CS3216 is Fun

Dying Phoenix

2009-04-12T21:46:00.000-07:00

Hello everybody,

it has been a very long time since I've been here.
Nice to start writing again.
The past few weeks since mid-term break was extremely hectic for me.
Every weekdays was extremely pain-staking and sleep-consuming.
This Final Project pushing on me,
and my most hated physics weekly online assignment and lab reports.(I really dont think we need that much assignment, it's irritating)
Furthermore, I have my other CCA which I have to attend to.
Adding all these together, I almost become like an architecture student that doesn't sleep much, everyday staying up late rushing stuff.
haha...

I really didn't have much time to do much stuff including writing this blog.
Really want to apologize to Prof and myself too for wasting this opportunity to blog and someone will actually give good comments to me.
Although writing this blog actually don't need to take that much time,
but I was thinking if I just anyhow write a short one just for submission of "homework" wouldnt be useful, just time-wasting, so I basically stop writing thinking that in the end of the semester I would have more time to finish the backlog of blogs that I wanted to write.
But these seems to be a wrong decision.

Actually wanted to write about last week presentation,
but after seeing Huihui blog(suddenly-i-wish-i-was-damn-zai-coder),
and I only got enough time to write one blog,
I think I shall write more about our project.
btw, I think I am much more worst than her.
I can't do marketing nor designing nor programming well.
Hate HTML, silly syntax error of a missing braces totally killed me and I didn't even notice.
All the display were flying around everywhere without logic and I got stuck for a few days trying to tweak it but it get worst every time without a reason.
Moral of the story, never do HTML on firefox, do on IE instead, firefox will "try" to fix your markup error while IE will show you obviously that something is very wrong.
I ended up producing some crap and can't meet my deadlines.
What happen, die loh...
I only realize mistake when I tried collapsing everything in Dreamweaver.
How blur I was...
...Days and night wasted on stupid bugs.
A moment of suspense( take a look of the history of "bugs" here and here )
go for lesson 1st
to be continued.....

Get Help!

2009-02-16T01:46:00.000-08:00

This is our second assignment that we have to do solo.
hmmm....still like the fun of working with others, but sometimes still have to do things alone.

We have to discuss about user interface & interaction design.

Interface Design

This is something really crucial to an application,
it gives you the first impression and also affects all parts of the application.
The interface design will also both conscious and subconsciously affects how the user feel about this app and gives the mood to the entire app.
Playfish interface designs is one of my favorites in Facebook...
It's UI simple but good designs and also with it's catchy but not too flashy music really gives me a calm/relax mood.

Interaction Design:

It's just like the whole flow of the application,
Imagine traveling in mrt and you don't know the direction and all the signs are misunderstanding and the train sometimes leads you to somewhere else...
what will you do?
Maybe get a taxi and not take mrt anymore.
So with a bad user interaction design, people will just slowly leave the app.
This is not only limited to the outer design, the coding will also affect how the app work.
Programmers also have to compromise to fit in to their limited resource,
if their server is slow many things that loads too slow have to be cut down or have other solutions to it.
Interaction designs also require much testing to prove that is alright.

gethelp facebook application:

This concept of tapping into facebook large social network to create a app to allow people to post thing that they neeed help is good.
The platform is quite suitable for this.
Many people that might need help will use this app.

1. Usability vs Aesthetics:

The UI is generally quite nice.
The only thing the icon beside "What do you want to ask?"
Can't really see any relation to that.
The slanting tab is cool for me, though not aesthetic to be slanting.
It's looks great and special, rather than good old normal ones.
There's one weird thing, not sure if it's just screenshot issue, the application seems to be slightly overlapping and covering the facebook tabs.
Unsure of what the content of all these tabs are, the "Badges" details should be either integrated in "Profile" or "Stats" page too.
However I still think it's ok to leave it there.
One important thing is missing here,
since people who first encounter this app might not need to use is to post any help at that moment,
people might not remember it one day that they really need to use this app for help.
The app might lose a lot of users because of this.
So, I suggest that a button or a reminder to bookmark this page or something like that in the homepage might be really useful.
Providing sms service will incure cost on developers, I would suggest to compile their friends no. for them to see.

2. Number of options / freedom given to user when posting a need.

The no. of options here are too little.
From my first look, I don't know what does the "estimated time" mean.
Not sure if there is a dropdown bar or something deadline, tag, location.
Everything will be much more organize if there is.
The tag should also have many specific tags to let the choose from, like IT,games,school,recreation, etc.
This will also in turn organize the database and create specialize tags so that people with specialize skill can go directly into their forte to look for what they can help.
Thus, Users can also find very helpful things quicker and better.

In the "who do you want to ask":
these choices are far too little, there should be more specific choices to choose from.

