jbv's blog

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).

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

I continued to explore the technologies we may be using in the FoodTracker. I finished the simple login system using MySQL and Java servlets.

After meeting with the Nutritional Sciences team, I have a bit more direction regarding things to study and learn about. We discussed what features the app might have. Overall, it seems that we need to focus on clean and simple app presentation while processing nutritional information on the server side. We also discussed our target audience, which is young children and their families.

This week, I created a UML sequence diagram of the current login system, so that it can easily be explained to others without reading the source code. The diagram is located here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/oss1ur4kqep7rel/AndroidFoodTracker.png

This week was spent connecting the technologies in a small demo. We tested an HTTP Post to a servlet running on our University servers. Although there is still an issue with the firewalls, everything should fall in to place once they are resolved. The demo involves a simple login system, which served to familiarize me with the servlet and database technology, and may even be extended to be used in our application.

This week we continued to explore available technologies to be used in building server/client phone applications. I read a paper relating to design patterns in server/client architectures that can lead to increased usability from the user perspective.

We are beginning the Foodtracker project by exploring some of the technologies that may be useful for our application. This week, we focused on Java servlets and connecting them to a MySQL database to store user information. We are running these servlets using Apache Tomcat.

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