Week 9 - Working on a Brand New Poster!

Hey everyone,

Last week Alex told you guys about our new plans for the notetaking system. We got everything working, and we thought we were done with notetaking until we tried putting the application on the device.  It turns out that the iPad simulator in XCode is not a good indicator of how well something will work on the iPad...in fact the application can run quite differently.

While notetaking was rather smooth on the simulator, when we tried it out on the device we were horrified. There was a pretty bad delay when writing, and everything came out angular i.e. a circle would come out as a triangle. We tried optimizing it more, but we just couldn't get the notetaking to an adequate state.

We were previously using Quartz 2D to handle the notetaking/drawing system, and now we are considering using OpenGL instead.  We've learned that OpenGL is used a lot for ios games, and we believe that it could potentially be faster and more efficient. Unfortunately, none of us have any prior experience with OpenGL and it appears to be a bit time consuming to actually learn it.

We had planned on spending the last two weeks giving OpenGL our best shot, but then we received some excellent news. The poster application we submitted for ACM ASSETS 2011 was accepted! We had to write a short 2 page paper about the project and they also sent back a lot of feedback on what we wrote.  That feedback, in combination with the experiences we had at Posters on the Hill and the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference will need to be taken into consideration when creating our new poster.

A couple of the things we learned from our previous poster presentations

• Text should be kept short! People do not want to come up to your poster and stand there for a few minutes reading. We received a couple of comments about our posters having too much text.

• Make text larger! Not excessively large, but it's a big poster and people will be standing a couple of feet away from it. Make sure it won't be difficult for people to read the text at that distance.

• We need to make it more clear that we are only working on the software aspect of this project. At the Richard Tapia conference people became very excited about the hardware and asked questions about that, and we had to explain that we did the iPad application portion of the project.
 

• People like diagrams. It can sometimes be easier and faster to convey something with pictures than with text.

This week we will be working on the new poster. Some of the material from the previous posters may be able to be rewritten and shortened so that it can be used on the new poster, but we also have to write about all of the work that we have done since the last conference.

Lindsey