A Quarterly Reflection - via Alex

Hello all,

Winter quarter has ended and Spring quarter has begun (although I can't say that the weather correlates!); We thought that it would be appropriate to post individual reflections/summaries of our second quarter of work on Access Lecture. If you have been following us at all, these reflections will be very similar to the first quarter reflections posted a while back. If you haven't been following us, then I think that you'll catch on rather quickly!

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A big picture overview:

So, what exactly did we get done this quarter? The answer to this is "a lot", so I'll sum-it-up in a more abstract format, for both my sanity and yours. I will divide our focus points and accomplishments into two categories: technical and scholarly.

1. Technical Focus Points
We made a lot of technical progress in regards to developing our app for the iPad, as well as developing for the iPad in-general. I recently had a look over the first resources that we bookmarked and shared to try and teach ourselves these crazy things called "Objective-C" and the "iPhone SDK". Here's what some of them were called:

• "The Hello, World Application: An Overview"
  
• "How to Handle Basic iPhone Interaction"
• "Creating a Basic iPad Application"
• "A Basic Fundamental Guide for iOS Application Design

Well, you get the point. Looking back at these tutorials, it's almost laughable how little we knew at the time! I think that these past two quarters have proved that the "learn by doing" approach certainly works, as we are all very adept in various areas of iPhone SDK development. I've actually started answering iPhone development questions in Stack Overflow for fun (for the reputation!).

In short, we have more than solidified our knowledge of the fundamentals of iOS development, and then some; we don't need to yell for help whenever we want to add a new feature anymore! It's a great feeling to realize that you've gained so much knowledge without even realizing it.

So, specifically, what have we accomplished technically for Access Lecture?

1. The near-finalization of our prototype applications for our usability tests.
   
2. A polished UI, with emphasis on visual accessibility.
3. The full implementation of the Note-Taking Box feature.
4. A multi-touch logging system, that records the coordinates of each tap. This feature will be very valuable for usability testing, and will allow us to pinpoint potential usability flaws.
5. Fixed various bugs with our prototype apps, most of which have been haunting us all year!

I feel pretty good about that list!

2. Scholarly Focus Points
I use the term "scholarly" to encapsulate all of our work/achievements in regards to our research (and the accompanying research process) itself. The key items to mention are:

1. Our acceptance to present and attend two computing research conferences! The Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference in San Fransisco, and the Posters on the Hill conference in Washington D.C. We will be presenting a poster on Access Lecture at both of these conferences.
   
2. Our intense work and research into usability testing. The term "usability test" has been all over our blog this quarter, and for a very good reason! We achieved and completed work excellently in this regard.
   
3. The accumulation of a vast amount of scholarly research articles that relate to our own research at Access Lecture in various ways. We now have an excellent collection of notes and references on these articles, which will be used when we eventually write our own papers and reports.

In summary, we gained an incredible amount of experience and received a comparable amount of exposure to academic research and the nuts and bolts that go with it. Our acceptance to the conferences was exciting news to say the least, and to think that they're both coming up in a little over a month's time!

In Closing:

I have gained a great amount of exposure and experience to both the research and technical aspects of research. I am really amazed at how much I've learned about so many different things in just one quarter, I feel very accomplished and proud to be a part of this project. What's even better, is that we still have one quarter of part time work, and then an entire summer of a 9-5 for the Access Lecture project! With so much more to go and so much already happening, I can barely even speculate on what is to come for me in the future!

Here's to another great quarter, and most of all, some more great fun!

Thank you for reading.

- Alex