Final Post

Today the final deliverables for the course are due, aka the Portfolio and this Blog. I'm not sure what final blog posts usually state so I'll just blabber on about finally finishing this course.

So! Doing this course has obviously improved not just my coding skills but also my Photoshop, Illustration and team working skills.

I have learnt many lessons after completing the project, such as not leaving tasks to do the night before they are due and to encourage more communication and group meetups in the team. These new lessons I will carry with me to my future group working projects or any other IT courses.

Looking back at my first first on this blog, I sounded so oblivious to the effort needed to undertake this course. I sort of thought back then that there would be less coding and more designing, but now seeing that this project is coming to an end, I admit the amount of coding and designing required is just as equal. Mentioned also in that post was how I hoped to be put in a group that wasn't awkward and finish the course happily with no regrets and stuff. I think the outcome for this was somewhat successful aha.

It is not without the help of Lorna, the tutors and other students in the course that have gotten our project how far it went. The supportive advice, feedback and deadline reminders from everyone is greatly appreciated, so thank you!!

Finally, if my team members happen to be reading this, thank you for being awesome team members! Although our application didn't fully implement everything, we all worked as much as we could and without you all I don't know what would even happen. Your dedication to all nighters are so inspiring. Really. Hope all your future group projects do well! This is so cheesy ahha. So moving on.

I don't think I had too much trouble implementing the portfolio, but I hope there aren't any little mistakes left. Whether it be grammatical errors or just small coding errors that can potentially ruin the whole page. As you may have picked up if you've been reading over my posts on here for that last three months, I do tend to write a lot. So proof reading my portfolio wasn't something I found too exciting after already doing so a few times.

Anyway, the holidays are so near now! Good luck to everyone on any upcoming exams! Don't forget to study! If you're already on holidays, I question why you would waste it reading this but hope your holidays are going well anyway! And have an amazing rest of the year everyone! Bye for everrr :) :) :)

Heres a cute little photo of my group. :) 

Portfolio Things

Soo as we all know every individual is expected to have made a portfolio to go along with the individual blogs. Basically, I've spent a lot of time making it over the past week when really, I need to be studying for my exams. Why? ? Because my coding is so bad that if I don't it'll end up looking like trash.

My portfolio consists of five pages; the About Me, Projects, Reflection, Portfolio, and Other Work pages. All pages are accessible from the navigation bar which is fixed at the top of every page.

I wanted to base the design of my portfolio around the design of this blog so I have kept the same font, colour scheme and background. If you remember from like my fifth post or something, I mentioned that the font used is Calibri (despite it being so ordinary), the background is 'nice_snow' from subtlepatterns.com, and the colour scheme is green (#A2D4B0) on white.

The pages look like this..

This is the About Me page. 

This is a normal page filled with many writings. 

You can see that on the right of the normal pages, theres a fixed smaller navigation box that leads to different sections of the page. That little box goes to its full colours when its hovered over. 

You can see that I like simplicity. And maybe green? 

In achieving the portfolio to be the way it finally is, I encountered an issue which although may look fine on my laptop and probably other 13 inch laptops, may turn out different on different sized computer screens. The first problem I had was to do with the navigation bar. As some of my pages were long, I decided that having a fixed navigation bar would be more useful, so I applied this to the longer pages such as the PROJECTS and OTHER WORK pages. I had no problem doing this however noticed that were was a gap above the navigation bar, so when you scrolled up, you can see all the content moving thorough the gap. I decided that I wanted to remove this gap or cover it somehow. Unfortunately, my skills did not take me far enough to remove it (without just making the navigation bar higher so it'd cover the space), so I literally placed a white image there. So now, as I test out my portfolio on my laptop, it looks fine, but I am aware that on different sized computer screens, the gap may be more obvious because the image is fixed to a certain size. 

Along with this issue, the only other thing that frustrated me was having a caption with the images while you hovered over the image. In the REFLECTIONS page, I have made each image to have a caption successfully, but I wanted the caption to come when the image was hovered over. I don't know what the problem was but the caption only shows up when the cursor hovers over the caption area. So  unless you happen to be aimlessly hovering your mouse over the image, you won't know that there's a caption over it. I tried a few techniques and although some did work, they were not the way I wanted it to be, as in the fading of the caption was weird and changing that ruined the whole thing. Apart from these, I don't think anything else was too troubling to make in this portfolio.

It was actually kind of fun to make. It took up too much time though, that should have been spent studying for exams. 

Final Application Due

Today the final application and final report was due. Looking back at the previously due projects, it would be needless to say that our team rushed into finishing both projects in the last hours.

Since the tradeshow one week ago, we had made a list of all the things that the application still needed to do. I can't remember if i posted it last week or took a photo of the list and posted it. Or if i posted anything about it at all, but some of the things that we still needed to do included:

• the embedding of the separate maps (in pop up windows) into the same page
• providing only one hint at a time 
• removing all animal names in the articles that appear bolded as 'wild' 
• adding a results page which shows the questions that users got wrong 
• adding a rankings page
• adding a loader for the articles and maps when they load

Last night i remember China and Soobin started working on achieving these hours on end while I started the final report. It was clear that what each of us worked on was what we were strongest at doing. Bill was unheard of last night. 

After hours of researching and unsuccessful coding, I remember Soobin telling me that nothing worked and that they were getting frustrated. Apparently whenever they finally got somewhere, an older feature would lose its function. At this time, China then started to help me write up the report while Soobin did further code work. 

The report was worked on in Google Docs to allow the ease of both of us working on it at the same time. The structure that we laid the report out was as followed:

1.0 Introduction 
2.0 Final Product 
   2.1 Product Description Purpose and Audience  
   2.2 Product Implementation
   2.3 Instructions for Use  
3.0 Process    
   3.1 Issues, Challenges and Responses
   3.2 Changes Since Initial Idea  
4.0 Reflection  
   4.1 What We Like About the Final Product  
   4.2 What We Dislike About the Final Product
   4.3 Successful and Unsuccessful Aspects 
   4.4 Improvements 
   4.5 Eliminated Features 
5.0 Conclusion 
6.0 References  
7.0 Appendices 

I wrote out this structure out the day before with what i was going to mention in each heading, and honestly thought it wouldnt take that long to produce such a report which is why i left it to do the night before the report was due, and let me just say how regretful i am currently feeling.

