Pieces coming together

Hello all,

Just as our second week of 9-5 development comes to an end, our "proof of concept" implementation does as well!

We have worked towards one primary goal this week: Create an iOS application that is capable of connecting to a Mac remotely, and displaying the Mac's screen contents in real-time.

We have finally been able to receive and setup our Mimio Capture and Mimio Teach system next to our workstation (see photo); the Mimio is being used as a tool to aid in the demonstration of a proof of concept for Access Lecture. Essentially, the Mimio system wirelessly transmits what is drawn on a whiteboard to a PC/Mac program. Our application contrasts with the Mimio in several important ways (hardware usage, portability, and accessibility focus to name a few), but the Mimio can still provide us with the ability to mimic the ideal/eventual functionality of Access Lecture.

Our task was to take the capture obtained by the Mimio, and make it viewable from within our application on the iPad. There are many possible ways to approach this problem; the approach we chose involves establishing a wireless, remote connection to a Mac which is running the Mimio software. We were able to utilize the open source iOS framework "Telekinesis" to easily obtain core remote-connection functionality. We built on-top of Telekinesis, and utilized it to stream the Mimio capture display to the iPad with little latency (about a 1 second delay). An example screenshot of the app displaying the Mimio capture from the whiteboard image above can be seen here.

Our proof of concept has the following requirements:

• Access to a wireless network
• A Mac with the Telekinesis software installed, setup, and activated

Clearly, this model involves (generally) minor software/hardware constraints; in-terms of these constraints, it is still extremely unclear whether the final application will even remotely this setup. The current aspects technical setup are meant only to demonstrate, and do not yet provide a satisfactory level of practicality for our user-base.

Well, that is all for this week. We're very excited with the significant leaps in progress that Access Lecture has seen since full-time development began just two weeks ago, and we plan to continue this trend in the weeks to come.

- Alex