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