Making the slide-show for my project is so fiddly, designing the program is a bit of a pain.

I think I have to re-design it, it looks a bit too childish

Keeping to the whole iPhone~ Apple  theme, I will make an animated movie on how my application works, today during my presentation I showed the class the storyboard of the movie, people seemed to like it. It’s a straight forward movie that shows someone shaking the phone, then the steps to change the character’s face and then back to rotating the phone with the new character and hurting it.

I know it’s been a very long time since I last wrote but I have a very good excuse, I had a 10-15 page paper due for my “History and Theory of Multimedia and Animation” class as well as a Psychology report which required a lot of reading… so there. But during the holidays I interviewed my user groups with my questionnaire and got some helpful and some not so helpful feed back… I mean: you do not answer a question with another question in a questionnaire!

Pretty much the only problem with my questionnaire was that I didn’t ask one of my questions about photo-manipulation programs properly and it confused a lot of people so I kind of had to rely on my own experiences.

It’s been quite a while since I wrote anything… sorry? I just had a lot of other assignments and I sort of forgot about this blog… this is why I never keep blogs.

Anyway… I have written a Questionnaire that I will use to research my particular user group, but the problem is actually getting to the people and not annoying the hell out of them. I want to send a group email to all the people at my dad’s work, but again I am faced with the problem of annoying them during work, of course some of them might want to answer it because it’s helpful in distracting themselves from their actual work……………..argh

Some of my friends also fit into the criteria, but whenever I see them it’s usually at a bar and everyone’s drinking and that’s not a place where you can really pull out a questionnaire and begin an interview, and knowing them I don’t believe they’ll meet up in a non-bar related environment.

It was really interesting to see what other people have decided to do for the iPhone. I got a bit worried when everybody was doing some sort of serious application, e.g. phone security, personal assistant. But luckily some other people were doing games.

I got a good response from the others, everyone found the idea of beating up a virtual character to relieve stress funny. I didn’t get any criticism expect for what might happen to the phone if it is shaken too much. I was thinking about that as well, but I have no idea how steady an iPhone is. If some one does end up damaging their phone by shaking it too much I think they should see professional help. There was another suggestion that a user should be able to punch the character too, I thought it was a good idea but I probably won’t use it, I’m going to stick with my main idea of shaking the phone… you never know, someone might end up punching their phone if they’re really stressed and the character pisses them off.

Now I just need to work on my interview questions, the program for PAYAAC and then creating a prototype.

I found a way to get the menu on my webpage on the side, that’s a lot better than having it wat the top of the page. I’ve added extra colour instead of just keeping to the black and white motif I started of with. I want to more pictures on the site but for some reason it’s not working at the moment, it did before. And I also want to put my presentation onto the site.

I’m just a bit worried about my idea because it is more for entertainment rather than a useful tool, and that’s what everyone else has basically been doing :S  I just think that it would be a bit more fun then the other stuff, but I guess it is helpful on a social level: it will definately get conversations started.

I’ll get a group of friends and ask them about it and then I’ll sketch a few designs and I’ll try and work out what kind  preference do people have e.g. cat, dog, human, stick figure.

When I was falling asleep a couple of nights ago it came to me…

I will create an entertainment tool, a interactive character screen-saver. I got the idea from the fact that the phone can sense when you flip it on its side, but my idea involves shaking the phone.

BASIC DESCRIPTION: There’s a character on the screen that hangs around and does its own thing until the user shakes the phone then the character is thrown from side to side or up and down and gets more and more beaten up, I think I’ll make it impossible to kill him, except for the adult version. On the adult version I think I might make it that he’ll even swear when he’s rolling around on the screen. If the character is inactive for a while because the phone is not moving then it’ll start doing it’s hobbies e.g. playing the guitar, painting, reading… and if the character has to wait for a very long time then it will even fall asleep. But then when it is shaken up suddenly I don’t want his stuff, like the blanket pillow and alarm clock to suddenly disappear, they will fly around and break up against the sides of the screen. This is because I really hate when the objects do disappear because it gives the whole program a sense that it is just built up of separate scenes. There will be an optional noise button, because if you’re in a meeting or in class you don’t want the little man to start jamming and creating havoc.

I have found an interesting website that comments on the iPhone it is at:

http://www.engadget.com/2007/06/26/first-apple-iphone-reviews-trickle-out/