Milestone 1

In preparation for Milestone 1, a lot of effort was put into understanding how to code for the Microsoft Surface and how to get Surface objects to interact with code written for functionality.

The main task I worked on was trying to get the Timeline image to generate, as this is a pivotal part of our interface and helps to personalize a user's experience.

It became apparent before working on generating the Timeline image, that it would be necessary to clarify what sorts of objects would be necessary to create (e.g. Movie, Note, Person, etc.), and to get an idea of what functionality belonged to each class. So, the first step was to conceptualize the necessary objects and to make skeletons of their classes.

After this, came the struggle of figuring out how to generate and appropriate image and associate that with a certain object on the Surface's screen. Pointers were taken from the GeneBrowse code, as it is a great resource (albeit, hard to read in its entirety).

The task of generating the Timeline was broken into: generating the black background rectangle, generating the rectangles that represent the duration of a person's time on the screen, and to generating note markers of the appropriate type in the appropriate place. Of course, the stage-time rectangles and the note-markers had to be generated according to a color associated with the particular Person that the stage times referred to.

These three tasks were eventually implemented and generated (based on canned information).

The second big task that was approached this milestone (and implemented by Donna), was taking in text notes taken during production and parsing them properly so that they're associated with the correct person and generate the correct type note-marker at the correct timestamp on the Timeline.

The layout design was refined by Rebecca and Ji -- but upon seeing everything come together we all thought that the interface looked very cluttered and not very intuitive (and the class agreed). We also agreed that our design does not leverage the Microsoft Surface's inviting qualities or collaborative qualities.


So, for the next milestone, a lot of things need to transpire, including a major overhaul of the interface.
Other tasks we have set out (in no particular order):

- experiment with the LogiPen
- work on getting the parsed notes to generate a Notes panel
- enable Notes to be dragged out into a separate manipulable object
- be able to tap the Timeline and have this bring up the Notes re-sorted menu
- get the the Notes re-sorter menu to re-sort the Notes according to type and/or color
- get the Movie to pause and play via tapping
- implement a Recent Notes panel
- implement a Tape Head that moves along the Timeline (and is also draggable for fast forwarding/rewinding)