I was reading over some of the past reports last year and was pretty impressed by some of them. I wasn't too impressed by the length or what they added into it, but i was really envious of how they wrote it. Like the writing style would be good enough to suit an award winning book, and thats important because you need readers of the report to not get bored. Thats why i literally read every word out of the really good reports and got a little sad knowing that our report would only ever be written that well if i had only started the report earlier!.!.! See, some people are born with a talent that makes them write formal stuff to be really addictive to read even if it is just a report. I, on the other hand, dont have this natural talent and can only write addictive to read stuff informally - and thats when i really try. So to write our report up to be really really nice to read, i need to try, and to try, i need time. And that was something i didnt arrange. So yea moving on.

The better reports from last year had included some extra information that was not mandatory (i.e. suggested to write from Lorna's list of recommendations). Some of the things included their team's process for construction (e.g. the iterative, incremental, waterfall etc models), really nicely drawn images, imported Trove content and availability/accessibility etc. I put as much effort as they did into their final report as i did into our first report (which actually included all of those initiative headings too) however needed that motivation again for the final report.

The final report basically went through the whole semester's implementation and reflective processes. Although i felt as though a lot of our information was repetitive, it was submitted that way anyway. Why? Because we didnt have enough time to change and make it better. Why? Because i didnt start it early enough..

Anyway, China and i stayed up all night last night doing the report. Basically China did all of the blue things and I did all of the red things:
1.0 Introduction 
2.0 Final Product 
   2.1 Product Description Purpose and Audience  
   2.2 Product Implementation
   2.3 Instructions for Use  
3.0 Process    
   3.1 Issues, Challenges and Responses 
   3.2 Changes Since Initial Idea  
4.0 Reflection  
   4.1 What We Like About the Final Product  
   4.2 What We Dislike About the Final Product  
   4.3 Successful and Unsuccessful Aspects 
   4.4 Improvements 
   4.5 Eliminated Features 
5.0 Conclusion 
6.0 References  
7.0 Appendices 
I actually admire China for doing so much given that she was also multitasking on the coding. I think Soobin stopped working on the coding somewhere around 2am-3am because he wasn't online anymore but im not too sure.

At 4.30am China uploaded the latest version of the game so far with links to the websites that she was learning off. She wanted to get the maps from the separate HTML files to be embedded in the same page as the questions. I thought the websites she gave were actually pretty useful:
- http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_iframe.asp
- http://www.web-source.net/embedding_web_pages.htm#.VFpkplOKXd5 

So i stopped working on the reports and tried to embed the maps into the same questions page given the websites that China suggested. I had managed to display the maps from the HTML pages but i was not sure how to generate the map that had linked to the same article's animal. I think i gave up around 30-45 mins later and went back to completing the report. 

At around 7am i remembered that i had to drive my sisters to school at 8am, and because i didnt want to risk crashing the car which although was pretty unlikely (i kinda just wanted a reason), i went to nap until 8am. You know when you're awake you're like 'wow im not even sleepy, i can pull an all nighter blah blah etc' ? And when you're asleep youre feeling the exact opposite, that its soo hard to get up and that sleeping is so good you could sleep forever? Well this was exactly me. At 7am i was sure that sleeping until 8am would only boost up my energy levels but getting up at 8am was one of the hardest challenges ever. 'Things in motion tend to stay in motion', ive heard. So anyway i literally drove my sisters to school half asleep and tired which was exactly what i was planning to avoid (dw no accidents happened). But when i got back home at 8.30am instead of going back to work on the report, i fell asleep again??? So ashamed. 

At this stage, we still needed to do the conclusion, references, appendices, 3/4 of the reflections and all of 3.1 (issues, challenges & responses). I knew i was falling asleep but didnt want to work so told myself to wake up at at least 10am to continue working again. This would leave me 6 hours to complete the report. 

I woke up at 12.30pm. ??? This only left me three and a half hours to complete the report - almost half the time i was planning. Soo ashamed of myself. So I logged back onto my laptop which was still left on stand by beside me as i slept (to remind and motivate me to work which obviously failed). 

In terms of coding, nothing had changed since my nap. About an hour earlier, Soobin had also attempted to embed the maps with China's suggested websites but with no luck. Bill still hadnt shown up. China, according to facebook, was online about an hour ago. 

I logged back onto the report on Google docs and resumed my works. I saw that China had added more such as a component in the 'Successful and Unsuccessful Aspects' part while i was gone. I continued my work off there. About 30-45mins later China returned and started helping to finish the report. 

At 3.30 the report was almost done. The last part i was doing was the improvements part, while China worked on features changed since initial idea. At 3.45 i think everything was complete. This was when i realised that an appendices would be nice so i added that in and then started to fix all the little errors with the inserted images. The images were all labelled with 'Figure #: Description', but because i was working everywhere at once, the numbers were all muddled up so i had to change all this too. Finally at 3.50 everything was complete and China and I started to proof read the report. It was SO intense trying to read all 26 pages carefully, knowing that I still needed to download it off from Google Docs as Microsoft word to add a proper Contents page, THEN convert it to PDF before finally submitting it. 

To work faster, we divided the 26 pages so that China proof read the first 13 pages while i read pages 14-26. At 3.59 we realised that we were going to have a late submission so aborted our proof reading so that i could download it etc. The problem however is that my Macbook is reallllllyy bad when it comes to downloading these things, so when i downloaded it as a microsoft word document and opened it, the whole microsoft document went unresponsive. Im not even lying, i dont know why these things happen to me only ever when assessments are due. I tried everything, from quitting the application to minimizing the page (so that i could actually close it) but it was frozen for about 5 minutes before it finally started to work. I frantically added a proper contents page and checked if all the pages were consistent before saving it as a PDF to upload to blackboard. I was praying that my internet wouldnt be weird like last time so that the file would actually load in time. 

