Reflections

Shocking Price Comparisons

2010-11-06T21:55:00.005-04:00

With all this buzz about hybrid cars and such, Nissan has gone back in time back to the electric car. The Nissan Leaf gets, supposedly, anywhere from 62 to 138 miles to a charge, depending on your driving habits. EPA tests pegged the range at about 111 miles. The 62 mile number comes from "worst case" driving (winter weather, stop-and-go traffic).

This didn't speak much to me. My car, a 2.3L automatic-transmission Mazda3, gets decent gas mileage. Nothing to brag about at 27mpg average, but that isn't terrible. Would getting an electric car actually be cheaper? I plugged some numbers using my all time favorite tool, Excel.

Let's define some constants. Leaf data lifted from Nissan.

I drive, on average, 5,200 miles per year.
Gas is stuck at $2.50/gallon.
Electricity, where I presently live, is stuck at $0.08/kWh
My car has a 14 gallon gas tank and gets 27 miles per gallon.
The Leaf requires 26.4 kWh of power to charge (note that the battery capacity is 24 kWh, but apparently requires an additional 2.4kWh to charge).

I used very conservative estimates from both cars. My car can "supposedly" get (14 gallons * 27 miles per gallon) 378 miles out of a tank. The Nissan Leaf can "supposedly" get 138 miles to a tank. This means that I would refuel my car (5,200 / 378) 13.76 times per year. This is hardly the case, but it is a conservative estimate. The Leaf, at the supposed 138 range would need refueled (5,200 / 138) 37.68 times.

With these ideal situations,

My car would cost (13.76 tanks/year * (14 gallon fuel tank * $2.50 gas price)) $481.48 per year
The Leaf would cost (37.68 charges/year * (26.4 kWh * $0.08/kWh)) $79.58.

This LOOKS promising. However, the Leaf has a proprietary charging station that costs $2,000. You would have to won the car for 5 years to make up the difference. And that assumes that you're already in the market for a car of similar value! And of course this all gets jiggled around when the cost of fuels change. This site offers a good application to compare costs.

New project!

2010-10-05T22:53:00.005-04:00

I started, and finished, a project in a record 5 hours! Last week I bought an Arduino board to use for my traffic light that I bought off Craigslist. Well, I ordered the relays and other bits for that yesterday and it'll be awhile until they arrive and I can't satiate my need to tinker, and daisy-chaining LEDs was getting old and boring.

During class today (... shut up) I was thinking about hooking up an analog car gauge to my computer. I have a lot of beef with digital readouts of some things, especially things where you don't need precision. RAM usage, in my opinion, is one of those things.

So, I took a risk. I know car wiring runs on 12V DC, and Arduino runs on 5V DC. All the motor does is spin a needle that maybe weighs a couple of grams. I decided to try my luck and I went to Advanced Auto Parts and got an electronic oil pressure gauge. It was $70, not cheap, but it saved me a lot of time in figuring out manual motor control.

I spliced up some wire of unknown gauge (proper gauge, at least) and stuck it in digital pin 13. I fired up the Arduino and the needle flipped around and this was the best sign. Pin 13 sends a digital HIGH and LOW when the unit boots. However, LOW is below 0 on the gauge, and HIGH is 100. No in between.

So I looked up analog out, noting my board didn't have any. Apparently Arduinos can emulate analog using pulse width modulation. This basically means that the power to the pin is cycled on and off at determinate amounts of time. For my gauge, the higher the number, the less time. If I set the value to 0 (zero) then the pin spends all its time ON, and thus the gauge is peaked at 100. The lowest value is 135, which lets the needle rest on 0 on the gauge. I found the values needed for the needle to rest at other points (25, 50, and 75) and used a linear trendline to find an equation to use, since the numbers aren't actually linear (this surprised me).

Getting the Arduino to handle the input was the hardest part. Arduinos use USB-to-serial interfacing, and as like all serial readers, it can only read 1 byte at a time. On top of that, it reads in as ASCII. So if you put in "100" you get, "494848". So I had to read a buffer and convert it to decimal. Ugh.