The solution:
The screenshot page actually suits quite well for "quick help"
but that is definitely not enough to satisfy many things.
Putting something like another "Advance Help" page would certainly be very helpful.
This will benefit both people who just want to quickly post their help and people who really want specific help.

Advance Help page should roughly include:
i) Customize "I need help with" so that user can enter whatever they like as the header.
ii)Much more detailed choices to choose and input in the request for help.
iii)Besides of asking those in the choices as in the screenshot adding network and/or network combinations to ask will also be very helpful.
and some others more details thing to be more specific with the help needed.

3. Cycle of interaction & incentives (Are the elements of the app engaging?)

The incentive given is not really very good and might possibly even create trouble like spamming.
People just need to post more answer to gain badges,
So this mean they can anyhow post anything and then get high rank. This is really wrong right?
Here we can incorporate User-Generated-Content, who are we to decide who's gets the most badges..
We can ask others to vote for the best advice and have many good posts.
Another thing that is that the naming of the ranking could be better by using name that has a more clear hierarchy.
There is one very good solution that I have to quote from Yuming’s post
“everyone is given a set of points at the start. When you post a question, u have to offer points to the helper who gave the most useful answer. This has at least 3 benefits. First the helpers are more enticed to answer the question with the top points. Second, if u need help urgently, u just need to dump all your points to attract all the good/greedy samaritans. Third, If you run out of points, u can wait for the system to handout points periodically (think gst offset package) or u can answer questions to earn points. By facilitating such a vicious cycle, the population can be self-sustained."
This is really a brilliant idea that Experts-Exchange(EE) uses.
I want to further add to this. This app can "borrow" what we learnt from Elven Blood.
It can use the way Elven Blood users have to earn their "blessings" which in gethelp will be points in order to post more questions.
I would also like to add a loan points section so that desperate users can still seek help when he/she doesn't have any points left.
Then developers can even earn money through these surveys and gain more users to use their app..
cool....

4. Other problems you think the team might have faced:

i)When I looked at the 1st screenshot, I notice the name of the app is called "Get Done!"
This is definitely a very bad name for people to search. Nobody will ever search for "done" if they need help.
A good search term is very important for an application publicity.
ii)It might be better to put homepage as overview of this app with other users help request, so that users will also see others help, or else they might only post helps but less people doing the helping.

erm.....I think I wrote too much words....
I shall edit again....

3rd Lecture?

2009-02-03T06:52:00.000-08:00

This is our 3rd lecture?
Hmm....Not really a lecture. Today, rather than listening to speakers, we had to present our chosen Facebook application and evaluate them.
Also, this my 1st ever presentation in NUS...cool......really was looking forward to today

Our group presented Graffiti, which was a very simple yet it is capable of many things.
Thanks Janus, Wenhan and Wang Sha....my team mates...we all contributed quite a lot to the presentation.
I was in charge of the New apps section, thought of an idea and decided to present it in picture form....haha...hope everyone enjoyed it
I was quite nervous during the presentation,
Luckily I didn't really freezed-up during the presentation.
Don’t know if you guys find me nervous while presenting?
We also get to see our course mate present, this is kind of interesting to see what cool presentation ideas can come from my friends here and also learn from them.

The Application that I will choose to critique is Geochallenge.
Why? It's because this is one of the facebook app that I am most familiar with and interested. It is the one which my friends had been crazy playing it for a period of time. Some of my friends even played during lecture......

The few main pts the presenting team have said:
1. It is an addictive game.
2. It has quite a consistent graphic design.
3. This is also an educational game.

1. It is an addictive game.

As an addictive game, it will attract many people to keep on playing this game.
People will want to come back to play this game rather than just a "one night stand" game.
The leader board is also a very crucial element for this game, users will want to outbid their friends ranking and spend more time playing.

2. It has quite a consistent graphic design.

Graphics are also one of the crucial things in a game application.
For some people, graphics is something very important for them.
But for most, though there won't be demanding for very high-end graphics for FB apps,
A nicely done interface would definitely enhance the users experience.
The layout of the game is also very organized and also even has links to other Playfish games to promote other games.
All the Playfish games design and layout are very similar in style, it actually gives you a sense of familiarity. When you go to other games, you won’t feel that it is something foreign.

3. This is also an educational game.

Being sort of educational game itself has a very high market potential.
If marketed well, it could hit into preschool or primary schools around the world as an innovative way to teach kids to memorize these geographical names. Kids will enjoy this as a game and not as a chore to memorize all these names.
It can also slowly include other educational games tailored for kids to play and learn.
Eventually, they might even take over the market.

What I would also like to mention here is Playfish success to really create many good games.
Most of it games are those that you can play alone and use the score to challenge your friends scores.
The concept is also quite good as it doesn’t need real time connection with the server to play the games which might cause bigger load. The users only need to download the flash once. The rest of the time the users will only need to upload/download scores and friends details etc.
The only bad thing about this is that the initial download of the flash takes quite a long time, people who have no patient might not wait.