I managed to finally upload the file 11 minutes late. My internet was slow this time but ha ha i have learnt from my mistakes and started to close all my other opened tabs and applications. Unfortunately i only remembered this technique about a minute into it loading its submission. When i did close everything, it submitted straight away though. Since this time the late submission really was our fault, i didnt think emailing Lorna to complain about internet problems would  make a difference. Last time was a real problem. Anyway 11 mins late was better than nothing. Its currently 4.33am as i write this the next day by the way, so yes i have read over the report since the upload at 4pm (took so much guts to dare myself to read such a report), and there sure were errors that China and I missed. Oh the depression. If only i woke up earlierrrr. 

The game application to our zone was uploaded on time, i think 30mins-1 hour before 4pm. It wasnt until recently that i realised that our contact 1 week ago was probably the last time ill be seeing all the other team members. Ahaha.

Now all we need to complete is our individual portfolios and keep updating this online reflective journal (which i am really treating too much like a real personal journal), then were FREED LITTLE BIRDIES and forever over with DECO1800! (unless we fail this course but lets think positively before im about to bed). So yea i should really go to bed now i mean i have to drive my sisters to school again in less than 4 hours and i dont want to have any car accidents because i had little sleep which is still unlikely but anyway goodnight world! or rather, good morning! Have a nice day everyone and dont forget to study for any upcoming examssss. 

Contact 30.10.14 aka the tradeshow.

Required for the tradeshow are visual presentations e.g. posters, brochures, pamphlets etc, a basic pitch, and the application itself.

The night before, we set off doing the requirements separately. By the end of the night, China finished a basic pitch for our presentation as well as a powerpoint. I was able to make a brochure detailing our application's performance and aims. Before i left the house this morning, i printed off a couple of the brochures.

I remember being told to not arrive late to the studio no matter what. It was suggested that we come 10 minutes early even, to set up and get ready. For this reason, i took the earlier bus that i usually take (in case the one i usually took was late) and ended up coming 30 minutes early instead of 10 minutes early. The waiting period was as boring as watching paint dry. Finally, it was 2pm and the rest of the studio also waiting outside the room forwarded in. My group was still no where to be seen.

Immediately once in the room, different groups started automatically setting up. In a matter of 5 minutes, all whiteboards and TV screens were taken up. In this 5 minutes still none of my group members had come. Oh the awkwardness of me sitting there alone pretending to be distracted by my phone while everyone else diligently started hanging bright posters everywhere in their professionally dressed clothes. The embarrassment was real.

Other groups were all professionally dressed, had at least one A3 sized poster, brochures etc. One group went so far as to even bring large white curtains, stands, decorative statues, an extra table (with matching white table cloth), at least 10 brochures and flowers??? Needless to say, their dressing attire was also spot on. It was kind of like they were a real business coming in to advertise their application. I actually spoke to the group members yesterday and they told me all this was going to happen. I thought they were lying though!? Apparently, all their props totalled about $85. So speechless.

Anyway, after what felt like the longest time in history, the first of my group members aka China finally arrived. Not long after Bill also walked in. We sort of all sat at our table in awe for a few minutes, watching the other groups show off their obviously much better props than ours. We were only left with our own laptops and the studio computers. So basically all we had was one computer with the application, one with our powerpoint and just a few brochures. No, we did not dress up. No we did not have our poster from last time (which wasnt the idea we settled on anyway). No, we still only had three members at the time.

Anyway, into the studio things started to get alive as everyone started walking around visiting other tradeshows. About 25-30 mins into the contact, Lorna approached us. We welcomed her a seat before we all sat down around her. Then, we just sort of sat there awkwardly in silence for a long time even though we knew she was waiting for us to start talking. I dont know i guess i was just waiting for another member to start talking. So yea i started introducing our application, i explained our design processes and how each of our ideas have evolved over time and why. Finally, i offered her to play the game. Despite our weird articles, shes actually really good at our game???? If i werent a creator of the application and hadnt memorised all the maps to their animals, she wouldve beat me in the game any day.

Moving on, Lorna played the game a few times (each time making us more nervous) until she finally stopped and addressed some issues. At this time, our fourth member Soobin finally showed up. Lorna suggested merging the maps window in with the game and said she was looking forward to see our results page where we would show users all the questions they got wrong. Just as she was about to leave i remembered our brochures and showed them to her. She looked really touched for some reason that i had offered her to read a brochure. She took a brochure with her and left. I did not expect this. I made it so informal. Oh well.

After she left we watched her write down some notes on her paper about us. So nerve wracking. We then decided to write down all the things that we still needed to do, including all of her suggested ideas.

Not surprisingly, and very luckily, no tutors came to our group after this. I think it was because we looked unwelcoming by looking busy doing other things (which was true) like writing down our list of things left to do, fixing codes etc. Often during the contact, some close friends from other groups would come to try our application. Rarely, we would also dare ourselves to venture out of our group to experience the world of much better applications than ours.

This was another group's posters. 

This was our group's overall tradeshow presentation.. (by the way, yes i did print more brochures than just two)

..And this was the other group that even took along flowers. okay.

The outside cover of our brochure.  

The inside of our brochure. Feel free not to read. 

Some users playing our application.

Workshop 29.10.14

There were a few minor flaws in the file that we uploaded to our zones. One image, the lead beater possum, did not show up for example. This was fixed by China today (there was a problem with this because its name in the code was had a capital letter difference to its name as the jpg image). China also made the 'incorrect' and 'correct' display more appropriate by changing its colours to match its meaning (i.e. red and green). Our tradeshow is tomorrow.

Talking with others in the workshop who had already done their tradeshow, it makes me feel better knowing that no one dressed up (in this particular person's contact anyway). Posters, brochures etc are still recommended.