As I know very, very little about C++ it was difficult. Eventually I made the buffer fixed width at 5 characters. It reads free memory from serial and converts it to a percentage on the board. This adds some work on the board but avoids having to take in a decimal through serial. The very first datum sent is the maximum amount of memory. Every number after that is an update.

I use Python to send data to the board in 1 second intervals, and it uses a trivial amount of CPU. Success!

I made a video demoing the finished product.

Ear piercing

2010-08-30T17:54:00.003-04:00

Today I got my eardrum pierced with a needle. Steroids help my inner ear disorder and my doctor and I decided to inject them straight to the ear, which is becoming a more popular procedure. I asked my doctor how painful the procedure is and he replied, "It hurts like crazy for 3 seconds." This is correct.

He started by turning my head to the side so my ear was facing upwards. He put this tube thing in my ear (I assume as a guide, since the ear canal isn't really straight) and injected a little bit a numbing fluid. He then injected the steroids. It made a weird noise.

I got a little bit dizzy (which is expected if you put fluid in your ear that isn't up to body temperature) and I pretty much lost all my hearing in that ear due to the numbing medication. I then sat there for about 10 minutes and I left. I occasionally got stabbing pains in my ear from the stab wound but I regained my hearing within the hour. The ear still feels slightly funny, though.

The steroids also taste really, really bad.

From here I'm not sure what to expect. Only time will tell at this stage!

Death, Taxes, and Needles

2010-08-21T22:31:00.002-04:00

Meniere's disease is a strange beast. It's becoming more prevalent in thought that no one umbrella cause is behind it. It can be allergies, vitamin deficiencies, autoimmune disorders, viruses, head injuries, etc. Basically there are way too many possible causes to real nail it down unless it's really obvious.

Mine was attacked as allergies at first because, hey, it's the easiest. Allergy medications are cheap, over-the-counter, and simple. Well this did nothing (although I know how to rid myself of severe sinus blockage now) I moved on.

We started the diuretic and low sodium diet to reduce the amount of potential swelling my tissues can do. The idea is that the less sodium I have in my body the less sodium there is to absorb water, thus reducing pressure. This helps to a point. If I mess up and eat a lot of sodium my diuretic can't keep up, and usually once symptoms show up they aren't going away until membranes rupture and I get vertigo. I moved on.

My otologist gave me Prednisone, a synthetic steroid. He instructed me to take it whenever my symptoms persisted over a span of a few days and it ends up working very well. It doesn't return me to 100%, nor does it work within 24 hours or so, but if I pummel my symptoms with enough force they go away more often, and faster. Granted, I'm still left with vertigo but if I can attack it early it won't be bad. Often times the vertigo won't last very long or, more recently, been simply BPPV which is super easy to deal with, and doesn't cause me to vomit like a sick child! I just sit still for about 30 minutes until the Valium kicks in and I'm as good as new.

However, as you know, steroids are not good to be on for more than a week or so. I think the longest I ever actually had to use them in succession was 3 or 4 days. 5 days is the cut off, and after that I'm pretty much boned.

And I'm out of refills. Great.

So, what now? I've found out that steroids work well in my favor. From here the next step is injecting steroids directly into my ear. It's the same concept, except the steroids are localized to my ear and not going all over my body. The catch is that this procedure needs to be repeated every few months. I'm calling to get this set up on Monday.

Ideally the ordeal takes about 45 minutes. They poke a needle full of steroidy-goodness through my ear drum and I sit there for half an hour. Then it drains out. Then I leave. Hopefully it's this simple in practice.

A Starry Night

2010-05-22T20:04:00.004-04:00

There is some speculation that Van Gogh's "A Starry Night" was inspired by his chronic dizziness. There is speculation that the same dizziness is why he cut off his ear. The disorder put forth as his diagnosis is Ménière's disease.