Most of the game are all pretty simple to play, very suitable for Facebook platform which users don't really want to use too much brains to play.
Geochallenge, Word Challenge, Who Has The Biggest Brain?
Main game concept of these games are only testing users
Reaction time and different type of knowledge each.
Even if a person is extremely bad at geography, he/she can choose from one of the other games which are similar to play.

About the presentation, the one that I love most is the presentation on Causes.
This team utilize their own teammate strength and manage to hide all their weakness well.
The "faceTV" was really very innovative. Really enjoyed it.
What I love most is the part when Zhao Cong act as a professor. Besides his face looks young, the accent and all the other things really portraits a professors.
This is very good, Zhao Cong manage to utilize his uniqueness to an advantage.
As a first year, I really got a first look at NUS student presentation skills. There are really quite a few good presenters in this module. Like Dr. Ben said, knowing how to sell is also important. Hopefully, I get to learn and polish my presentation skills in this module.

* edited
I almost forgot to post these.
One of the most important thing learnt through this seminar is evaluating others app.
Rather than reinventing the wheel, we can learn what is already there that is good.
Like Dr. Ben said, it's ok to copy a little bit.
By evaluating other app's ideas, business models, programming methods, logic flow, commercial potential etc.
We can learn a lot when applying it to our own apps.
Analogous to programming, we can use certain prebuilt API rather than always writing new codes for programs.
There is already lot's of great ideas out there that we can always learn from others.
In fact, there are many apps that are similar with their predecesor, after repakaging, some manage to do very well.
The most prominent few examples are like baidu and xiaonei of China.
Baidu is basically almost the same as google, established about a year after google.
xiaonei is also almost the same as facebook, established about 22 months after facebook.
These two really shows that it is possible imitate but can still be successful if used in another place.
One of the thing that makes it success is also it's quick move to immitate the programs, they only take about 1,2 years to establish themselves after their predecensors.
If they were a little bit later, google or facebook might have already taken over the market.
Furthermore, google and facebook also made a mistake by underestimating the market of China.
If they were to predicted this and produce a chinese version, they would have got much more revenue.
Once again, this shows that anticipating the future is extremely crucial.
As this module name speaks, "Softwawre Engineering on Evolving Platform",
These world keep on evolving and technologies keep improving through time.
We have to anticipate what will happen next and know what are the possibilities in the future.
Learn from the past, and anticipate the future.

The "Second" Lecture

2009-01-25T03:09:00.000-08:00

This lecture has 3 sections:
1. Xbox Xna
2. Microsoft SilverLight and Surface
3. MDA

Main points summarized by Dr. Ben:
1. Possibilities
2. Doing things before it is done by others (aka "the loser story")
3. Marketing

One of the most important things that I learnt in this lecture is about the newest technology and its application.
When I see the presentation about the Microsoft Surface, it is really an eye-opener.
I saw this technology during the holidays when I visited Singapore Science Centre.
Never would I think that these are actually already used practically already.
This really showed that there is a lot of "Possibilities" available in this world.
Furthermore, the world is also changing and technology advancing in a very fast pace.
What you see today in a documentary or certain research paper that seems very improbable to become reality,
You might be using that technology in just a few years time.
What you see in some movies today, might also become part of your lifestyle in the near future.
The potential of technology can't be underestimated.

Although I am currently not studying a computing course which requires a lot of updating of many new technologies available,
However, but new, weird, special, wacky, odd technologies fascinates me a lot.
Having fun and experimenting with things is one of my hobbies, being able to understand new and upcoming technologies may allow me in my endeavour to maybe think of really new ideas before others think of.
Dr. Ben life story is really quite true.
I thought of a simple example though quite childish before last time.
This world really isn't fair, if I were to live in the past, sitting under an apple tree could just be the thing needed to success.
But now, since many things had already been discovered, so, people now have to work even harder to create "new" things.
Thus, I fully agree with Dr. Ben's story.

Then about SilverLight, I found out something interesting when I did some research on Microsoft Surface.
I found out that Microsoft Surface website is actually using Flash rather than their own SilverLight technology.
Really wondering why they don’t support their own product.....
I really don’t know much about SilverLight, the only knowledge I know about it is when I downloaded the plugin some time last year.
How is the future of SilverLight?
Like the story of Dr. Ben told, Flash has already started before SilverLight. Flash is currently more established than SilverLight.
If it were to success, it would have to be up to the challenge of Flash.

