FP Ch2 n stuff

This past 2 weeks have been nothing less than hectic. Stress levels are approaching critical limits and everyone's barely hanging in there. Despite that, the team remains motivated and are sticking to the appointed deadlines, which is great.

Our prototype's almost done up. With an extremely competent designer (Yong Shen) in our party, the UI designs are on a completely different level from the projects i did before. I hope this would make our app appeal to many more people. I am convinced of how important having a good designer in a team is. 

Somethings i learned thus far are how important it is to have good team synergy. Having a good designer to work out all the UI aspects, coders have a much easier time just implementing the required design specifications. And it makes it so much easier knowing that the designs came from reliable hands. No need to worry about rejection lol. Also, having a dedicated designer means no disputes between coders on aesthetics. 

Of course, with such good UI we must not disappoint on the features and functionalities. Our team has not really come up with a complete scope for features yet, but the simple functionalities are already available. Even for features, we need to count on our very valuable, overworked designer, lol. Working with more competent coders are also great and theres so much to learn. XY is just amazing. He can code faster on that little Vaio toy =x. 

Try out our app :). Better you better everyone :)

http://vickyhuttons.com/betterme

Past 2 weeks' lectures had been very insightful. It got me to think about the importance of scaling in an application. This aspect is as important if not more, than the UI or any other. The materials covered by Mr Lai were very technical and probably too deep for the audience, myself included. It really did get me to appreciate the operations going on beneath the OS layer. In fact, as a computer engineer i can sort of relate to some of the topics, but i'd still be a long away from being an expert. 

The other lecture covered by Mr Chiang was also another aspect that i'd been exploring - computer security. He covered some examples of simple SQL injection (but don't really work nowadays lol). I guess they don't and will never teach you stuff like that directly. The lecture also did get me to appreciate the importance of security in our applications. I did wish he would share more examples of security bypassing though, that would've been really helpful, hehehe

FP stage 1..

We're finally at the final project. The time just passed so quickly, it feels surreal. It feels like just last week when we made a decision to enter this class to achieve our dreams lol. 

Brainstorming for ideas was itself a huge obstacle. Until now we have not actually settled on a fixed direction. We're still figuring out which way to go. There were a number of ways, and some of em were really interesting. Initially, JH and i wanted to refine our BTDT idea. Then we got to Timeline. Then Events, and then, and then and then. I realized that, more important than coming up with a good idea, is to know how to sell the idea.

Until this monday's consultation, we were still going around in circles. The team seemed to have settled on Choices. The rationale behind the app is definitely remarkable. However, it seemed that we did not put enough consideration in its practicality. Big mistake there. So back into the jungle we go..

Through our app, we hope to bring back some of the traditional values that appears to be lost in the newer generations. Society has definitely changed a lot in the last couple of decades, mostly due to the tech advances and whatnot. We feel that people seem to be paying less attention to things like respecting the elderly or the need to be considerate to others etc. We think we have found a good problem statement. But how to go about solving it? Is it even possible, hmm. Well if it isn't as a whole, maybe we could break it into many processes to eventually achieve the goals. So, finally we have - Better Me (haha the name's not finalized :P). It would be the first step, and there are many changes to the original idea that we hope would overcome the practicality issues faced before.

Things I've managed to take away. 

Before, to me app development was just: identify a problem, write a good program. 

Now its: identify a good problem, prepare a good marketing proposal, think of ways to solve the problem, write a simple but interactive program.

Programming is still important, but it really makes up barely 20% of the package. It's beginning to piece together now, why this software engineering course does not have any technical lectures or tutorials, its so different from my other engineering courses. Perhaps i'd been a little slow, but i think I'm finally learning how to learn.