I was diagnosed with Ménière's disease in 2008, after a violent vertigo attack at work left me sick and incapacitated and had to be driven home by a co-worker. This was not the first sign of Ménière's, but rather the breaking point. There are several symptoms of Ménière's:

Aural fullness in the ear (the feeling like you need to pop your ears)
Tinnitus
Hearing loss
Vertigo and dizziness (not the same thing)

It all started with the aural fullness. The earliest record of this I have is 2004. I was flying back from a Blue Stars camp and during descent I got the absolute worst headache I've ever had from my ear. Whether or not this was a migraine I'm not sure, I've not had a headache like that since.

From there, the symptoms mostly vanished for a few years. Any occurrence of them I chalked up to allergies or seasonal changes. In 2007 I started getting more aural fullness, but I didn't know what it was about. Later that year I was woken up with light dizziness, but my ear felt better. This happened twice. Suddenly, a bad connection was made: aural fullness -> dizziness. This was not OK in my book. I saw the campus health doctors who noted that there did seem to be some fluid behind my ear and I was put on antibiotics several times to treat an infection.

During spring break of 2008, I was working for my dad helping move some IT equipment from the old office to the new. The day after the move I got very little sleep and woke up with the worst aural fullness I'd ever had. I couldn't hear a damn thing. I was walking around when I physically felt something in my ear pop and the entire room began to spin violently. After stumbling around randomly for bit, I got sick, and was driven home. Where I was promptly sick, again. I passed out for a few hours and woke up as if nothing had ever happened. The only evidence was my sore throat.

I went back to school and something that happened that destroyed me. I was nauseous for an entire week. I had to miss an entire week of school, mostly unconscious. Eating very little. I had a doctor's appointment later that week due to this but when the time came there was no way I was going to able to ride 40 miles to the doctor without vomiting. I insisted we go to the ER. They diagnosed me with labrynthitis and gave me some meclazine for the nausea and an antibiotic. This cleared everything right up.

The aural fullness remained, however.

I made a doctor's appointment some months later, during Fall 2008 semester. He referred me to an allergist (all the awhile I had already been researching the symptoms on my own) who did a battery of tests and didn't find anything severe but did find some allergies and told me what to do. That regimen of antihistamines and nasal sprays ultimately did nothing (although they are quite reliving during allergy seasons) and I was referred to an otologist.

My ear has the innate ability to be completely and totally fine every time I see my otologist. He diagnosed me with early/atypical Ménière's, where I have most of the symptoms, but not all. After my diagnosis he gave me a diuretic and was instructed to go on a low-sodium diet. Dandy. Whatever works, I thought.

I started my low salt diet and was very strict about it. I have an Excel sheet where I input everything. Nothing got past me. After a few weeks, however, it really began to drain me. I was stressed and was not happy about having to give up a lot of foods, even though I was totally symptom free. I began to experiment. I slowly upped my salt intake to see where my threshold was. I was back to eating my normal garbage and was symptom free. I had no idea. The entire thing had vanished.

I was symptom free for about a year and a half, having changed absolutely nothing.

Then it returns. I had the aural fullness again. I was not happy. I knew, in the back of my head, it was only a matter of time but I just did not want it to happen. I wanted it to be gone. So, I start my diuretic and low salt diet again. Nothing changes. Blah blah blah.

This goes on for some time, and each time my anxiety sky rockets due to the thought of having another debilitating vertigo attack.

In early 2010, I woke up for class and was sitting at my computer and was hit with some random dizziness. What caused this I have no idea but it scared me. It scared me a lot. This means my disorder is no longer following its usual procession. I had dizziness without aural fullness, which had never happened before. I was a bus driver at this time, so I had to see my boss and get clearance for this, which was fine. That's worked out.

A few weeks after that, I'm woken up with the absolute loudest tinnitus I've ever had, coupled with pretty severe hearing loss. Now, I've always had a very high pitched ringing in my ears to begin with but I attributed that to hearing loss from drumming with no ear protection for several years. This was not high pitched, and very annoying. It sounds much like if someone took a clarinet and played middle C right next to your ear. This scared me even more than the dizziness, since this symptom was completely new. I had a panic attack and had to call off work. The tinnitus persisted for 3 days. I woke up later that week with no tinnitus, but with dizziness. Fantastic.