At the moment, the only thing we still need to do is the scoring system and the ranking system. Everything else seems to be going as planned. At this rate, we strongly predict a ranking system will not be implemented by tomorrow or by monday.

Because im having my workshop now, it is my responsibility to ask about implementing a scoring system. 63 minutes into the workshop and the tutor is still busy.

Another problem that was just encountered is that the pop up windows for the maps dont appear as pop up windows on some PCs, but as new tabs instead. This is even more annoying than having a pop up window because its full screen so you need to close it and/or switch back and forth from different tabs to see the map and the article/answer options again.

***

I saved the written part above as a draft then completely forgot about it until today which is like sunday but time to update and write more ohh fun.

So 10 minutes until the end of that workshop Khoa was finaallllyyyyyy free and came over to help. I told him that we wanted to implement a scoring system and he was like ok and started looking over our current code. He made a few variables in the code to define the totalScore and made some other adjustments for about five minutes. Then suddenly he couldnt handle our structure anymore and told me to indent all the code properly because it was making it harder for him. Ok. We have 5 minutes left of class. But ok. So yea it took me more than 5 minutes to clean everything up and by this time Khoa had already left. ?? Okay. So i had no option but to skip my upcoming lecture and stay into the next workshop for help. 

The next workshop's tutor (i didnt catch her name!) seemed a lot more calm than Khoa. Calm as in there werent 5 students asking for help at a time so i took this opportunity to awkwardly ask for help. I told her that we wanted a scoring system and asked if she could help me implement one. She admitted that she was not good with scoring systems but would try her best. 10 minutes later we were working our way into the code, adding new variables, ridding Khoa's unfinished work, and testing the application over and over.

About 30 minutes into the workshop she started to get stuck. The problem we were facing was due to the refreshing of the page. Basically what we had done was added a variable to start at 0, this we called totalpoints. I had explained that i wanted the scoring system to work so that each time the user answers a question correctly, the number of seconds left on the progress bar would be the number of points they get for that question. So if a user answered a question when there were 10 seconds left on the progress bar for example, they would get 10 points. Anyway, we tried to work it so that every time the game proceeded to the next question, the user's previous score to the question before would add onto their existing score. This was a problem however, because whenever the game proceeded to the next question, the game would refresh and the totalpoints would return to 0. At this time, it was getting quite frustrating. 

About 45 minutes into the workshop, we then started to research ways to keep the totalpoints in javascript. There were some methods shown online and the tutor admitted that it would take a while to implement since she was not confident with this stuff. After playing the game again, which was something we did basically every minute, we realised that the lives system did not reset back to 0 every time the next question was shown. We then went to look over at the live system's code. It was a lot more simpler than the one online however may not fully work with the scoring. Thus, the idea of combining both the online method and the live systems method was done. By this time by the way, it was almost an hour into the workshop and i felt so bad for taking up that much time from a tutor whose workshop i didnt even belong in so yea sorry to anyone else who had been waiting for her help. 

At last, after just over an hour, we had a working scoring system! I appreciated that tutor so much at that moment for putting up with me seriously. There were a few things that were the reason to the slowness of the progress.

Since the page refreshed every time the user proceeded to the next question, the score had to be stored in the local folder every time another question showed. The stored score would then add on to the new score for new questions. This meant that if the game wasnt finished and played again in the same window, the old score may show up as the starting score for the game. So you need to finish the game first by losing. Because the score is stored in the local folder, it may be difficult to implement the results page as the score would need to be retrieved from the local folder.

Anyway, i thanked the tutor for all the help and posted the newest version of the game onto our team facebook group page. About 20 past 4 (so an hour and 20 mins into the workshop), i packed up and thanked the tutor again, before leaving off to my lecture. It was only after i left the room that i realised that that was my last ever workshop (or really, workshops) for DECO1800, and i didnt even say goodbye to Khoa or the tutor. I may never see them ever again. And im still not sure what that tutors name is. Haha. wow. Moving on, when i reached the my lecture room no one was even there, the lecture had finished early. So sad. So I couldve stayed in the workshop to start working on the results page. Pushing that note aside, i left for home. 

And that was my workshop for today. The end.    

Product before uploading

Our application has to be uploaded to our zones today. This means that our tradeshow will be using the version that we uploaded, whether we decide to change it before the 4th of November or not.

We still have a lot to do however things that we have managed to do over nigh or during the last few days:

1. Added a score
2. Hearts subtracted when time runs out (as well as getting a question wrong)
3. New design in the stylesheet 
4. Maps now added into the game however combined with questions
5. more things that i cant remember 

Things were still working on as i type this:

1. Getting images from Trove (and blurring them)
2. Having more than just the croc, kangaroo and koala image answer options
3. maybe ill remember more

Things we havent even touched and will most likely be eliminated from the game: 

1. Ranking page
2. Results page (?)
3. Highscores
4. Sound
5. idk

Im not sure whether we can change our application after we upload it to our zones (like im not sure if we just need to have something uploaded by today). But we did try nonetheless to finish as much as possible. 

Basically, Bill worked on the scoring for the game, Soobin worked on getting everything to function (this meant anything php, javascript or html related), China worked on the css of retrieval of images for the application (which includes being able to blur the images attained fro Trove) while i finished off all the maps, touched up the instructions and occasionally tried to help China. Altogether, we worked on trying to incorporated more than just the three images of the croc, koala and kangaroo for each question. 

There were a few things from our original idea that we had to change. We had all agreed that functionality was more important that fanciness or appearance, so some of the more difficult things were eliminated and sacrificed from our game. This included sounding for the whole application.

Another thing we altered was what one question's hints were. Originally, there would be one hint for each question (either image, article or map (or sound which no longer is)), however because all of the maps were in separate html files, this proved to be too difficult to manage through the use of php etc. Thus, probably the lowest of all options was forced to lead the way into a new and possible future. This meant having not just one hint for each question, but two; one map hint and one of either the article or image hint. Once the question would show up on the screen, a pop up window would appear, and in this would be the map. There was no other option with the limited time and skills we had. The map can be used as an extra hint to users if they feel that the image/article is not enough.

