Katie #4

This week was quite productive for our team. We had two team meetings, one Monday and one Thursday, as well as practice for our presentation on Friday. At Monday's meeting, we tried to break down the design for our program into many steps so that we could start work independently. A key concern we discussed was determining the speed at which we can get the iPhone LED to flash, and how we will have to choose how many frames will constitute one 'unit' in Morse code. Now, because the backend is receiving information from the frame buffer, and we have determined our unit speed, we were not going to be able to easily start work on that part of the project. We developed a solution:

We will add an intermediate step between the image processing/ translation steps which compresses the binary string representing the frames down into a string where a single bit represents a 'unit' of time. This way, we can begin working on the functions to translate this string to readable text without knowing the speed capabilities of the LED, and go back and write the intermediate function later.

We officially determined that Ethan will focus on the User Interface, I will focus on the translation of messages, and Ryan will focus on the image processing. We believe the image processing component will be the most difficult, so Ethan and I will assist Ryan as necessary.

We looked at the storyboards feature in Xamarin, which allows easy UI creation. Compatibility issues remain frustrating, as we learned that I will not be able to compile or test code, or even see the storyboards for iOS without being remotely connected to a Mac. Our impression was that Xamarin would let us all easily develop for iOS, so it is disheartening to learn that it is perhaps as much trouble as tracking down a Mac for me to use. However, since my portion of the project is platform independent, I should be able to test it with canned data.

We met Thursday to write our design and powerpoint slides. Ryan and I did the design while Ethan created an aesthetically majestic set of slides for us to use. Friday, we practiced our presentation at eStudio and believe we found areas we could improve on for our presentation Wednesday.