Today the tinnitus came back.

At this stage I'm weighing my options. There are no cures for Ménière's disease. No one knows what causes it, and it affects everyone differently. The only sure-fire solutions is invasive surgery, some of which involve me going deaf in that ear, others involving light brain surgery.

All the awhile I find it difficult to function. If my ear is acting up, I become a wreck. I can't do anything, I'm afraid to leave the house. The unpredictability of the disorder has taken over my life. Medicine helps, but if I continue this route I'll become a drug addict. I've pretty much convinced myself I'd rather be deaf but functional rather than loaded with drugs and have full hearing.

I've been told to consider other choices. Coping mechanisms were suggested, based on how permanent the surgeries are. This would be ideal, if I knew how long the disorder would persist. Ménière's does typically burn out after awhile, but, again, that varies by the person. How much longer should I wait and torment myself with this waiting for a burn out, which will leave me mostly deaf anyway? At the same time, there's a chance it'll go away tomorrow and I'll never have a problem again. Likewise, I'm 22 and I could suffer with this until I'm 60.

I'm left balancing the possibilities of persistent anxiety and other symptoms for years, even decades, or irreversible surgery. If you managed to read this entire thing to the end, what's your input?

Edit: I should also add that there's no guarantee that the condition won't also travel to my other ear.

Wrap up

2010-05-01T17:26:00.002-04:00

I've still been having a lot of trouble with these reflections. I talked to Ben about it, and he told me the story about a Team Liquid member who watched his replays after matches to learn about his style. I've been trying to somehow incorporate this into my thinking, but really I've come up with nothing. It's been in the back of my head for the past 2 weeks, too.

I look back at the semester and I'm trying to see what I did. I mean, I don't really learn by reading books or watching tutorials. I learn by just jumping in head first and trying stuff. I realize that this isn't the most effective method but it allows me to learn the best way: by making mistakes. I look up stuff as I need them. I talked to veterans of that language later to see if what I'm doing could be done better. This tends to lead to poor results early on, but I feel as if it allows me to understand the inner workings of the language better because I actually experience what's wrong. Instead of reading, "You should not parse primitive doubles as strings." I end up doing it anyway and find out the hard way which allows me to realize why and I end up imprinting into my brain with an actual experience behind it.

This semester has been a bit different. To get to a stage where I can get to trial-and-error I had to actually read some documentation. This is something I've started doing recently since I've tried to find easier solutions to easy problems, much like the permissions issue. You run the app for the first time and you have wrong permissions you're going to get some error and, rather than just claw at the program like a helpless kitten, I figured, "Oh hey, I bet the docs have something relevant here."

That being said, Javadocs have been worthless to me outside of finding return types. If I need help, I need examples. Late in April I found some built-in templates and functionality for something I was doing with custom adapters and what not. I figured it was in my best interest to use the optimized, packaged items rather than my clunky custom ones. I tried looking them up but to no avail. There is, I swear, no examples about it. You can find bits and pieces of it in the documentation but nothing meaningful outside the Javadocs. So I fell back on my old strategy of just ... plugging stuff in. This... kind of worked. It worked to the extent where it compiled but didn't run. At this stage I was frustrated already and simply gave up that idea.

This semester has kind of been a ... merging of ideas. It got to a point where I didn't need to look up anything because I knew either what I was doing would A) work, or B) not work. Towards the end of the semester it become less and less guesswork and more, "Yeah, that's not possible" or "Yeah, that should be possible." Save for the few, "Oh, how about that." moments where things happened that I didn't expect. Granted, I can't cite specific instances but that's how it feels. I understand the concept of Adapters now, which at the beginning I was just hacking stuff into it and seeing what would happen. I went from no adapter knowledge at all to making custom adapters.

Et tu, Ball State?

