Blogs

Weeks 10/11 were mostly spent implementing UI changes that the nutrional science team contributed at our last meeting. The servlet that is handling the phone queries was also rehauled exensively to allow for the type of restaurant menu requests that we are going to need to handle.

During week 9, I got the application to use the Google Places API to search for restaurants within a certain radius of the user. The location is obtained using the GPS of the phone.

I spent week 8 preparing for a presentation of the research thus far to some industry programmers.

A logo was also created for the prototype. Based on the feedback from the nutritional science team, we've decided to rate food health based on the Go, Slow, Whoa system. As such, the logo reflects this. The color scheme of the app was also updated to include greens, reds, and yellows (based off of a stoplight, and the Go, Slow, Whoa theme).

This past week consisted of two goals. The first was continuing our quest of Android applications that we would like to use as a model and inspiration to our own. The second was to figure out how we want to test our application, I focused a little more on questions about content validation and improving it.

A few weeks ago the nutrition team and computer science team met to view the prototype and go over the full look of the app. I was out of town for that meeting, but I was caught up via email the next week. Last Tuesday the nutrition team met to nail down some fonts colors and themes we'd like for the app to send to the computer science team. During this meeting we also discussed some alternative health tips to make red or yellow foods into green foods. After compiling that list of tips and putting some examples of colorful apps together, we seem to be on track for this upcoming week.

After our last full group meeting and looking at the prototype that Jorge has been working on we decided to make a few changes to hopefully make our application even better and more functional. The first change is more for visual modification: moving our Woah, Slow, Go icons from the right of the menu item to the left. We also decided to make these icons clickable with a pop-up window of healthy suggestions to make a Woah or Slow food into a Go food.

This week the Nutrition Team will be taking it a bit easier. We have three tasks ahead of us: figure out our criteria to give to the Computer Science Team for what will constitute as Woah, Slow, and Go, give tips to make healthier choices and changes to the 15 fast food chains we decided on, and find kid friendly apps that we like as inspiration for our own.

During week 7, I implemented a prototype user interface. It will surely change and improve as the project goes on, but for now, it allows the other team members to see the current state of the app, rather than communicating in sweeping generalizations.

A powerpoint describing the prototype can be found here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/j6zn8fbc0v07e7q/Food%20Tracker%20Demo.pptx

One of the things that was discussed at our last meeting was how much information we can collect from the user. As a result, I ended up researching different ways that we can anonymously keep track of a device -- even just for simple purposes such as rating a restaurant. I read about the different methods available on both iPhone and Android devices. A short summary of my readings is here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/sd0ecb92oyj9diy/Identifying%20Devices.docx

After we met this week Madison and I had a few goals and projects we needed to work on. One was deciding on ten restaurants and finding their nutritional facts menu so that the computer science team can work on incorporating a formula/guidelines we think up into the app. We then went through these menus and took examples of food and rated them Woah, Slow, or Go. Not surprisingly most of the fast food restaurants consisted of all Woah foods even if these foods were listed under a "healthy eating" category.