BTW, I got the chance to try the dual mouse playing the keyboard with two mice. Quite fun indeed.
When he showed the keyboard, in my mind was (Dr. Ben, pls don't call me, pls don't call me....).
Suddenly remember that during the speed dating, almost all the paper I fill has the "knows how to play musical instrument section empty", high probability of me getting called...haha
haha....why am I still so shy...
Thanks Dr. Ben for calling me, I want to learn to overcome this...
Quite interesting, but it’s really quite hard to use mouse to play, especially with my left hand.
Still prefer playing on keyboard.
Wondering if the WPF can utilize webcam, user experience will certainly be a lot better if our application can use webcam.
The next assignment is using WPF, should be quite fun and interesting, for now, really hope that it has lot of features and capabilities for us to explore and utilize.
For now just wondering how to market the apps without the huge facebook social network...or maybe we can still use:)

About marketing.
To be honest, I, myself is quite poor at marketing and presenting stuffs.
So the current technique that I use now is to do the job real good so that I don't have to speak much to convince others.
Thus, if something that relies mostly on presentation or improvisation speaking, it will kill me.
So, I experienced and truly understand the importance of marketing.
Can't survive in this world without good marketing skills, really have to learn this quick.

Finally, something learnt not from the lecture, but from blogging, I realise that I am really not well at organizing my thoughts.
There's a lot of thoughts and idea in my mind but I just can't sort it out to present it in a presentable way.
I probably need to install SQL to sort it out:)
Trying to blog things that I want to share about and wanting to make it not so lengthy but still have what all I in it is quite a tough job for me.
So another aspiration for me for this CS3216 module is to learn how to organize all the stuff in my brains and able to express my thoughts clearly to everyone.

About my post topic, I feel that time is also very important, every second in life is very important, many things can happen in a split second. In this module, we are also trying to learn as much as possible in very short time. This second week also is the time we really start to spends lots of time doing assignment, really hope that every second we can learn like “EVERYTHING”...haha
Hope everyone is enjoying their assignment.
Happy Chinese New Year to everyone.
Wish everyone 心想事成，万事如意 in this module.
Wish everyone can make some of their dream come true in this module.

心想事成: May all your wish come true.
万事如意：Best wishes for everything your heart desire

The First Lecture

2009-01-15T19:18:00.000-08:00

Hakuna matata, what a wonderful day.
It means no worries for the rest of your days.

Excerpt from The Lion King Movie.

This Lecture was truly a wonderful one.
However, it's also a start of a lot of worries.... because we have such short deadlines and lots of work
But this module is fun, so we will most probably enjoy the worries
Wish everyone will enjoy this module no matter what happens. No worries....just have fun.

This is also very special and refreshing for the first day of class.
Compared to other modules, this is the only one that needs a lot of preparation even before the first class.
We have to write something like a resume to even qualified for this module.
Really was honoured to be chosen. Thanks Prof Ben :)
I am the one who blew the bottle
Still keeping it, with the same volume of water.

Seriously, never ever thought I would do that in front of other people.haha
Honestly, I didn't even know I will be able to play a tune with that.(although there still some out of tune)
This was quite a random idea too, I was planning to present other stuff, I only thought of blowing the bottle on Saturday night:S
Then, decided to just do it, since it should be quite interesting and cool.
I spend the whole Sunday noon and afternoon to try to get this right.
It was really nerve-wrecking experience to do this, doing something that I never done before with only very little practice.
overall, it was quite an wonderful experience performing these type of thing. lol
Hope everyone enjoyed it

Looking at others showing their things are also very fascinating, many have already many accomplishment in their own field, robotics, cooking, promoting guns, etc...
Really very cool.
As a first year, it seems to me like I haven't really achieve anything real big yet in Uni.
Being able to work with such talents and people who already know quite a lot and have tones of experiences,
HOPE THAT THIS MODULE WILL BE MY FIRST BIG ACHIEVEMENT!

Back to talking about the lecture.
This was my first night lecture at NUS. COOL
This was my time having 4 lectures in a day. Exuberant
This was the first class that teach me to "make a different" not just the usual learn what is given. Delighted
This was the first lecture that I was trying to eat my dinner before lecture, actually I went back to my room to practice my bottle blowing after lecture ended 5:30. Hungry
This was my first time going to FongSeng after lecture. Finally, food:P

Many first in these lecture.

I have really learnt some special things in this lecture, though I didn't learn something like an equation that can be used immediately to solve problems.
I have learn some of the most important things in life.
We got a very good professor who was so call evil, but he also told us that "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger"
hmm...Conclusion: He will to try to kill us but not let us get killed...
Oh ya, he has already stated his killing plans, so, I believe we can survive this, because we are all handpicked by to join this killer module.
So we better wear the best bullet vest available so that we don't get killed, after this module, we shall be

Since these is a killer module, like everyone else, I also wish to not get killed, thus, I think I have to start all our assignment as early as possible though we might have lots of scheduling issue due to cross faculty.

I guess that's all for this first lecture, looking forward to the next workshop and lecture.
See you all in class!

Yours sincerely,
Learning to be evil