2010-04-21T15:18:00.004-04:00

I have never been so pissed off at Ball State University. I have a lot of beef with the university as a whole to begin with, but I'm going to focus on the latest travesty that's affected me.

Ball State requires a writing competency exam. It isn't so much writing "competency" as it is, "can you push out an essay on an extremely general question in an arbitrary amount of time" test.

Now, I've always regarded myself as a good writer. I got A's in both ENG 103 and 104 (this point I will return to) and was actually offered a job by the writing center (a service run on campus to review essays and papers). I'd like to think my writings on this blog are evidence of this as well.

The writing competency exam goes like this:

You're given a prompt that fits the kinda of test you're taking (general, science, humanities, etc). I took the science exam so I got a prompt that was relevant to my area of study.
You write like a meth-addict.

My prompt was, "What has your major contributed in the past 100 years to change or impact society?" Being a computer science major this was exceedingly easy. I wrote, specifically, about how early computers revolutionized the engineering industry and made space travel possible. Then I wrote about the Internet and it's formation and how it has connected the entire goddamn world and made everyone hyper-aware of what goes in the world.

I remember this very vividly. So much so that I could probably re-write the entire essay from memory. I was done in 40 minutes, out of the alloted 120. I left very confident and have felt very confident ever since.

Today I found out I did not get credit. This is the absolute biggest insult I have ever been given by this university. I submitted the form to get my exam back but who knows if I'll ever know what I did wrong. To be honest, I don't think I did anything wrong! I almost want to go in and write the same exact thing and see what happens.

I have always been against the writing competency exam. I'm sure every other student is too. Not because it's a forced, standardized test but because it's redundant. We're forced to take two English classes to begin with, both of which focus entirely on writing. They teach you to organize your thoughts in a coherent manner. Then, if you don't pass their master plan test for any reason they decide, you get screwed.

I now have to waste more time to deal with this. In my seething rage I want to plan on wasting as many people's time as possible just so they know how it feels. Realistically I know this will not pan out in my favor. Needless to say, this incident has pretty much sworn off any alumni relations with me. This happened to my high school too. They played with me and then expected a REWARD? They got my tuition, and nothing else. The alumni emails are in a GMail filter to go straight to trash. Good riddance.

Ball State has proven itself to be a university not worth attending. I fully regret coming here and I hope my future is not negatively impacted because of my attendance.

Reflecting on reflections

2010-04-09T20:30:00.000-04:00

I've been struggling with these reflections. I have a lot of trouble with open-ended questions and ideas. This problem alone is pretty much the entire reason I switched out of English and into computer science. For some reason I just cannot wrap my brain around open-ended concepts. They are so foreign to me.

I never know where to start. My brain wanders a lot. This makes it difficult to stay on topic as it is and when I'm given an opportunity to explore a less than linear path I never know where to go or when to stop.

I keep trying to think about what I've done differently this semester so I have something to at least think about. Sometimes I find something and I'm able to come up with something meaningful but overall I still struggle. Granted this has opened my mind a bit and I've become more introspective as a result, but I feel like I could be doing more.

Even now I try to reflect on how I reflect and I draw blanks. The entire concept of being anything but a robotic programmer is actually kind of new to me. I've always been the kind of person who gets an idea and ends up putting out some code in the span of a few hours, sometimes more. This whole... architecture and planning thing is intriguing and, apparently, very important.

I also understand the learning about yourself is also important and I guess it becomes a surprise to me because I've always tried to do this. Maybe I've never explicitly stated my findings but don't we all have some inner-self-improvement running in the back of our minds? This just seems common sense to me since in order to improve anything you must first figure out what's wrong and how to fix it. This ties into my first paragraph: How do I find what to fix when I'm given the world as a problem? Granted this sounds like a bit of an exaggeration but that's how it feels to me. There's so many variables involved in every day situations I can't possibly keep tabs on every one.

Ultimately I feel as if I've missed a mark and have reduced the entire concept of being a reflective practitioner to some elementary concept that even then I'm misunderstood.

