Beat Meier's blog

CME: Weekly Report (October 18)

What we planned for this week

• Get Feedback from Healthy Food a.s.a.p.
• Finish conversions
• Workout a test user plan

What we actually did

• Conversions
  We implemented a second version of conversions. We are currently debugging memory leaks and allocation issues.
  
  
• Sponsor feedback
  Healthy Food has decided to build their own iPhone application and has decided that it wouldn't be in their best interest to provide us with recipes. Jo Segar is not interested at this stage. Tegel?
  
  
• Workout a test user plan
  A basic plan has been developed and user-testing has commenced.
  
  

Who did what 

• Conversions (Mandy)
• Test plan (Beat)
• Sponsors (Mandy)

Plans for the following week

• Finish conversions
• Think about what to do with the Temperature setting
• Continue usability testing
• Draft final report
• Recipe data put into xml/database
• Clean code according code review
• If no sponsor, implement a direct link to where we found the recipe

What needs to be done until Go-Live

• Find Sponsor or collect from internet
• Convert recipes from Sponsor to our xml-version
• Final documentation
• Testing

Re-evaluation of risks

Risk	Likelihood	Impact	Time lost	Action
No company wants to give us recipes.	H	H	Hours	Find recipes online, copy & paste to XML. A lot of work.

CME: Weekly Report (October 11)

What we planned for this week

• Implement the user-defined view for the measurements. Consider the settings made in the plist. Calculate the right amount according to the chosen settings. An additional feature would be to touch a row and change the units
• Add favourite button to Steps View as well
• Better quality images and have a thumbnail of each (will increase performance?). Use thumbnails with suffix "_tn"
• Add possibility to add a minus (-) in front of an ingredient to exclude this from the query
• Add copyright information to single view
• Research sponsor for our recipes
• Think about use of colours in App

What we actually did

• Conversions
  We implemented a first version of conversions. It is working but doesn't cover all cases yet. Weight and volume conversion is implemented. We changed the datatype of the unit to a string so an input '1/2' is possible. We have to work on it that e.g. '1 1/2' is working as well.
  
  
• Favourite button
  Implemented.
  
  
• Images
  All images are replaced by a PNG and we added thumbnails. It is faster now but still a bit lagging.
  
  
• Exclude option
  It is implemented.
  
  
• Sponsors
  We have to talked to 4 possible sponsors. We would like to contact 'Healthy Food' in detail to know if they're still interested. They have the most information how we would like it.
  

Who did what 

• Conversions (Mandy)
• Favourite button (Beat)
• Images (Chris)
• Exclude option (Beat)
• Contacting possible sponsors (Mandy)

Plans for the following week

• Get Feedback from Healthy Food a.s.a.p.
• Finish conversions
• Workout a test user plan

What needs to be done until Go-Live

• Find Sponsor
• Convert recipes from Sponsor to our xml-version
• Final documentation
• Testing

Re-evaluation of risks

Risk	Likelihood	Impact	Time lost	Action
Healthy food doesn't cooperate.	M	H	2 days	Contact Joe Seagar or Tegel. Tegel should be no problem.

CME: Weekly Report (September 27 + October 4)

We are on holiday, sorry.

CME: Weekly Report (September 20)

What we planned for this week

• Customize table view for search results
• Finish Steps screen
• Implement CoverFlow on steps screen
• Add Interactive search (smart search)
• Implement Settings View
• Implement Favourites View (add star button on SingleView), think of storage of favourites (another entity or plist)

What we actually did

• Implemented Custom Cell for SearchView
  We use a another nib-file which holds a custom cell.  We load this nib-file accordingly for every row. 
  Think about what we do if the user doesn't want to see the images in the search results. We wll probably create a second nib-file that doesn't have an image.
• Steps Screen
  Added CoverFlow effect for stepping through steps.  Removed memory leaks in Cover Flow. Added browsing through images (if available).
  
  
• Interactive search
  The search is started as the user starts to type. It is possible to search for multiple words separated by a space.  It will search in the recipe title and ingredients list.
  
  
• Settings View
  Loading basic settings structure from plist. The selected values for each setting are stored in a separate plist which is copied to the applications directory. It works.
  
  
• Favourites
  Added custom button to the navigation bar in Single View.  Changed search query so we can use the the same View Controller.  Added initMethod to distinguish between the Search and Favourites views.
  We store it in the recipes table as an attribute (on or off).
  
  
• Memory Leaks
  We used the Performance Tools from Xcode to detect memory leaks in the Search and Settings views.  They should be gone by now.

Who did what 

• Custom cell for search results (Chris)
• Settings screen (Mandy)
• Started test plan (Mandy)
• CoverFlow effect on Steps screen (Beat)
• Interactive search (Beat)
• Favourites (Beat)
• Fixed a lot of memory leaks (Beat)

Plans for the following week

• Implement the user-defined view for the measurements. Consider the settings made in the plist. Calculate the right amount according to the chosen settings. An additional feature would be to touch a row and change the units
• Add favourite button to Steps View as well
• Better quality images and have a thumbnail of each (will increase performance?). Use thumbnails with suffix "_tn"
• Add possibility to add a minus (-) in front of an ingredient to exclude this from the query
• Add copyright information to single view
• Research sponsor for our recipes
• Think about use of colours in App

Overall progress

We have a working App at the moment but without measurement conversion so far. So we are quite happy at the moment about our progress. We still have some remaining points from last week for further thinking:

• Necessity of searching recipes online
• Usability of the App - is the target audience satisfied?

