Jonathan Stephens
This user hasn't shared any biographical information
Homepage: http://jonathanstephens.us
AIM: ELNATNAL
Posts by Jonathan Stephens
Scope of Goals and Outcomes
Feb 23rd
Service Purpose
Teaching the abilities to converse with a native speaker and survive in a foreign Spanish environment.
Service Goals
Through the series of steps, learning on tier-based process. When one level of ability is attained, another can be reached. The user is asked, and somewhat forced, to think in Spanish, seeing words and objects and making them become the Spanish word or phrase. Vocabulary will be shown to create a knowledge base of words. Grammar is an essential to learn and will be part of the tier-based app, certain forms and conjugations will be learned later on as they advance and comprehend more Spanish. Throughout the entire app, the user will be able to listen to native speaker’s speech, how words and sentences are supposed to sound and how they are supposed to be formed. There’s also a progress tracker that would determine the advancement of the user. They would advance as they improved in their knowledge and communicative skills, not when they felt like moving on.
Cognitive Domain
Knowledge:
- Identify when Spanish is being spoken and identifying words or sentences while listening to Spanish.
- State basic phrases in Spanish.
- Define Spanish words in English
Comprehension:
- Explain some tasks happening at a certain time.
- Describe physical attributes of an object
- Paraphrase paragraphs, though limited by knowledge.
- Translate learned material to the limited extent.
Application:
- Carry out a conversation, when kept going by the native speaker.
- Prepare, fluidly, for a response or words to use before entering into a topic of conversation.
- Use correct grammar, past, present, and future, though at times broken.
Analysis:
- Categorize verbs and appropriate conjugations/tenses for speaking.
- Analyze the origin of the speaker
- Outline a paragraph or story in multiple tenses and verbage
Synthesis:
- Start a conversation in Spanish with a native speaker
- Evaluate self Spanish pronunciation by listening to themselves speak, recognize problems in speaking.
- Generate stories, future/past/present
- Propose a conversation topic
Evaluation:
- Assess what would be appropriate to talk about in certain situations
- Interpret correctly, switch languages relatively easily
- Support other’s conversations, speak with multiple speakers and in multiple threads of conversations
- Evaluate your skills, knowing to improve
- Conclude that you can speak Spanish!
An Adobe Flash developer on why the iPad can’t use Flash
Feb 22nd
February 20th, 2010
Daniel Eran Dilger
Morgan Adams, an interactive content developer who knows a lot about building Flash, wrote in with an interesting perspective on Flash and the iPad. The remainder of this piece is his comments on the subject.
Inside Apple’s iPad: Adobe Flash
.
I’m biased. I’m a full-time Flash developer and I’d love to get paid to make Flash sites for iPad. I want that to make sense—but it doesn’t. Flash on the iPad will not (and should not) happen—and the main reason, as I see it, is one that never gets talked about:
Current Flash sites could never be made work well on any touchscreen device, and this cannot be solved by Apple, Adobe, or magical new hardware.
That’s not because of slow mobile performance, battery drain or crashes. It’s because of the hover or mouseover problem.
Many (if not most) current Flash games, menus, and even video players require a visible mouse pointer. They are coded to rely on the difference between hovering over something (mouseover) vs. actually clicking. This distinction is not rare. It’s pervasive, fundamental to interactive design, and vital to the basic use of Flash content. New Flash content designed just for touchscreens can be done, but people want existing Flash sites to work. All of them—not just some here and there—and in a usable manner. That’s impossible no matter what.
All that Apple and Adobe could ever do is make current Flash content visible. It would be seen, but very often would not work. Users would hate that broken promise much more than they hate gaps in pages, missing banner ads, and the need to download a game once from the App Store instead of re-downloading it every time they visit a Flash game page.
Mouseover examples:
* Video players where the controls appear on mouseover and hide otherwise. (This seems to be the norm, in fact. Whereas a click on the same video does something different: usually Pause. Try Hulu for instance.)
* Games where you steer with the mouse without clicking (extremely common).
* Menus that popup up subpage links when you mouse over a main button, vs. going directly to a main category page when you click.
* Buttons that have important explanations/summaries on mouseover, which you need to understand before deciding what to click.
* Functions that use mouseover to preview and click to commit; such as choosing hair colors for an avatar: you mouse over the colors until your character looks the way you like, and then you click to commit.
* Maps and diagrams that don’t use click at all, but pop up info as you mouse around.
* Numerous other custom mouseover functions that “just work” with a mouse and need no explanation.
None of these things can work right with a finger (or traditional stylus) because on a touchscreen, pointing at something without clicking isn’t a mouseover: it’s just holding your finger vaguely in the air. The device doesn’t even know it’s happening.