Worlds colliding

2010-03-17T22:52:00.003-04:00

Dr. McNely brought up some interesting ideas on Tuesday.

When I took ENG 210 some semesters ago we spent the entire semester discussing the exact ideas he was mentioning, although from a more feminist approach. That class was very challenging. There were days where I was calling the professor at home to get help with the ideas and to this day I still cannot wrap my brain around some of the ideas. There is a mindset trait I am missing for this sort of thing. And to be completely honest I probably couldn't even tell you what they are anymore. The only thing I really remember is the standard "getting away from seeing everything through the white male's eyes" idea.

But Dr. McNely presented it in a different light. I'd never really considered user experience to be a rhetoric topic. I'd thought about the idea but I never connected them in that way.

Earlier in the semester I had a task on my calendar, "Build prototypes for Evelyn." Evelyn is my nearly-3-year-old niece. I'd toyed with the idea of building an app similar to our project, but with different goals such as finding an animal, color, or something a toddler would identify with. I was thinking this would give me an eye into what a child does with the UI (although she isn't new to the mobile app idea, she uses my brother's iPhone like a pro) but I never got around to it but Dr. McNely's talk kind of re-sparked the idea for me. I figured she would be the ideal candidate for getting UI feedback (providing I would be able to recreate the situation is a way she would work with, and a way I could re-translate... which is unlikely) since she has few, if any, preconceptions on software.

Although then I'd have to weigh those results with those who do have preconceptions on software. I think this can relate to the Office 2003 vs. 2007 interface. The ribbon was a disaster for people who knew their way around the old interface, but was easier for less-experienced users to navigate now that buttons and menus were grouped by function.

I've been talking to people about my current user testing adventures and I mentioned that it's kind of hard to find people in our target audience. Android phones still have a small market share so everyone I tested with had to familiarize themselves with the phone. This was... interested, and it gave me some insight as to how they interacted with a UI they'd never used before. I, personally, tend to abuse the Menu button because, to me, that makes sense. My "subjects" had to find the menu key first which leads me to question just how much faith to put in the menu button. Granted, it has its uses but I shouldn't assume it'll be the first place users will look for functions. One of my subjects didn't realize the phone was a touch screen and was using the scroll wheel so now I'm starting to look at usability in terms of scrolling. Interesting conclusions, really.

What I took from Dr. McNely's speech was that I should expand how I'm thinking about the end-user. My idea of the end-user is an all-inclusive model of a person. I'm starting to think of different kinds of end-users now. For example, I saw Evelyn as the ideal end-user because she doesn't really think about what to expect, she just sees and interprets. In reality, users have ideas of where to look for things and it's up to us to try and merge our design with other people's world-view to make a fully usable and friendly interface.

By the books

2010-03-14T00:43:00.003-05:00

So, for this year's spring break I went to San Francisco via Amtrak. That was fun and all, but I really want to discuss my findings on the train.

The train goes through the rockies, and so you have very limited cell reception. There are windows of up to 6 to 7 hours where you will not get a single bar. Most people would take this time to think introspectively, or read a book (which I did do) but I was also at my computer for parts of those windows. I started writing an Android app on the train that dealt with GPS, since that was about the only external communication I had.

The biggest problem I ran into? Documentation. Now, the documentation itself is fine. It's accessing it.

How much of a platform should one know offhand? I ran into times where I was having trouble casting doubles, and since I couldn't look up anything, I came up with this gem (brace yourself):

Object[] x = footsteps.toArray();
Double diff = Double.parseDouble(x[4].toString()) - Double.parseDouble(x[0].toString());

Here, footsteps is of type double. I rely very heavily on Google to get me out of binds that I sometimes have to fall back on dirty casting and duct-tape hacks.

Granted, this is more language-specific typing than it is documentation, but I suppose both come with time.

