Week 1 again!

Hello everyone,

We started off this quarter by putting our test applications on the iPad to try them outside of the XCode simulator.  They both worked fine except for a small problem that occurred when you plugged in an external keyboard.  We want users to have the option to be able to use either the virtual keyboard or a physical keyboard, but we had overlooked the fact that our lecture view will display a little bit differentlu depending on whether or not the screen had to display the keyboard as well.

We realized early on that when the virtual keyboard popped open it'd cover up part of our lecture view, so to fix this we made it so that whenever the notes box was opened for typing, we'd push the lecture view up so that none of it would be hidden by the keyboard. Unfortunately we forgot that when the user plugs in the physical keyboard, we won't need to push the lecture view up.  We were able to fix the problem (thanks to some old posts we found on stackoverflow.com) so now the apps will display nicely regardless of what keyboard you choose to use.

Aside from that, Alex and I have been working on preparations for the two conferences we will be attending next month.  For one of the conferences we needed to revise our abstract, and for both of the conferences we need to create our posters.  Alex and I brainstormed yesterday to figure out what information we want to highlight on the posters, and then today we created a nice mock up of one of the posters using Photoshop.  Alex used some of his Photoshop ninja skills (which I'm hoping will rub off on me...) and now our design looks really nice.  Neither of us have made a poster before so we're waiting to get feedback from the professor we're working with.  Once we've come up with a solid design, maybe we can post the mock-up on here as a nice little preview.

We're also going to start scheduling people for the usability tests next week. We were able to recruit ~10 or so people who wear glasses that want to do the tests.  While it's disappointing that we were unable to find visually impaired volunteers, a lot of other research projects we've read about experience similar problems and had to similarly use people who wear glasses.  A lot of tests that were designed for completely blind subjects had to use volunteers wearing blindfolds because sometimes it's quite difficult to find people that are actually in your target group.

We'll let you know what happens this week with the development of our poster and with the upcoming usability tests!

Lindsey