In addition, some Flash sites rely on right-clicks (such as for security settings), and many rely on a physical keyboard. Especially games, which are the main kind of content people want from Flash. (I’d say video, except video can easily be done without Flash, and sites are increasingly doing so. Much of the video missing from your favorite Flash site is probably easily found on YouTube anyway.) Games often use realtime key control, requiring a distinction between a single press and a long hold, and including the need for chording. For instance: holding right arrow continuously to walk, while simultaneously hitting the space bar to fire, and either hitting up-arrow once to jump or holding up-arrow longer to jump higher. A touchscreen keyboard can’t handle these kinds of rapid, precise combinations well. And the keyboard would block the game view, too. Games on a touchscreen need controls suitable for a touchscreen (and/or tilt).
The only potential “solutions” to the mouseover problem are terrible ones:
A) The best case: every Flash app on every site is re-thought by its designers and re-coded by its programmers (if they’re even still available), just for touchscreens. They wouldn’t use mouseovers any more—or else they’d have dual versions of all Flash content, so that mouse users could still benefit from the mouseovers they are used to. That’s a ton of work across the Web, for thousands of parties, and just isn’t going to happen. Plus, with many sites, mouseovers are so fundamental that the very concept of the site would be altered, creating a whole different experience that would annoy and confuse the site’s existing users. (And would this be any easier than simply re-designing without Flash at all? Not always.)
B) Gestures, finger gymnastics or extra physical buttons are created that simulate mouseover—which is absurd since mouseovers, by their nature, are meant to be simpler than a click/tap, not more complex. And meant to be natural, not something new to learn. Not a whole set of habits that violates our desktop habits. And any additional complexity is unworkable when it comes to games: you need to react quickly and simply, not remember when to hold the Simulate Mouseover button, or use three fingers, or whatever. The game itself is enough to deal with. Anything on top of that takes away fun.
C) Make clicking itself—the fundamental, constantly-used action—MORE complex. Such as requiring a double-tap or two-finger tap before anything is registered. (Two taps is how Mobile Safari does JavaScript popup menus: the first tap pops it up, the second selects.) But many Flash apps and games already use double-click (or rapid-fire clicking) for other things. Extra taps only make sense for certain limited situations (like menu popups). And it’s not just clicking: you have to allow for movement: dragging vs. a moving mouseover. And even if a system could be created that was quick and simple enough to do all this in the middle of a game, how would the user know which parts of a web page played by these special rules? One part of a page (the Flash elements) would do fundamental things like scrolling or link-clicking differently from the rest of the page! (Not to mention the rest of your touch-based apps.)
D) Have a visible mouse pointer near your finger, and not interact with things directly. Use Apple track-pad style tap-and-drag gestures, as seen in some VNC clients. This kind of indirect control violates the very principle of direct touch manipulation. This is making the touchscreen be something “like a laptop but worse” and has little reason to exist. And again, you’d have to keep remembering whether you were in direct touch mode or “drag the arrow” mode, and which parts of the page behaved in which way.
E) Require extra force for a “real” tap. So you’d have to learn habits for a light tap vs. a hard tap. This extra complexity is non-intuitive, cramp-inducing, and easy for the user to get wrong (even with click feedback, as in RIM’s failed BlackBerry SurePress experiment). This complicates the whole device just for the sake of one browser plugin, and makes it more expensive to build.
So it’s not just that Apple has refused to support Flash. It cannot, logically, be done. A finger is not a mouse, and Flash sites are designed to require a mouse pointer (and keyboard) in fundamental ways. Someday that may change, and every Flash site could be redesigned with touch-friendly Flash. But that doesn’t make Flash sites work now.
Even if slow performance, battery drain and crashes weren’t problems with Flash (and they truly are), nothing can give users of any touchscreen, from any company, an acceptable experience with today’s Flash sites. The thing so many complainers want is simply an impossibility.
By the way, imagine my embarrassment as a Flash developer when my own animated site wouldn’t work on the newfangled iPhone! So I sat down and made new animations using WebKit’s CSS animation abilities. Now desktop users still see Flash at adamsi.com, but iPhone users see animations too. It can be done.
Morgan Adams, adamsimmersive
interactive design and games
Questions for T-Mobile
Feb 19th
Hi! I’m developing a mobile app that teaches native English speakers, gringos, how to speak fluent Spanish. It not only teaches grammar and linguistic skills, but also teaching the process on learning the language. I just have a couple of questions about interviewing the target group and just how to interview people who are in the process already.
1. I’m on my path to become fully fluent in Spanish. I am capable of surviving in a Spanish environment, speaking fluently at native-pace is difficult at times. So, if I’m designing this app for people learning Spanish and am seeking how people learning Spanish are going about it, what they do, etc. How can I judge or tell where their level of Spanish is? I was thinking of conducting interviews in the language but I get to a point that’s, ‘Who am I to judge and determine the level of someone?’ I guess, how can I speak and interview the people in the process to design an app that helps teach and lead the user through the process?
2. The second is how do I keep people interested and driven to use the app continuously? The process of learning another language can be long and arduous for people, getting frustrated at themselves and giving up or the attention deficiency that people have concerning apps etc.? How do you design for failure and success? I have a hard time seeing how “Great job! You’re doing great!” is enough of a motivator when something’s being learned and “well, we can keep working on this,” is kind of discouraging for the user.