Trying to get images from Trove as  hints was a difficult task for all of us. Our first problem was actually trying to obtain a random selection of different images from Trove. Our second problem was only wanting one image per question, and not as much as the command could complete. Trying to blur or even crop the image was another problem.

We experienced and still are experiencing many difficulties in doing the tasks today. Any form of tutor's help would have been muchly appreciated, as mentioned a few times during the night-morning.

Update

SO ive spent all morning in this library doing the maps for the emu, flying fox, wallaby, etc. and i have finally finished all the possible ones.

Basically, all the tags in green above are what i have done all morning (except the three i did yesterday and the kangaroo done by China). The ones with no tags have been sent to China to do and i think she should be done by now but not sure. The ones in red are those that i cant do because they either have more than one location or their location is not full, and i do not know how to do this. If you can see closely on the image, their maps have more than one location/arent full. 

For the last 30 minutes after finishing all that i could do, i started trying to add more one than polygon to a map. I tried looking this up on google developers but they only showed how to add more than one circle and how to add overlays (like bike, train, satellite overlays etc.). 

THEN i started to play around with the code for some of the animals and i have finally figured how to do it!! This is the most satisfying feeling ive had all day. Maybe even all week because this week has honestly been completely boring. Note that there are no maps for pelicans, wallaroos and goannas, because i couldnt find a suitable one for each, and thylacines due to their extinction. 

All the maps achieved over the night-morning.

Top left: Bridled nail tail wallaby 

Top middle: Eastern snake necked turtle

Top right: Emu  

Middle left: Pygmy possum

Centre: Kangaroo (done by China)

Middle right: Flying fox

Bottom left: Tasmanian devil

Bottom middle: Numbat

Bottom right: Crocodile 

This was when i was trying to add more than one polygon and managed to add the pygmy possum and tasmanian devil's location together.

Although i have been in the engineering library all day, i am aware that the others are lurking somewhere around uni too. I know that Bill was in a workshop and maybe Soobin was with him, and because i sent the dugong and lead beater possum for China to do some hours ago, maybe shes at uni too. Regardless of our locations, we have been talking online so so far, Bill has managed to ask the tutor about the scoring system. 

Apparently the tutor didnt know how to do the scoring system so told Bill to go onto W3School to teach himself. About an hour later Bill updated that now there were scores however whenever the page was redirected to the next question, the score was reset. At the moment, he is still working on this. Apparently, quoted from Bill, "its about sending variables from html to php or something like that". Not soon after, the 10 completed maps so far have also been sent to Soobin to add to the database. 

Now i shall start working on more maps. Oh the joy..

After Contact Work

After the contact today we agreed to all work on the application together, so off we went in search for a place to work. The chosen venue, room 122 in GPS, although already accompanying two classes, was our home for the next few hours.

This was when i started to make the polygon maps for the animals. I admit, it was a lot lot lot easier than working with circles. Circles required more information, such as the size (population) of the circle as well as its long&latitude. When i wanted to change one, it also took forever to see which set of coordinates it was because the list needed no order, so it was a procedure of tedious trial and error steps.

Basically, the coordinates for making the circled areas for the crocodile's location:

var citymap = {};
citymap['area1'] = {
  center: new google.maps.LatLng(-19.5, 140.5),
  population: 4504856
};
citymap['area2'] = {
  center: new google.maps.LatLng(-17, 130),
  population: 3000000
};
citymap['area3'] = {
  center: new google.maps.LatLng(-17, 135),
  population: 4000000
};
citymap['area4'] = {
  center: new google.maps.LatLng(-14, 133),
  population: 4400000
};
citymap['area5'] = {
  center: new google.maps.LatLng(-14, 143),
  population: 2500000
};
citymap['area5'] = {
  center: new google.maps.LatLng(-15, 143),
  population: 2200000
};
citymap['area6'] = {
  center: new google.maps.LatLng(-17, 143),
  population: 2500000
};
citymap['area7'] = {
  center: new google.maps.LatLng(-20, 144),
  population: 4000000
};
citymap['area8'] = {
  center: new google.maps.LatLng(-20, 147),
  population: 1800000
};
citymap['area9'] = {
  center: new google.maps.LatLng(-18, 137),
  population: 4500000
};
citymap['area10'] = {
  center: new google.maps.LatLng(-16.5, 126.5),
  population: 4500000
};
citymap['area11'] = {
  center: new google.maps.LatLng(-18.5, 123.5),
  population: 3000000
};
citymap['area12'] = {
  center: new google.maps.LatLng(-17, 133),
  population: 2500000
};
citymap['area13'] = {
  center: new google.maps.LatLng(-13, 142.5),
  population: 1000000
};
citymap['area14'] = {
  center: new google.maps.LatLng(-18, 145),
  population: 1000000
};
citymap['area15'] = {
  center: new google.maps.LatLng(-16, 145),
  population: 800000
};
citymap['area16'] = {
  center: new google.maps.LatLng(-21.5, 148.5),
  population: 900000
};
citymap['area17'] = {
  center: new google.maps.LatLng(-23, 149.5),
  population: 800000
};
citymap['area18'] = {
  center: new google.maps.LatLng(-24, 150.5),
  population: 800000
};
citymap['area19'] = {
  center: new google.maps.LatLng(-25, 151.7),
  population: 500000
};
citymap['area20'] = {
  center: new google.maps.LatLng(-26, 152.5),
  population: 300000
};
citymap['area21'] = {
  center: new google.maps.LatLng(-26.8, 152.6),
  population: 200000
};
citymap['area22'] = {
  center: new google.maps.LatLng(-22, 146.5),
  population: 1500000
};
citymap['area23'] = {
  center: new google.maps.LatLng(-15, 130.5),
  population: 700000
};
citymap['area24'] = {
  center: new google.maps.LatLng(-13, 135.5),
  population: 700000
};

