aversiontosocialmedia-blog

[aversiontosocialmedia-blog]

Achieving the course goals

Wow! I still can’t believe that I’m at sitting at home and this semester is (almost) over already! Here goes on the ~ultimate~ reflection post:

Did you achieve your own learning goals for this course? Did you achieve the course learning goals?

My own learning goals were pretty vague – I typically approach things with a “I want to learn everything and anything that I can” attitude, which is great when it comes to always learning ~something~ but bad when it means I don’t really have a clear objective in what I want to learn! I think the course learning goals were really helpful in better outlining what I expected/wanted to learn this semester, and I’m happy to say I think I did achieve them. In particular, I’m most excited technically about my ability to understand and utilize APIs; I remember going to my first hackathon only a semester ago and not even understanding what an API ~was~, let alone how to read one! This class has not only helped me develop the skills to use APIs, but also the confidence and tools to approach novel ones with a structured plan of attack.

What are the skills that you strengthened during the course and you believe will be useful to you in other situations?

DEFINITELY the ability to learn new technologies quickly – in a class this fast-paced and variable in topic, I don’t know how you couldn’t! I think this is also the most useful one considering how quickly technology is evolving in today’s technical climate. I personally think that the most valuable people may not be the ones who are necessarily the ~best~ at something, but the ones who can adapt well and quickly.

If you were to take this course again (let's turn the time back), what would you do differently?

I wish I was able to incorporate more of the things I learned into projects of my own! All of the things I learned and projects I worked on are things I would love to and wish I could extend, but unfortunately (probably due to poor time management on my part), I never did. Maybe another time would be different!

If this course is to be offered again, what parts should be kept and what parts should be changed and improved?

I think lecture would benefit from a whole day of lab (i.e. Wednesday, if it’s offered 3 times a week). Personally, I’ve always learned computer science best from a hands-on approach as opposed to lecture, and since we’re discussing the actual implementation of these languages as opposed to theory (like CS251), I feel it would behoove the class the most to have a whole day completely dedicated to hands-on lab work, as opposed to bits and pieces of hands-on work interspersed into lectures.

[aversiontosocialmedia-blog]

Team Project Presentation [GP]

How well did your team use the allocated time? Did each of you get the same amount of time to speak? Did you have good transitions?

I think our group used the allocated amount of time well and we all had approximately the same amount of time to speak. I noticed that I definitely spoke more quickly than some of my group mates, and because of that, it might have seemed like I spoke for a less amount of time than them, but overall, the amount of content covered by all of us was approximately the same.

How was your performance in terms of using the right eye contact, voice, pace, and avoiding mannerism?

Surprisingly, after watching the video, my first reaction was that I needed to speak up (which is something I’ve never been told before)! I also noticed that I use a lot of hand motions, which at times can be useful for pointing out different features (which was my part of the presentation). However, I could also see that being confusing for an audience member, so it’s definitely something I’ll keep in mind for the future. 

If you were to give this presentation again, what are the good things you'll continue to do? What are the aspects that you will improve?

I would improve on speaking louder, a little slower, and also gesturing less!

[aversiontosocialmedia-blog]

Server vs client side [IP]

One of the things I want to keep track of in my database is the number of people checked in. The ways I’ve tried to approach it are:

within my users collection, there’s a field called “checkedIn” which is set to true if the user is already checked in. I created a method that would find all of the users with checkedIn set as “true”, count the number in that collection and set that equal to a session variable. However, I ran into some issues when I was trying to coordinate between the client side and server side, and also trying to insert this value into my “busses” collection to record the total number of riders.

create a counter than when a user checks in, it increments. Set a session variable to this counter. update the database accordingly. The issue with this was that if a user logged out and back in, it would still let them re-check in and increment the counter, i.e. a user could log in and out arbitrarily and the counter would still increase.

Thinking of best ways to fix this!

[aversiontosocialmedia-blog]

Multiple HTTP requests in Meteor? [IP]

Does anybody know how to do multiple HTTP requests in Meteor/if it can be done? I’m using two different APIs and I didn’t think it would be problematic, but it seems to be throwing errors. Thanks!

[aversiontosocialmedia-blog]

The smallest mistakes! [IP]

I’m going to use this forum to vent for a second – I hate how in CS, the most frustrating problems are sometimes the most simple! In my app, I use a geolocation function to find the user’s current location, then manipulate that to figure out which stop is closest to the user (and thus the stop the user would most logically head for). For the longest time, there seemed to be a scoping issue with my function – that is, it would return the x & y coordinates of user’s location within the showPosition() geolocation function, but when I tried to set a session variable so it would show up on my page, it kept coming up undefined!

