Milestone 3

For Milestone 3, we redesigned the interface. We thought it was too involved, confusing, not-intuitive enough. So, we make the interaction screen smaller, and gave a Rehearsal obejct 3 main items: timeline, movie, and notes panel.

Other items were also added to the application: a Recent Notes panel, a seeker for the movie (to navigate to certain times), a timestamp for the seeker, a title bar, a panel for buttons to filter the notes by color and type, and a portion that displays who is logged in. These objects improve the functionality and usefulness of the application.

The portions that I personally worked on was getting the movie to pause and play via tapping and to get the seeker to work. Both were a matter of looking at documentation for the movie object which is an instance of MediaElement. this object has built in functions for playing and pausing -- the playing and pausing of the movie is achieved via making Play and Pause buttons that are as large as the movie screen and invisible; so, when the user taps the screen, an invisible button is pressed with the correct functionality.

The MediaElement documentation gave a method for making s lider that could be used to slide to a certain portion of the video. However, in action, it is very slow/inaccurate/effectively stops the movie when used. i.e. interaction is very inconsistent and its is not very useful.

What we actually wanted was the idea of a "play head", that moved along with the video so that users could see where they were along their timeline, to give them more insight into their notes. However, to get this object to dynamically update and somehow be linked with the position of the movie element proved to be a problem out of the scope of the project/time/my knowledge.



In the end, I feel as though this prototype is a lot more approachable than the last one. My biggest concerns with it lie in the fact that I think the interface is still very GUI-like and not very intuitive.
I do believe that our project is more tangible than it is appears, as we did not get to implement the RFID, video camera, and pen portions, which were pivotal to the idea of our system integrating into normal rehearsal behavior.