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Final preparations for tomorrow’s big show! See below the latest Flash movie.

We added :

sounds in our application, allowing user to get auditive feedback
background and confirmation for hit sounds for improving the User Experience, creating an immersive experience who tries to transpose the user into the real wood atmosphere
self generating levels, allowing users to improve themselves beyond our ideas about their possibilities: the user gets 60 seconds levels in which he has to hit more and more animals as he becomes better in targeting ( and in ball retrieval )
changed the aspect ratio of the game from 4:3 to 16:9 to better use the whiteboard’s surface
we dropped a lower right sensor from our latest setup to improve the quality of sensor reading. The reason is that wooden board conducts very well the sound. Thus, too close sensors can receive same signal in almost the same moment, given false positive responses.

Flash, Media Informatics, Week 6

Flash UI changes

Jul 26th

Posted by Radu Poenaru in DIS 2 Lab

Since last week the Flash application changed- I added support for numerical keys for hitting. We mapped the numerical keys 1 to 6 to the 6 animals positions that can be hit. This way, it is enough to press a key to simulate the throw of a ball.

The reason behind this application architectural change is that we needed an smart way to simulate the sensors that were hit, without actually having the entire setup in our workplace.

Extraneous game, Flash, Media Informatics, Week 6

iMeet application presentation

Jul 25th

Posted by Radu Poenaru in CSCW Lab- iPhone

Finally, the biggest moment: application is ready!! I am very proud of this application, as it represents my achievements in fast learning and adapting to:

new way of programming, as XCode and Interface Builder truly represent the ModelViewController paradigm
new language- Objective-C, which as any language has its pluses and minuses
new device: mobile devices on which I didn’t work since my experience on Sales Force Automation in TotalSoft company, back in 2005, on Windows CE.

I’ve structured the application visually in few areas:

1. Login screen – the ‘”gate” to the application. Since the access to the

XML-RPC is done in a secure way, the application implemented also a credential input and recording mechanism. The mechanism is dual: user can enter the login into the first screen or in the iPhone Settings application. Depends only on him where and how he’ll manage his credentials.

The main point of this screen is to create a intuitive interface for users to insert their credentials, instead of having to leave the application and go to the iPhone settings.

Fraunhofer FIT, Interface Buider, iPhone, Media Informatics, Objective-C, RWTH Aachen, XCode

Objective-C: Putting markers on Map control

Jul 21st

Posted by Radu Poenaru in CSCW Lab- iPhone

This article comes as a completion to my previous ones, XCode : using MapKit with no geocoding available out of the box and XCode: Modal windows – Google maps and shows how to add pins on your already created Map View.

First of all, adding the points to the map is not as intuitive as it might seem, so let’s start by creating a new class called POI – point of interest. Its header must be filled with this code:

#import <foundation foundation.h>
#import <mapkit mapkit.h>
#import <corelocation corelocation.h>

@interface POI : NSObject  {    CLLocationCoordinate2D coordinate;        NSString *subtitle;         NSString *title;     }

@property (nonatomic, readonly) CLLocationCoordinate2D coordinate;@property (nonatomic,retain) NSString *subtitle;@property (nonatomic,retain) NSString *title;- (id) initWithCoords:(CLLocationCoordinate2D) coords;

@end

Interface Buider, iPhone, Media Informatics, Objective-C, RWTH Aachen, XCode

The User Interface

Jul 18th

Posted by Radu Poenaru in DIS 2 Lab

This week we work also on the User Interface – the Flash GUI. It was challenging since neither me nor Loredana had previous experience in creating games under this application.

Because of this fact, we searched for some advices on the net and after quite a long trial and errors we found something interesting here . Even that it didn’t met all requirements, this tutorial was what we needed to get a quick start.

The animal images are free clip arts taken from http://www.free-clipart-pictures.net/animal_clipart.html.

After following the steps and understood the concepts,we modified the application to :

Change the resolution, as it has to run on a projector
Redesign the entire scene graphics, but keeping basic elements like scoring and timer.
Change the game’s AI from
- how many simultaneously balloons you can hit in a specific period of time to
- having only one target available at one time and you can get another one only if you hit the current one
Remove the old targets and create 6 new ones more appealing.
Implement the Arduino interface classes taken from here.

Extraneous game, Flash, Media Informatics, User experience, Week 5

XCode: Modal windows – Google maps

Jul 18th

Posted by Radu Poenaru in CSCW Lab- iPhone

From time to time, you’ll need to show in your iPhone application a view over the entire application without navigating and destroying your workflow of the application. I’ll present the mechanism of modal windows as it is implemented in Cocoa Touch.

Lets take a real case: you have a view in which you want to input an address. Near the address you have a button which will show the user the Map centered on the specific address that he inputted. How this can be implemented?

The answer is quite simple: you need to declare the view from which you launch the modal view as <UINavigationBarDelegate> in the header file (.h for newbies), like this:

@interface CtrlAddEvtView1 : UIViewController <UINavigationBarDelegate>

This way, the view will know “magically” how to interact with children views.

Cocoa Touch, Interface Buider, iPhone, Media Informatics, Modal windows, Objective-C, RWTH Aachen, XCode

XCode : using MapKit with no geocoding available out of the box

Jul 15th

Posted by Radu Poenaru in CSCW Lab- iPhone

One of the tasks in the CSCW lab was to create a map on which the users to see the location of a specific address.

So I started working on it, knowing that the newest framework brings a lot of goodies, through which there is also a map framework. But surprise! Apple provides only reverse geocoding, not forward geocoding. This means that you can only transform a pair of Latitude / Longitude to the Map and it will show it to the user. But what to do when user enters an address?

My point is that nobody caries with him a GPS to search for the address, get the coordinates and enter them into my map!

I was curious about it and after a little search I found that there was a big argue about the geocoding and Apple didn’t want to pay the price that Google and Tom-Tom asked for this feature.

Interface Buider, iPhone, Media Informatics, Objective-C, XCode

The User Interface

Jul 14th

Posted by Radu Poenaru in DIS 2 Lab

A game should not have only a great idea, but also nice graphical interface. For this, we created an immersive forest environment where the user to be able to ‘hunt’ some animals.

Underneath is the background of the application:

Flash, Media Informatics, User experience, Week 5

We’re going on Arduino

Jul 12th

Posted by Radu Poenaru in DIS 2 Lab