Thanks to Eni’s help, it was discovered that the issue was a simple pair of parens after showPosition when I called it in the geolocation function. That resulted in showPosition being called right there and then, instead of passing in the results of the function as a parameter for the geolocation function. Glad it’s working now!

[aversiontosocialmedia-blog]

Progress [IP]

I can’t believe reading week (and with that finals) and the end of the school year are here already! Somehow, between this amazing weather and no classes, I’ve been able to get some work done on my independent project (a live bus tracker for Wellesley students). 

Below is the landing page (when a user hasn’t logged in yet). It looks like it’s almost there, but there are a bunch of bugs that are preventing closest stop from showing up! All of these calculations are happening in the back-end (calculating what the closest stop to the user and thus when the next bus will arrive there), but I wanted to keep the user interface excruciatingly obvious and only show pertinent information.

After the user logs in, there will be a check in functionality, data visualization, and live community forum for users to post updates. I chose to do the message board instead of giving the schedule because I figured it would be more useful for people to know when things aren’t going according to schedule/Wellesley students probably already have the schedule memorized by now anyway!

[aversiontosocialmedia-blog]

Conditional visibility of certain features in Meteor [GP]

In AM6, we addressed conditional visibility within one template when dealing with login, i.e. if the user was logged in, you could see some stuff, otherwise it wasn’t visible. 

Is there a way to do this using Meteor if/else for multiple templates? That is, when a user is logged in, we want them to be able to see one whole template, whereas if they’re not logged in, we want them to see another different template (vs. different aspects of the same template, like in AM6). 

[aversiontosocialmedia-blog]

Presentations [GP]

It was really helpful meeting with Sravanti today! I think pretty much all of the project based CS classes I’ve had so far (CS110, CS230) have had presentations, but I think this is the first one that required/suggested we meet with the PLTC. After our meeting our next big steps forward would be:

getting a live version of app working (!!!!)

tailor the presentation more towards a technical group. Right now, it’s very accessible to a non-technical group, but by including a slide or two about real implementation (i.e. why Meteor and how its implicit features benefit our specific app), we can easily cater to both audiences

Almost there!

[aversiontosocialmedia-blog]

Changes + Progress [GP]

Initially, my group and I had multiple pages envisioned for our app (a landing page, a feed page, and an account page), but after class on Friday, we decided to just incorporate everything into one page and then have different things show at different appropriate times. This also meant condensing some of the features we wanted to have (like the points trade in page) for addons for later. Right now, our app will look more like this:

It’ll be a lot of work to get done given these changes, but I’m excited to see what the final product looks like!

[aversiontosocialmedia-blog]

Amendments [IP]

One of the things I love about this class is being able to hear the opinions of my fellow peers and have those thoughts positively influence the products we all create! I especially appreciated this feedback process with the individual project because it made me rethink and re-evaluate exactly what it was I wanted my project to accomplish. After some thought, I came up with some changes:

instead of using Google Maps, I’ll be trying to use the Waze API! This was inspired by one of my reviewers, sophiakoukla, who commented that it might be hard to get live traffic updates. I agreed with what she was saying and realized that instead of trying to pull this information myself from Google Maps, I might as well utilize a tool like Waze which specifically does that!

I definitely want to use this app to provide more information/transparency in riding Peter Pan, but within the transportation office (and not just students alone). I really appreciated spillthejava’s remark that the app has more potential than what I listed – I always envisioned it as such but saw it more as an implicit quality. I think in my designs, I’ll incorporate buttons that reflect common problems students have in order to better aggregate useful data for the transportation office (i.e. “bus never showed up” or “was unable to ride b/c of overcrowding”) – that way, this info can easily be sent to the office and they’ll have tangible proof to model future bus rental decisions!

[aversiontosocialmedia-blog]

Tons of free templates and icons to use for making your wireframe seem that much more realistic! 

Tab Bar Icons iOS 7 Vol5 Original: http://ift.tt/1kCPko7

[aversiontosocialmedia-blog]

Idea + Sketches [Group Project]

For our group project, the two Jesses and I are creating an app that allows for favor exchanges within Wellesley. Users are able to post things they want done for them (i.e. “contact solution from CVS”), and if someone is able to do it (because they happen to be going to CVS the same day), they get points for completing the favor. On the flip side, people are able to offer to run favors for people (i.e. “going to Trader Joe’s today; anybody need anything?”), and then users can comment if they need favors to be run. Points are also accumulated for posting offers for running favors.

