10th Entry

This weeks lecture started off with a look at the I-Phone interface. I’ve always been curious of the I-Phone but heard some rumours that it’s a bit overrated and too expensive for what it is but I had never actually seen the interface, until now! From what I could see, Apple’s done a really good job with the touch screen. It’s got a really flashy, innovative interface with some nice features such as zooming in with your fingers. I’m not sure if the novelty with the touch screen will last though. I’ve heard people say it can be a bit fiddly and typing with the keyboard can get a bit tricky.

We then moved onto the blogs. We were told some people had not referenced their links properly, referring back to Harvard referencing we learnt in the first tutorial. One thing I missed out on my links is the date last accessed so I’ll make sure I add that piece of information in the future. Geneen said she could tell who was going to be successful just by looking at our blogs, we all went silent after hearing that, self evaluating our own blogs, but I definitely understand what she means.

We then had a look at available jobs available to ICT graduates such as jobs related to project management, programming, design and forensics. I’m sure I can speak for everyone when I say how surprised we were to find out the amount of money involved with each one. You never really seem to think of the financial benefits of doing degree because of your current financial situation and because it seems so far away but it’s nice to see light at the end of the road, definitely a good moral booster!

Below are two links related to project management. One is a Wikipedia article and the other is a list of project management resources I found on the university’s website.

We also briefly looked at archives and how computers and the internet are being used to organise, digitalise, view and contain them. The internet is such a good resource for them when you consider the shear volume of some archives, such as the BBC archive.

We finished with an interactive Flash video of a snowball fight. The interactivity of the video came in the form of being able to change the characters faces. It really shows how much interactivity Flash can be capable of.

This lecture was certainly a very good moral booster and kick up the backside combined! It really is nice to see real world jobs we could go into after the degree is finished and makes us work extra hard to make sure we achieve what we want.

This week’s tutorial (and the last tutorial of 2007) was about embedding Flash animations. We were given a very scary coursework style scenario detailing that we had to embed the Flash file with the University of Glamorgan logo by its side on a specific blue background. I thought it would take me ages since it gave no instructions on how to do this but it actually took no more than ten minutes. Flash’s interface is very easy to use and shares some similarities with other programs so it wasn’t hard to import the video and logo and change the background to the specific blue by the hex code. It was interesting to use some different functions of Flash though. Its nice to know that a common feature is quick and easy to use.

1. Wikipedia Article on project management –

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management

Last accessed – 17/12/07

2. Project management resources –

http://www.comp.glam.ac.uk/staff/dwfarthi/projman.htm

Last accessed – 17/12/07

9th Entry

Friday’s lecture was about design techniques and basically methods to get your ideas down onto paper. It fills a nice gap since we did a lot on analysing and thinking about that the user wants but until now we never had any idea how to translate the ideas onto paper in a correct format.

A structure chart is a hieratical chart showing how different elements in the chart are linked. For example you could list the employees, managers, senior managers etc with a small amount of important people at the top going down to the relatively large amount of employees in comparison at the bottom. Their basic format and layout means they’re easy to read and create.

A flow chart has a start point and an end point, between them being the things you need to do to get there. There may be multiple roots and part of the design process involves writing down all the possible roots and seeing which one is best. Flow charts are very commonly used in the design process as it is one of the most effective ways to see how you can get from A to B. The only downside is that since some flow charts use different colours and shapes to mean different things you have to have some knowledge and understanding of them to be able to create and read them. Some of the more complex ones can look very daunting!

Wireframes are basically pre designed templates consisting of different boxes for you to write down your ideas in and maybe even include small diagrams. Each wireframe layout is different allowing you to design it yourself to get the full use out of it. Wireframes can be very good for items that can’t be easily translated into a structure chart or flow diagram and is a lot more effective than writing down notes on a plain piece of paper. Since wireframes order information, they are very easy to read and very easy to create.