Looking at this, i will tell you that it is almost imposssibleee to locate which circle is which. Ive almost memorised what numbers the latitudes and longitudes are for each area on the map but this doesnt even help. This is the code for the polygons, also for crocodiles:

 var CrocCoords = [
  new google.maps.LatLng(-19, 122),
    new google.maps.LatLng(-17, 123),
    new google.maps.LatLng(-14, 126),
    new google.maps.LatLng(-14, 127),
    new google.maps.LatLng(-15, 129),
    new google.maps.LatLng(-13, 130),
    new google.maps.LatLng(-12, 133),
    new google.maps.LatLng(-12, 137),
    new google.maps.LatLng(-15, 135),
    new google.maps.LatLng(-18, 140),
    new google.maps.LatLng(-18, 141),
    new google.maps.LatLng(-14, 142),
    new google.maps.LatLng(-11, 142.5),
    new google.maps.LatLng(-15, 144),
    new google.maps.LatLng(-14.5, 144.7),
    new google.maps.LatLng(-15, 145.2),
    new google.maps.LatLng(-19, 146),
    new google.maps.LatLng(-21, 149),
    new google.maps.LatLng(-23, 150.6),
    new google.maps.LatLng(-26, 152.7),
    new google.maps.LatLng(-27, 152.8),
    new google.maps.LatLng(-24, 147),
    new google.maps.LatLng(-23, 142),
    new google.maps.LatLng(-19, 135),
    new google.maps.LatLng(-18, 130),
  ];

SO much shorter, neater and orderly structured! Here, everything is in order, because all the points need to connect, and its so much easier to change the placement of one or add another point into the polygon.

In the time of the group meetup, i had only managed to make three maps with polygons; the crocodiles, koalas and numbats. If youve read yesterday's post, the numbat's location is literally a circle on the bottom left of western australia, so really theres no point showing this achievement even though it took almost as much time to do as the rest.

Comparison of the circles & polygon for crocodiles location. Top right shows where they live from a normal map.

Comparison between circles & polygon use for koalas. 

You have to agree the polygons look a lot neater right? At 4pm, as China was about to leave, she suggested that i gave her some to do tonight as this would be a lot faster. I sent her the link to the website which i got the examples from, the file for the koala's polygon (to use as template to change) and a map of where kangaroos live to match off. Kind of confusing right, dont worry you dont need to do this.

Though polygons provide more benefits as oppose to circles, i realised some disadvantages from this technique. Polygons are basically just splotches of red that can be coded into different shapes to cover different areas on the map. Circles, though pretty much only being able to add circles, gives the option to add more than one area onto the map. So i can have ten circles in one area, and 1 circle on the other side of australia. I cant do this for polygons, because its only 1 shape. I have looked up adding more polygons to an image and am still looking to see whether it will work. If i cannot do it, i will consider using both circles and polygons.

Another problem that nether circles nor polygons can offer is having an area with nothing in it (woah so bad at explaining i wouldnt get this myself). So for example, if an animal lives on the outline of australia, the shape for this would be a hollow/empty australia. Polygons and circles cant achieve this shape.

This area in red shows where white bellied sea eagles are found in australia and sets a perfect example of what i mean. As far as my skills take me, polygons and circles cannot cover that red area.

If i cannot find another alternative for achieving this, we will have to replace animals such as the white bellied sea eagle to more simpler animals what live in one distinct location.

Continuing, during the time, Soobin had asked for some of the coordinates of the long & lats so that he could add them into the database. As i watched him add them into the database, i realised that his job was just as boring, tiring and tedious as mine as he needed to add each point into the database one by one. At least he didnt have to do 1951351 trial and error sequences to see where each point went.

In this time, I believe Bill was working on the ranking system. Occasionally, i would ask him what he did for the markers on the map and compared it to what i was doing (even though i did the markers too), in case i was doing anything wrong. At one point, i was hit with sudden realisation that i might have needed to incorporate google map's API keys etc into the maps aswell (because i realised there was a separate section in the website (google developers) for polygons, markers, circles etc with API keys. Also Soobin mentioned something about APIs before being interrupted by someone and never finished what he was going to say). This was cleared up when I asked Bill if he used it for his markers and again asking Soobin what he meant. What a relief it was.. duhh google maps isnt something from Trove..

At 5pm, we decided to head home. Soobin and Bill had also suggested that i give them the files for the maps so that they could try doing some for the animals since it was a long task. I agreed to teach them tonight or tomorrow. We briefly decided on meeting up tomorrow for the workshops and staying back at uni to complete as much as possible.

Things that still need to be done include the remainder of the application by monday (though i heard that we can still change some things about it after the upload to the zones), organising the tradeshow, the report and portfolio.

The tradeshow seems like a huge effort since visual aids are required, as well as simple pitches and preferred dress codes. And most importantly, a functional application!.!!. So much work to dooo..

Contact 23.10.14

Since this was the last studio we would have before the tradeshow and application due date (to zones), today's class was obviously dedicated to working on the game. Tasks were allocated today to make sure that each remaining segment in the application would have responsibility from someone:

• Bill will take responsibility of the scoring/ranking system. This includes managing the necessary items required for the ranking to work, such as user information/performance.
• China will be the designer who would be in charge of the game's CSS. This meant that everything from the gaming interface, colour combinations, font etc were managed by her. 
• Soobin's job was to manage the database which any external (nonTrove) sources would be attained from, including each maps' coordinates of each animal's location (longitude and latitude) and the users' details (names for the highscore & ranking etc)
• I took responsibility for the maps. This meant that i had to find each animal's location and match it with longitude and latitude values on the map via circles or other means. 

Other components of the application such as the retrieval of sounds and images were kept last as we needed core aspects in the game first and we already had the articles as a hint (and upcoming maps). 

