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.