A storyboard consists of lots of different pictures to represent the final product. This is very good for designing films for example or even flash animations – anything where pictures would be better than words. The only problem is that storyboarding can take quite some time to complete and you need some drawing skills but when done correctly they can be very easy to read and translate into the final product.

Checklists can also be used as a design tool. Checklists are good for noting what has to be completed when creating a specification. They are best used for making a few points on a specific item since no one likes to read though pages and pages of checklists with no indication of the key points.

And that concludes Fridays lecture, a brief yet thorough look though at the different design techniques. Businesses take a lot of care in with their design techniques since it is such a crucial stage of the development, so much so companies even sell expensive software for creating them. This lecture will definitely come in handy the next time I need to design something and get my thoughts together.

For my independent reading this week I’ve got a link to the BBC GCSE Bitesize design and technology area. I know it’s for GCSE but it’s actually really good!! (see bottom of the post)

This week’s tutorial was about “nesting” symbols within one another. This basically allows you to control its different components separately. After a few goes of trial and error I managed to get an animation I was really pleased with where the web part spun round and could be controlled independently by the buttons while the flash part completed its animation. You seem to learn much more when you have an error opposed to when everything goes well since your encouraged to stray off from the tutorial and delve down into flash’s intricate components to see how it all works. I really get the feeling that I’m playing around with a very powerful program! I look forward to expanding my knowledge of Flash even more next week.

Below is a good website for all sorts of tutorials relating to flash from simple to insanely complex. This is how I found out how to make my text spin around 360 degrees.

1. Tutorialized Flash tutorials –

http://www.tutorialized.com/tutorials/Flash/1

Last accessed – 10/12/07

2. BBC D&T Bitesize revision

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/dida/multimedia/designrev1.shtml

Last accessed – 10/12/07

8th Entry

This weeks lecture was on accessibility and how people with disabilities access resources on a computer. Accessibility is a very important subject that is often overlooked. As someone who has designed many websites, I was always aware but wasn’t that concerned about designing for people with disabilities because I always thought software would always be able to cater for their needs but this is not always the case. Legislation for making websites accessible for disabled people and the W3 accessibility guidelines have been in place for quite some time but I never bothered with them because they were a little excessive and no one else seemed to be bothering with them either so I was quite surprised to hear that disability pressure groups have started suing companies who do not abide by them.

Software can do a lot for people with disabilities including magnifying the text, changing the colour scheme of applications and websites for people with sight problems such as blindness or colour-blindness and providing voice recognition. It can also read text out loud on a website using a special text only browser. However while software can provide this companies need to insure their websites are compatible. A company has made a validator called Bobby so a company can check to see if their website would be accessible for people with disabilities. Some plugins, JavaScript frames and columns can all make a website difficult for a screen reader to read.

Hardware has also been created for people with disabilities including a panel that turns text to brail using pins and a keyboard for someone with only one hand.

To finish off we watched Animator Vs Animation II, incredibly to managed to be even better than the first, absolute pure genius!

This lecture has been very thought provoking. I never knew accessibility was such a big industry and I’m really surprised to find companies are even being sued for inaccessible websites. I’ll definitely keep accessibility in mind when I design websites and applications in the future. At the bottom of this blog entry are a few links I used to research the accessibility guidelines.

This weeks tutorial was about creating tweens within tweens with Flash. It basically involved tweening a symbol that already had a tween combined with it. It’s definitely getting more complex now but I’m enjoying discovering more of Flash’s features. You really need to think about what you want to achieve before you start creating the animation since the process of making the animation takes quite a while to complete and it can be difficult to edit at the end since your using so many different components.

1. W3’s accessibility guidelines -
http://www.w3.org/WAI/gettingstarted/Overview.html

2. Information about the Disability Discrimination Act - http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-accessibility/uk-website-legal-requirements.shtml

3. General information regarding accessibility – http://www.tiresias.org/guidelines/web.htm