Preparation for round 2 of usability testing begins!

Hello all,

We're extremely excited right now regarding our recent leaps in progress on Access Lecture. I believe that our progress can be best summarized as such:

Supervisor: "Alright team! It's time to get ourselves together and tackle this real-time screen capture issue! once and for all!"
AL Team: "Uhm, it's already done."
Supervisor: "...Really?"
AL Team: "Yep."
Supervisor: "Oh...well this is awkward."
AL Team: "Yeah..."
Supervisor: "Oh yeah? We still need to integrate it into the main project! Now get on that slackers!"
AL Team: "Did that too."
Supervisor: "Of course, I knew that!"
AL Team: "...So...what do we do now?"
Supervisor: "Do some usability tests! There's no way that you've had time to do that too!?"
AL Team: "Uh, no...no we haven't done those yet."
Supervisor: "What a bunch of slackers."

The AL project now boasts the implementation of these features:

• Integration of the real-time screen capture features which were discussed in the last blog post!
• Full zooming/navigation functionality has been added and modified to work with the real-time capture screen.
• A nice cleanup and sharpening of the app. Features are now more responsive to the user, and various bugs/glitches have been tidied up.

The key victory is that first bullet. As we discussed in our last blog entry, we were having more than a little trouble integrating the real-time capture functionality with the rest of the app; this was mostly due to the UIWebView not appreciating having its ScrollView modified. We decided to step-back and take a different approach, and it certainly paid off! Instead of displaying a webpage which refreshes continuously with images of the Mac's screen, a UIImageView is now fed a stream of those same images. The result is a view that looks exactly like the WebView, but actually functions!

Now that we have gotten the app to a stable and working proof-of-concept state, we are ready to conduct our second round of usability testing. The insight and feedback obtained from the first round was extremely valuable, and with so many new features added since then, the expectations for round 2 are equally as high. The goal is to begin the testing no more than 2 weeks from now.

Additionally, our applicant-paper for the ACM ASSETS 2011 conference has been finalized and submitted! Here's to hoping that we'll be in Scotland come fall.

- Alex