DECO1800: Design Computing Studio 1

With the semester drawing to a close, and the only piece of assessment left for DECO1800 being the personal portfolio, I thought it would be useful to take a look back on the semester and reflect on the assessment items and classes to see what I have learned and what skills I improved. By looking back to my  first blog entry  for the semester, regarding my course aims and expectations I can see that I was able to fulfil many of the tasks I had initially laid out for myself.  At the start of the course I believed I would be able to improve my web design skills by learning new things and I definitely think I achieved this. The workshops proved instrumental to this - working through examples to learn about AJAX calls and PHP global elements were just two examples that I specifically remember. Not only the workshops, the lectures helped me better myself in this area - Matt shared a great deal of knowledge on topics like decomposition and modularity. Whilst I may have not go...

Yesterday, the team and I engaged in our last piece of assessment together: the presentation of our web application 'On this day' in the form of a trade-show. Reflecting on the pitch I think the team did a really good job of mentioning all the key points of the web application that are specifically relevant to a trade show audience; we tried to keep away from the technical side and focused on the actual 'selling' of our site. We distributed brochures that summarised what we were talking about which were a huge help as the audience could follow along or read at their own pace throughout the presentation. I think as a team we could have improved upon the uniformity of our separate presentations. We didn't have a chance to go over the specifics of what we would discuss hence when we split up and talked to individual audience members separately I think each of us emphasised different points. This isn't necessarily something we did wrong as a group, however in a comp...

This week the team used our time to complete all the remaining components of Project Part C. Considering all the major functionalities of our website are up and running, I spent the majority of my time this week working on the report and the trade-show components of the assessment. As the semester progressed and our web application continued through its development phase, I felt as if I was not able to contribute to the site as much as I should have been, so I decided to step up and take leadership in completing the report section of Part C. Considering this, I allocated my time this week as follows: Sunday-Thursday: finishing my report sections Friday-Saturday: compiling and formatting the report Sunday-Monday: editing the report and running it by the group My report sections were focused on the first criteria point regarding the final product. I tried to keep the general scope and functionality sections as visual as I could by using dot points and various media (images, gr...

Due to the technical limitations of the Twitter API not allowing us to get tweets from every users from a single day, it was decided to use the alternative method of getting the tweets of a single user, sorting these by date, and repeating this process for several other users (specifically users tweeting about things that happened on a specific date) to compile a set of tweets that still relate to our web application's purpose. The single-user tweets method relies on the utilisation of a TwitterOAuth library and the example I followed along used a user named a library by user 'Abraham' (accessed and downloaded from GitHub ). I first retrieved my Twitter API key and secret from the developers page which were used to identify the specific application. These were defined as variables in index.php: Next, connection was established using these newly created variables using the Abraham Twitter library. Following this a call is made to get the tweets from a specified user a...

This week's workshop session was all about planning and preparing to develop our portfolio. A summary of the process I completed and notes I took during the session can be seen below: PHASE 1: Browsing portfolio's for inspiration Below I have included a list of design elements that I liked and could potentially use in my portfolio: Image navigation links: on hover the name of the link shows up and the image darkens -  Sagmeister & Walsh 's portfolio Single page scroll portfolio with links to jump down -  Melanie Daveid 's portfolio Header only shows up once scrolling down the page begins -  Studio Schurk 's site Simple animations on hover -  Mark Thomas 's portfolio Header that automatically changes as the page scrolls -  Jesse Willmon 's portfolio PHASE 2: Initial brainstorming The following have been constructed with a single page scroll type portfolio in mind. Site map Potential design layout Colour scheme I really like how b...

In this week's contact I took on the role of delegating the remaining tasks of Part C to the team to make sure everything gets done on time. Below an image of the planning document can be seen for reference. The document is formatted to show the key questions needing to be answered in the final report (and website/tradeshow) followed by a summarised description of how we can answer them. Looking back at the contact, I think I made suitable choices in delegating the tasks to each team member. It's often hard to keep everyone happy and get them doing a part of the project that they want, however after spending a semester with my team I feel like I gave everyone a task suits their skills and that they would enjoy. For example Ben was allocated the job of reading through the code and adding comments as I have learnt that he enjoys making and polishing programs while Qi is in charge of the tradeshow as he is good at compiling work into a presentation. With this work allocation ...

The past week has been mid-semester break, and this has served as an effective time to keep working through the remaining assessment items for DECO1800 this semester. Over the break I worked specifically on two assessment items - Part C and my portfolio and the word completed has been documented below: Work done in regards to Part C: Over the break I was specifically focused on figuring out suitable alternatives to the originally planned Twitter column (changing from a feed of daily tweets due to technical limitations). The list of alternatives I explored are as follows: Using the Twitter REST API to get tweets from a singular account - able to get data and display data Using a news website API instead - unable to get data Using the Wikipedia API instead - able to get data unable to use data Exploring these options and failing in the most part really gets my thinking about my technical skills as a web developer. This is my first time using API's and I am honestly struggl...