At the start of the contact session, we shared what we had all completed over the course of the week. China's success over the progress bar was shared, Bill's attempts of map markers, my maps and circles from yesterday, and Soobin's encounter on a website which provided a tutorial on how to make a quiz using HTML5, CSS3, PHP, MySQL, jQuery and Ajax. 

The site which he shared, (http://www.smarttutorials.net/quiz-application-using-php-jquery-ajax-mysql-and-html5/), was insightful enough as to inform us about the different possible usages for the different programming languages and even provided the author's folder available to download (containing the files in which they used to construct the quiz). 

During the contact, China asked a tutor about the lives system and in no time the lives system was fully functional. This was uploaded online to the group's space. While the tutor was with us, we also took the opportunity to ask about the different map files and how it was possible to make it all into one file. This was when the database idea was introduced.

For the remainder of the contact class we worked our own way into our assigned tasks. Occasionally we discussed matters as a group to hear different opinions and perspectives on decisions, such as whether the 'proceed to next question' button was really necessary in the game instead of having users redirected to the next question regardless of the in/correctness of their answer.

During this time i realised what polygons actually where!.!?! Even though i found out yesterday about the endless alternatives for markers, i thought that polylines (which were basically just lines) and polygons were the same thing (even though i knew polygons were 5 sided shapes, which still doesnt have anything to do with what it is). After two hours of indecisive decision making (yes, the whole of the contact session), i finally decided to abandon my hours worth of circles to move onto polygons (in the economics course im also doing, it states that when considering alternative opportunities, sunk costs (stuff that was already wasted/used up, e.g. the 5 maps with circles that i had spent hours on), should not be considered when deciding, only results from each decision etc. and that benefits should outweigh costs etc etc blah etc i dont want to retell a random economics lecture on here). SO after this, yes i decided to discard my circles for polygons.

This was my first practice on polygons. 

I dont think ive mentioned this yesterday but i used google developers to help me do all this (https://developers.google.com/maps/). Looking back on a previous post about over a month ago, a workshop i attended suggested google developers for this kind of stuff, and Bill used it too to help with the placement of his markers. 

Then for some strange reason it was already 1.50 and the contact class had ended. Time actually goes by so fast sometimes. After the contact we all agreed to work on the application together as a team. I can see that this post is getting a little lengthy so ill make the team-working-together-in-a-lab-after-the-contact another post.

Workshop 22.10.14

Due to our obvious desperate needs to catch up, today we decided to attend as many workshops as possible. I attended China's, she stayed back for mine, and i also stayed for the one after mine. Bill came to the last workshop however was working on another group project with his group (i think he said that?) so i had only discussed with him very briefly what my progress was compared to his. Soobin had other classes and didnt attend any workshops that i was in.

The first workshop for today was spent attempting new things in our to-do list, including the lives system and the maps. Before this, China had spent roughly an hour trying to merge the process bar in with the questions. Long consultations with the tutor proved useless until the workshop was over and the next tutor, aka Khoa,  came to rescue. He fixed the problem and stated that the reason it was wrong was because the jquery src had apparently kept overriding the jquery UI. Nonetheless, China and i had a little celebratory cry after it was finally fixed.

*this is where the image for the working progress bar + questions would normally go, but i dont have a picture or anything*

During the time that China had spent doing this, I tried to find our latest version of the game on our google drive so that i could also try to add the progress bar in with China. I realised after 30minutes into the first workshop that we had two google drive spaces which was the reason i was so lost in finding our latest version. It also turned out that our latest-latest version hadnt even been uploaded online yet. It was a little different, as in about three lines different, from the version that i had. Those three lines do make a big difference though. Altogether, ashamed to say, this took up soo much time. I gave up trying to sort out all my versions and folders after about an hour into the first workshop. I literally had 5 of each file on my laptop and my attempt to swap some of them around - all with the same names (e.g. index.html, play.html etc) - had only confused me even more.

That was when i gave up and focused my attention back on the maps that i had started a few weeks back. I remember being able to show the map with the use of my API key. I wanted to add markers in the maps to represent the location in which each animal lived so searched this up. After some time i had successfully gotten up one marker on the map. The API keys were no use in this file.

I took so long teaching myself how to add the markers to the exact perfect place. Here, i used Brisbane as an example. Note that i deliberately made the map to only take up that much space on the page as usually the questions, buttons etc would surround it. 

When i started searching up how to add more than one marker, i came across a few tutorials that gave out codes that added markers to several places. In the same tutorials they had also changed the marker image to flags to represent beaches in the example. When i tried this coding however, the flags didnt come up, but this is what i taught myself in that time anyway.

After this i then realised all the possibilities that i had as alternatives to markers. Some include polylines, polygons, rectangles, arrows, user edited shapes/symbols and dashed lines. One of these includes circles! I felt that this was the more appropriate tool to use considering the many places that some animals live in Australia. So i then started to teach myself how to add circles to maps. This was my first attempt (yes i used the United States to practise). 

The circles can be edited in terms of size (which they refer to as population), colour, opacity and stroke weight. The location in which they were pinned were based on longitude and latitude. After this i then looked up the locations for some of our animals and tried attempting to replicate the maps using the circles. In the time that i did doing this, i did five before i got really tired and bored. Let me tell you that doing one takes a lot of time and gets so boring and tedious.

The map i did of crocodiles location compared with the image of their location i found online (in the smaller map).  

Emu locations. Even though this one used up like five circles, i found it to be the hardest to replicate of the map i was using to copy off (the smaller one top right). Its so off.

This is the Koala's map. hmmm.. 

Kangaroo's location. It was also really hard trying to duplicate the brown almost-rectangle shape into circles. This one looks so failed. :(

Numbats. By far the easiest, fastest and my favourite to do. Note that compared to the map i was using to match shows both their past distribution (orange area) and the current distribution (blue). 