Although, imagine this rhetorical situation: Say two job candidates were lined up for an interview. Both were given the same program to write (on paper, no computer). Applicant A did it fine, but applicant B had trouble since they couldn't recall specific parts of a language/platform. If A and B were on similar skill sets, but B just didn't have a good memory (or just doesn't memorize trivial things). Are A and B both suited for the job, or does their memories set them apart?

This is something that has haunted me on CS tests before. Why should I memorize specific syntax when the computer is there to coach me through it? Within reason, of course. I suppose I don't see the merit in memorizing QuickSort either; it's not like I'm writing it every day. Memorizing sorting/searching routines is a waste of energy in my eyes.

Bad loomings, this time

2010-02-25T11:23:00.003-05:00

Something I've realized recently is that I'm feeling completely unprepared for higher CS courses. Sure, I can program but I have very little critical problem solving skills. In operating systems today our professor introduced the eight queens puzzle and I would have no idea where to start. It doesn't help that I don't know much about chess.

I've been reading some forum threads mostly composed by graduate and doctoral students recently. I came upon this post. It's about Ph.D qualifying exams and one of the questions is, "Do you need explicit support from a programming language to write object-oriented code?" Now, I realize this is way above my level but I can't even begin to conceptualize this. I barely know what it means to be object-oriented in the first place, much less what writing OOP code in a non-OOP language, and what that all entails.

In some of my classes P/NP completeness has been mentioned and I still have no idea what it means. I feel like there's an entire set of logic and problem solving skills that I am missing and I fear it's going to hold me back in the future.

The bigger problem with these logic puzzles is how in the world do I do it programatically? I think it's only reasonable to be able to do this by hand before I teach a computer to do it.

One of the problems I run into is I run into a point where I know I understand it but I can't vocalize it. I can't put the solution into words. I never get around to verbalizing it until I have to teach someone how to do it. This is a bit weak and sounds a bit like the piano teacher who stays one lesson ahead of the student.

Design woes

2010-02-24T12:37:00.005-05:00

Our guest speaker in class mentioned competition a lot. It dawned on me that we really hadn't scoped out what other people had done. I searched for "mass text" on the Android market and got 2 results, 1 relevant. I poked around in it, and realized they seemed to have gotten a much usable interface. See below.

Listed here are my medical contacts, so no one's privacy is being violated. Our competitor's approach takes a group and displays a list view with check boxes, allowing you to pick and choose (and easy select/unselect all). This is so easy, how could we possibly improve upon this?

It's about that time where I wonder if we just want to copy their approach and add a different feature (We've been toying with the idea of mass e-mail) to give us an edge. But I still want to explore all the possibilities of a new interface.

It almost seems as if we've done a bunch of thinking, testing, and design all to go full-circle and avoid the easiest solution. Now that I see how its been done I'm having some trouble coming up with new ideas. I feel some strong outside-the-box thinking is in order. But at the same time, I'm afraid it's a lost effort because I feel like I'd be violating the KISS principle and end up just losing valuable time.

Our first prototype is pretty much done, so I guess user testing will tell me how much time needs to go into the GUI. Our final product will probably look totally different than what it looks like today.

Truth in art

2010-02-20T15:29:00.002-05:00

I laugh every time I see this. His blog is worth reading, as well.

The Big Lie

2010-02-16T13:36:00.001-05:00

Theoretically, if you created an app called "Self-detonate" and only had one button with no text (at all), would users click it? There's a bit of a big lie idea in this. Really, a user would be downright stupid to click it, but it seems silly that a software button could make the phone explode.

Asking users a lot of questions and giving them a lot of directions falls back onto the entire mess of popup dialogs. If you're trying to get something done and a prompt comes up asking you something, you almost start going for the buttons out of instinct! This has frustrated users for years. I have only anecdotal evidence (which I understand is not the singular of data) but in my experience users hate being asked questions. They want you to preemptively read their mind.

