge of the servlet and XML parser, so i will let you read about that on thier blogs.

My job was to make the map view load properly with pins for nearby users locations, SUCCESS! :D:D:D got it working...



The next step though was to have multiple pins, otherwise it would be pointless even having a map display. Who would want to see just one user out of say 100 :P

anywho, a few tweaks here and there and I made a marker class that lets you add pins based on locations onto the map view at any time. So I called it a few times to test, and hey presto it worked :)



The final thing i wanted to get working this week was to have custom graphics as the pins...and also a button in the annotation so the user could initiate the private chat. So after even more fiddling around and tweaking this is what I finally came up with :)


Using random stick men as our graphics :P


and a little button within the annotation to switch to private chat view


well there, as i said productive week, however the pins do reset after interacting with them or switching views...but that can be fixed during next weeks coding session :P

Week 5 - Goodbye Google :(

Week 5 was pretty much the same as last week, though, on Dom's recommendation we are going to use a java servlett talking to an oracle server as I believe, as opposed to the google engine. Read Dom or att's blog for more info as I cant explain it as well as I don't have a good understanding on how server side apps work :S

Other than that, I’ve just been continuing trying to figure out Objective-…im getting there.

In general, am fairly confident that I can get some for of map app ready by mid-semester break, so that we can implement it into our app.

Week 4 - The lull

Week 4 was fun…kind of

So generally good progress has been made. Officially, the chat app cannot be called completely anonymous anymore as we plan to show users location on a map. Yes their usernames will still be different, but if you were close to someone and got annoyed…you could ultimately find them.

There are many debates about what constitutes as ‘anonymous’, without going into too much detail, there is still a level of security/anonymity in our app, but expect a description change soon.

In my own work…am starting to get the hang of core animation and display functions for the iphone. It is tricky, but its just the syntax of objective C that im not used to.
More updates soon