Progress before the school year ends

Hey everyone!

I mentioned in my last post that we were planning on wrapping up a couple of little things with the app before the school year ended.  While we will be continuing work over summer, we will be off from work for 2 weeks so we wanted to leave off at a good point. 

This week we reworked a lot of the icons to make them easier to distinguish (i.e. making certain icons thicker and removing gradients from icons since they made the icons more difficult to understand when inverted).  Abhishek worked on making a test application where you can take notes using a stylus, and this week we were able to integrate it with our project.  We added a navigation system so that the user would be able to open different pages of the application. While we were changing to application to be navigation based we were able to refactor it a bit and clean up a lot of the messy stuff that ended up sneaking it's way in over time. We were also able to make sure that the code was documented as well.  Since we will be off from the project for a while before we start up again over summer, it's important that the code is readable and easy to understand, so that was another priority before the school year ended.

Finally, we wanted to remove the tap zooming which our usability test subjects found unintuitive and conflicting with other applications gestures.  The app no longer has support for the tap zooming, and we're working on salvaging some of that logic to use for the zoom in and zoom out buttons.  At first we were expecting it to be very simple to reuse the code, but we've since realized that without the gestures to send locations to your zooming methods it can actually be difficult until you figure out how to pinpoint the coordinates you need to work with. We've all taken a couple shots at figuring out how to calculate the numbers we need but so far we've been unsuccessful; however, since we've finished everything else we wanted to work on before summer started, we will have all of next week to devote to tackling this problem.

We'll post next week to summarize the work we've done over the past quarter, and where we were able to leave off on.  And then in a couple more weeks we'll start regularly posting updates again!

-Lindsey