Re-evaluation of risks

Risk	Likelihood	Impact	Time lost	Action
Hackintosh erased hard drive	L	H	NaN	Set up everything again.
App will not be accepted by Apple	M	H	Immense	Do it all again.
Users don't find App user-friendly	H	H	Weekend	Improve user interface.

CME: Weekly Report (September 13)

What we planned for this week

• Implement Customized TableView (Image)
• Test CoverFlow (Usability) in real iPhone
• Single view for selected item in TableView
• Load image and display image from CoreData on single view
• Research & Code Examples for UISegmentControl
• Create first screen with menu from plist

What we actually did

• Implement Customized TableView
  We customized table view to display the ingredients in the Single View. Basically we have two labels with a small font size, different colors and a smaller row height. We haven't customized the table view for the search results yet.
  
  
• Test CoverFlow
  We tested the cover flow usability in the real iPhone. We will give it a go in our App and we'll see how it goes. Unexpected exceptions are expected...
  
  
• Single View & UISegmentControl & Load image
  We implemented these. We are hiding and displaying the different parts of the view dependent on what segment was chosen.
  Loading the image from CoreData was easier than we thought.
  
  
• Create first screen with menu from plist
  It works like a charm.
  
  
• Steps view
  We started creating the steps view and are still working on this.

Who did what 

• Trying troubleshoot the mac to access the internet again (Chris)
• Added more recipes (Mandy)
• Implemented copying of database instead of importing the XML all the time (Chris)
• Implemented start screen, navigation from plist (Mandy)
• Added search control to the RecipeSearchViewController (Beat)
• SingleView with UISegment Control (Beat)
• Research customized TableView for search screen to show image, heading, subheading etc (Mandy) 

Plans for the following week

• Customized table view for search results
• Finish steps screen
• Try to implement CoverFlow on steps screen
• Interactive search (smart search)
• Settings View
• Favourites View (Button on SingleView), think of storage of favourites (another entity or plist)

Overall progress

We are on track. After next week we will have implemented all our desired screens. What is missing are details in respect of the design of the views. Before being able to ship our app to the app store more things are in the queue that need further thinking and investigation.

• How to present the user the possibility to change the units (despite of changing it in the settings)
• How to get more recipes into our database
• Necessity of searching recipes online
• Necessity of an advanced search (e.g. exclude ingredients)
• Usability of the App - is the target audience satisfied?

Re-evaluation of risks

Risk	Likelihood	Impact	Time lost	Action
Emotional outburst because of slow Unitec internet	H	H	Immense	Unfortunately we can't change it. :( Where can we complain?
Hackintosh problems, small screens and high possibility of crashing	H	H	3 hour / week	Buy a real Mac. Problem: no money. Solution: Unitec pays.

CME: Weekly Report (September 6)

What we planned for this week

• Import Data into CoreData
• Fill TableView with data from CoreData
• Customize TableView
• Test CoverFlow (Usability) in real iPhone

What we actually did

• Import Data into CoreData
  We use a XML now to define the recipes. The images are stored locally under /ressources/images. In xCode we use a XML Parser to read the xml. While reading the XML we create the necessary Core Data Objects.
  
  
• Fill TableView with data from CoreData
  We just used the given example and changed the table to read the data from. It works, our recipe names are displayed. Yeah!
  
  
• Research on customizing TableView
  Found way to add images to view. No code yet, just in Tutorials.
  Link:  http://www.iphonesdkarticles.com/2009/01/uitableview-loading-detail-view.html

Who did what 

• Import Data into CoreData (Beat)
• Fill TableView with data from CoreData (Beat)
• Research on customizing TableView for recipe viewing usability (Chris)
• Research on TableViews (Tutorials) (Mandy)
• Added recipe test data into XML (Mandy)
• Added icon for our App (Mandy) 

Plans for the following week

• Implement Customized TableView (Image)
• Test CoverFlow (Usability) in real iPhone
• Single View for selected item in TableView
• Load image and display image from CoreData on single view
• Research & Code Examples for UISegmentControl
• Create first screen with menu from plist

Re-evaluation of risks

Risk	Likelihood	Impact	Time lost	Action
Work load in other projects, courses, assignments	H	H	Huge	Talk about time management. Define certain times a week to work only for this project.
Closing of vox	H	M	1 hour / member	Need a new way to distribute information, create new blog on TypePad. Follow each others blog in order to follow the actions from all team members.

Team's concerns

• Source Control decision/discussion: We're happy with GoogleCode and the integration into XCODE for the moment. It is really time consuming if we have to change that again. We don't like to create something and then after some weeks a 'rule' is coming for everyone how to do it.