The goal of this app is to foster a collaborative community within Wellesley and create a sort-of “game” by helping one another – one accumulates points by helping others, and we envision the points being redeemable for things like Senate bus tokens. 

Below are our initial wireframes! The first one is of a person’s account, and the second one is of the feed of favors (the user can either comment on a favor someone else has posted and offered to run, or post their own that they are wondering if someone can run for them). 

[aversiontosocialmedia-blog]

Free wireframe tools!

Here are some tools I’ve used in the past for wireframing:

https://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/ – great for laying out the basic but essential features you want your page/app to have

http://www.invisionapp.com/ – if you wireframe with Illustrator/Photoshop/Sketch, you can upload the screens and incorporate interactivity using Invision (similar to the Keynote resource Nichole mentioned, but free!)

[aversiontosocialmedia-blog]

IP Review: Trailer Push

I really like the community aspect of this app, especially within the frame of supporting indie/lower budget films! I have a few clarification questions first, and then some thoughts: 

The first mode is allowing the user to watch movie trailers (without having to log in). Are these movie trailers a selected few, related to the movies that are coming out this week, or is there a search functionality for the user to search ~any~ movie trailer and the “coming out this week” is just a sidebar to this? Perhaps in the frame of this app/project in general, it might be easier to limit the trailers to match the movies coming out this week, instead of giving the user the possibility to search ~any~ movie trailer. 

What interactive graphic element/data visualization would you be incorporating into your app? 

The up-to-date trailer archive of the newest 30 trailers is a really cool idea, but is the only criteria you’re considering for these movies that they’re the newest trailers? In other words, I feel like tons of movie trailers are coming out, and trying to keep track of and constantly update this database would be way more than the scope of this project requires. Maybe, instead of a trailer archive of the newest 30 trailers, it could just be an archive of the “coming out this week” trailers, and then the search functionality (that I was confused about in the first bullet point) could be for all movie trailers? 

You pointed out the difficulty in melding together various API’s – would you consider using YouTube as a source for trailers? I did something similar with AM1 where I used YouTube to source movie trailers – that way, you also don’t have to worry about the fact that movies with small budgets might not be able to afford putting up trailers. 

Hope this helps! 

[aversiontosocialmedia-blog]

IP Review: Laidback Music

This is a pretty cool app – I could totally see myself using it! 

I’m most intrigued by the “edit with ease” selling point. I like that you described “editing with ease” as incorporating different acoustic attributes to differentiate/extend what Spotify/the radio is now, but I’m curious as to what the UX/UI will look like for the app. Some questions that come to mind:

How will you incorporate this “edit with ease” into the design? 

What choices will you make regarding search fields, buttons, etc. to allow a user to edit quickly? 

What is the tradeoff between editing “well” and editing with “ease” (if there is one)? How will you deal with this in the design and execution of your app? 

Personally, I feel like while more search options can be great for narrowing down a stream, it can also be overwhelming from a user perspective if not implemented with a clean design. 

[aversiontosocialmedia-blog]

Nevermind, figured this out! But a weirder issue – when I add players, nothing shows up anymore (under Selected Player, where the list used to be) – I haven’t changed anything in the code besides adding the account functionality. Has anybody else had this issue?

# players not updating?

I have the account functionality in place where the user creates their players, but for some reason, my app still says there are 11 players (the # I had before), even when there are none. The thing is, my code is populating the MongoDB “PlayersList” from an array called “students” that I current have being an empty array (before it had 11 players) – by that logic, PlayersList should also currently 0. Any ideas why this is happening? 

PlayersList = new Mongo.Collection(‘players’); //var students = ['Lucy’, 'Sophia’, 'Audrey’, 'Meridian’, 'Susie’, 'Jamie’, 'Priscilla’, 'Jess G’, 'Jess B’, 'Pam’, 'Clare’] var students = []

[aversiontosocialmedia-blog]

# players not updating?

I have the account functionality in place where the user creates their players, but for some reason, my app still says there are 11 players (the # I had before), even when there are none. The thing is, my code is populating the MongoDB “PlayersList” from an array called “students” that I current have being an empty array (before it had 11 players) – by that logic, PlayersList should also currently 0. Any ideas why this is happening? 

PlayersList = new Mongo.Collection('players'); //var students = ['Lucy', 'Sophia', 'Audrey', 'Meridian', 'Susie', 'Jamie', 'Priscilla', 'Jess G', 'Jess B', 'Pam', 'Clare'] var students = []