The thing to understand about our group is that we will argue intensely until we have a solution as each of us thinks that our idea is the right approach to take. The first debate was on how to visualize other users and their location. Few ideas were passed around, but essentially the main problem was the screen limitation and how it complicated interactions if we were to implement a more complex visualization.
One idea was to have users grouped depending on the amount of users in the area, and then visualize them as if they were in buildings. The problem with this was that the user would have to rotate the screen and zoom in a ridiculous amount to be able to see other users nicknames.
The other idea, which we eventually settled on was to display a kind of semi-3D node display. Where groups would be represented as dots with varied sizes depending on how many users in the area, and the closer you zoomed in/selected a node, the display would zoom in to the group and separate them into individual users. Groups will be sorted in a recursion style algorithm that makes grids within grids dependant on location.
(See Image).
I really liked this idea, especially seeing I’m getting into the core Graphics area of Iphone Development.
Server Side Reasoning:
Back to the google app engine, we felt if we use this as our message server/sorter. It will minimise the filtering of data and transfers on the phone, thus saving battery and so on. Another great aspect of the google app engine is that it uses google servers…which can rarely be timed out dur to request numbers :D
So quick look of tasks to complete by next week..
-- Get the backend for the Google App Engine up and running (storing messages, generating xml and filtering)
-- Research Core Animation
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