We like to give users a lot of options. But (most) users hate options. I'd bet most casual users don't even open their options menu. Take, for example, an unnamed software updater. You boot up your computer and it tells you it's going to check for updates. A more serious user will see this and think, "Good, it's telling me." but a casual user is thinking, "Why do I care?" Then if they tell it to go ahead and check for updates, it might not find one and it terminates. But if it find an update it starts prompting you for more permission, supposedly to download and install it. A lot of applications just go to the fail-safe which is just ask as many questions as possible but this ends up having a negative consequence; users begin to ignore the application entirely.

Thoughts on basic interaction

2010-02-16T12:56:00.006-05:00

Lately we've been talking a lot of prototypes and planning around our application, but I was assigned user experience testing in my group so I've had the looming thought in my head, "how do we make this usable?" I've been looking at our application evolve in this aspect.

We started with the typical three prototypes, and we all agreed on the idea of a sliding drawer containing any sort of data. The initial idea had a list of contacts and a sliding drawer containing a list of tags/groups. We all agreed that this looked good and was seemingly intuitive. A teammate and I further agreed that it'd be a good use of screen space. This idea ended up tanking, pretty hard. We ran into several issues:

The code was restrictive. I spent several weeks trying to even get it to render on the phone, with minimal success. I still maintain that it's possible but it got to the point where we were taking too much time deliberating over the initial UI feasibility.
Users didn't like it. Although, because of the aforementioned problem we never got any sort of formal feedback, instead relying on drawings to show users.

Had users liked the view, we could potentially invest more time into making the view render properly, but because there was little to no positive feedback regarding the potential layout, it was scrapped entirely.

This left us with two more ideas. Both incorporated a list view to show contacts, simply out of efficiency and user familiarity. However, selecting the tags is where the two prototypes differed. Our prototypes are as followed:

The tags are selected using a single button which brought a dialog of check boxes.
The tags are selected using a spinner (combo box/drop down).

Prototype 1 actually ended up getting the best feedback from the users. Buttons are intuitive and if there's only one button it seems to scream, "Click Me" or "Submit/Finish" regardless of what the button actually says. I'm tempted to write several applications and have only one button and no text to see what users do. My hypothesis is that users will click it just to see what it does. I feel like users expect guidance and will otherwise fall back on "monkeying" with the interface to figure it out. If the button says, "Tags: Family, Doctors, Coworkers" will users know right off the hand that pressing it lets you choose more groups, or will it, in our application's context, send the text? If you pay for texting this would be a rough trial since your worst case costs you money (multiplied by how many contacts you send to!).

The spinner idea is very similar. In fact one could argue it's more intuitive than the button. Spinner's come with a small graphic arrow on the right that is essentially saying, "click me, there's more to choose from!" Having a spinner and a button seems more intuitive to me, but user testing might prove otherwise.

Loomings

2010-01-30T18:47:00.000-05:00

This semester should be a positive challenge for me. I often fall into traps that involve me starting a project and then never finishing them, which is depressing since I feel a lot of my projects have value. They generally all fall out when I run into something else that takes more time (school, work) and I lose my place and never start them again and the projects that I do restart I usually do so from scratch because I look back at my code and I see what I could do better. My viewpoint of, "do it right the first time or don't do it at all" really causes problems in this aspect.

This semester should hopefully give me insight in pacing myself. With me it's always rush, rush, rush and get it done as soon as possible and fix issues later. This really is not a good way to work and I'm trying to look at potential problems before they occur. With this, I've found I do a lot of trial-and-error in my coding. I'll try something without every really thinking about it, compile it, find it throws an exception or two and I'll go back and see what I could change and code blindly until I get frustrated and look at the docs or Google for the problem in question. This works for small programs, but when you start adding multiple libraries that take 30 minutes to link then it becomes more of an inconvenience and doesn't look too good on performance reviews.

Initially I was a bit nervous about the idea of team-based programming since I haven't done a lot of repository work and I'm used to coding around my own rules, but so far this fear seems to be unfounded. It's also proved very useful to have opposing view points. So often does one get stuck with tunnel vision in the scope of project outlines that having someone bore a hole in the tunnel is a great insight and can prove powerful to both the developers and the end-user, who will ultimately benefit from our work.