By the time i was about into my second map and second workshop, China left after attempting the lives system. I believe she did some research (which didnt really prove useful), and then moved on to looking for game like heart images to use. She placed one on the same page as the working progress bar while we both waited for a tutor to come around and teach us how to implement the lives system. The workshop was pretty full though and after soo long, she gave up and left without having asked any tutors. We agreed that we would ask this among with many other questions tomorrow.

Into the third workshop was when i finished five maps of animals and felt extremely bored. I then started looking up maps of where the other 15 animals lived in Australia. I was not able to find some such as a map for wallaroos and goannas. Of course, no map will be made for the thylacine due to its long extinction. For the wallaroo and goanna, ill just search up worded descriptions of where they live and base the circles around that. 

After this searching and some portfolio work (aka procrastinating from continuing the maps), the third workshop was over and i headed home. About halfway through the workshop, Bill approached me and asked what the maps i had done looked like since he was also working on the maps. He said that my method was apparently better than his because it showed more than one location as oppose to this attempt to add single markers. Then i left home. Six hours workshopping gets you pretty tired. Unnecessary to this blog, but i coincidentally met China walking out of the building. She was also leaving home (well after heading to the city). 

On the bus home, i was notified on facebook in our group chat from Bill that i should combine all the maps into one html file, since at the moment i had each animal with one html file each. Since all the articles were also in one file, he suggested that it would be easier that when we would randomly select a question, it would randomly select one of the files (articles, maps, photos, sound etc). I agreed to try this later at night. China suggested adding them all in an array in one file so that it would be easier to randomly select.   

Though i feel that so much work was done today, we still have soo much left to do. And its due in less than a week. Anyway ive written too much today. Bye. 

Last Lecture & Portfolio

Today i sat the last lecture for DECO1800 and for the first time this semester, i took actual, serious notes. The lecture today was a wrap up of the course as a whole, detailing the different projects that would be due over the remainder of the semester. This was also the first lecture i attended without any of my friends/group members attending. I felt that it was therefore my responsibility to share the discussed topics in the lecture with the rest of my team.

The lecture overall explored the three major upcoming assessed items; the Tradeshow (next contact studio), the Final Report (deadline extended to 4th Nov, 4pm) and the Portfolio (due 14 Nov, 4pm).

Notes I took from the lecture. Not sure if all is readable. 

One of the many things i got from today's lecture was the tradeshow. Technically, i did know it existed before today but i didnt know much about it since the lecture that it was introduced in happened to be the only lecture ive missed. What i find unfortunate about it though is the huge amount of effort Lorna makes it sound like. Really though.. past tradeshows have had students dressing up and making large fancy posters for it. At current, my group havent even spoken about the tradeshow together once, let alone the presentation we intend to display. Apart from this, i was also introduced to the fact that we were going to need a basic pitch to go with the tradeshow. Not one where there would be a script, but one where everyone would basically improvise with ease because wed know every single detail about our project enough to talk about. 

***

After the lecture i set off to a library and began to construct my portfolio. Since (if you remembered), i spent literally three hours (unintentionally) designing my blog (mostly due to procrastination to actually start the posts that day), i felt that it would be nice if i based by portfolio on the design of my blog. Ive been posting regular enough this semester to have gotten so used to the design that i feel like the combination of colours, fonts etc are my trademark. 

The Homepage/About Me page that ill add more to eventually.

Projects page. Three projects A, B and C as links, #A2D4B0 as hovered colour. Note that I will obviously need to change the content that i have temporarily added.

Reflections Page. Hover colour for the navigation menu is black over #A2D4B0 font by the way. 

Other optional work. Have a 70% feeling i wont end up using this page since i automatically skip optional choices and im kind of very lazy. Or i could sacrifice sleep on the night before the due date doing it. This is actually quite predictable too. 

I have looked over at some past portfolios and the first one (thats pink and all) is SO good?? How even. I cant even comprehend it. I will never match its level. Anyway i noticed that most portfolios had a picture of the student on the About Me page and realised that a picture would also add nicely to mine. But its soo uncomfortable seeing a picture of myself every time i open the page. Its already so awkward seeing my picture every time i log on to post a new update on this blog. Its like me starring at me. So uncomfortable. You're lying if you dont feel this when you see photos of yourself too. 

Moving on, the colours i have used in my design are white, #A2D4B0 (the green colour) and black. I am a person that really prefers and finds simplicity to be better and more appealing than complicated things (depending on how its done), so i have avoided adding any other colours. Note that my profile picture has a green background too?? And im wearing a white shirt?? This wasnt even planned. I love it when life is so spontaneously nice to me. 

The background image that i have used for both my blog and portfolio is 'nice_snow' from subtlepatterns.com. If you're a person that also really likes simplicity, i recommend this website. Its so simple. I love it ahah. It was a suggested website to use for designing and inspiring our websites for DECO1400 last semester. 

Basic structure of my portfolio includes the navigation bar at the top of every page (consisting of ABOUT ME, PROJECTS, REFLECTION and OTHER WORK). At the footer of every page, I have included my name, student number, course + semester & year and a button that is clicked to navigate back to the top of the page if my pages get too lengthy (which considering my blog is really likely). 

Finally something else that i have noticed is the slow updates when i access my portfolio from http://deco1800.uqcloud.net/portfolios/, where i can also see everyone else's. This is used to test whether the markers will be able to see my portfolio when they mark it. Yes, mine is connected but when i access it, some pages are not updated and still contain my old versions. Im assuming this is normal? Because after some time it changes. But my reflections page was not like what is now (there was no navigation bar) this afternoon, and now that im accessing it again at 11.26pm, its still not updated? I dont see anything odd in my coding so im assuming it is slow at updating? (yes im at home connected to UQ's VPN). But yea, this shouldnt be a problem. Hopefully. 

Finally, our application as a team project so far: no update really needed for this.. were still quite behind. As suggested last week, it was said that in order to catch up we should attend every workshop this week (well weve skipped todays one so far so..). At the moment on our Facebook group, it was asked if we should have a meeting tomorrow. No one has responded and for some reason i dont want to. This really indicates the closeness and level of interactivity in our group..