3. Then, right now this is looking like it’s going to be a very large app, memory and capabilities wise. Updates as someone advances, a viable solution? Just, when building and designing the app, what would be a good way to economically work from the ground-up?
Thank you and thank you for the presentation the other day. I’m really looking forward to the future sessions and learning more about interaction design from everyone. Thanks and have a great day!
Project Brief Beginnings
Feb 16th
Who?
People who want to learn Spanish enough to be able to converse with a native speaker, travel to an Spanish speaking country and be able to assimilate or be more independent in their traveling, or completely be able to converse with a local in their home and be able to assimilate into the culture more easily.
What?
Teaching the abilities to converse with a native speaker.
When?
Whenever the user has time to study and use the app. It will function similarly to the Wii Fit, as in keeping track of how much time they spend and when they spend working on their language skills. It would recommend at least 30 min a day but more is much better. The focus is to immerse yourself as much as possible, so using the app as much as possible is something the user, if driven, is aiming for.
Where?
This part is variable. When using the app, it could be anywhere really. Like, inside their home, in the car, sitting at work, whatever it may be. However, one aim of the app is to get them away from this, get them away from the little handheld device and trying to immerse themselves. This could be going to a hispanic league soccer game, a discoteca, hispanic dance classes, watching telenovelas, whatever may be. Searching for opportunities of immersion.
How?
Through the series of steps, learning on tier-based process. When one level of ability is attained, another can be reached. The user is asked, and somewhat forced, to think in Spanish, seeing words and objects and making them become the Spanish word or phrase. Vocabulary will be shown to create a knowledge base of words. Grammar is an essential to learn and will be part of the tier-based app, certain forms and conjugations will be learned later on as they advance and comprehend more Spanish. Throughout the entire app, the user will be able to listen to native speaker’s speech, how words and sentences are supposed to sound and how they are supposed to be formed. There’s also a progress tracker that would determine the advancement of the user. They would advance as they improved in their knowledge and communicative skills, not when they felt like moving on.
Process Work – Maps
Feb 14th
Here are the maps we made in Thursday’s class. My app is going to be teaching an english speaker how to speak Spanish. The first ones are the hand-drawn in class. The next ones are the vectorised ones.
Ideation and Ideas
Feb 8th
I was having a tough time just getting my head around and thinking up just what could I do? So, I went the post-it route. Most of what I had posted were questions of different varieties I’ve been hearing recently by peers and what I just keep seeing people ask for or is happening with their lives. Some of the ideas might not be feasible or may be and I just don’t know how I might implement it or anything but, I figure, that’s what the next however many weeks are for. Here’s the door as I was compiling and organizing ideas and then, here are some of the ideas I came up with.
Ideation images
Ideas
Pocket Portfolio
Organiser, something to organise a college life with
How to just figure out your life
How to find work
How to be creative
Save money! need, want, etc
Where to travel! How to travel!
Where to go out tonight?
Brew your own beer
How to cook
Translator type thing, could be fun etc
Bored and broke. Finding what to do for cheap
How to dance
How to relax
Student made app tracks BAC
Feb 2nd
“Over the Limit” app acts as BAC calculator
By Laura Wilkinson
Life & Style Editor
Published by The Technician: Monday, February 1, 2010
Flashing blue lights in the rearview mirror are never a good sign, but they can turn into a nightmare after a night of drinking. It would be nice to know if that .08 limit has been reached … before a breathalyzer comes into play. Well, there’s an app for that.
Harmonist Inc., a company founded by four University students, creates iPhone applications mainly geared toward college students. One of the newest applications is a blood alcohol concentration calculator.
Jack Zapple, a sophomore in international studies and CAO of Harmonist Inc, said “Over the Limit” is an application that tracks a person’s blood alcohol concentration based on the drinks a person has consumed.
“It works completely on the iPhone with no attachments needed. You type up your weight and gender one time and just keep track of the drinks you’ve had,” Zapple said. “It keeps a log of what you’ve had to drink.”
Zapple said the device sends an alert once the BAC reaches the legal limit.
“If it goes over .08, which is the legal limit in North Carolina, the number goes red at the top and lets you know if you’re over the limit,” Zapple said.
Spencer Feuerstein, a junior in nuclear engineering, said he would find the application useful so as not to get in trouble with the police and to know when he has had too much to drive safely.
“Even if it isn’t 100 percent accurate, it’s still a very good guideline,” Feuerstein said. But would he trust it? “To a point. There’s some leeway from person to person to how it affects you. It could still be a little bit off.”
Addison Hardy, CTO of Harmonist Inc and a computer science student at Wake Tech, said there is an additional feature that offers to find a cab service.
“It will find a taxi for you, locating you based on your GPS position,” Hardy said. Feuerstein said he likes the “find a taxi” feature because he would not have to search through his phone to find a cab company.
“It makes it easier for the person who has already been drinking,” Feuerstein said. “The only possible upgrade you could do is to find different [taxi] places and their prices for where you want to go.”
Hardy said the same formula used in breathalyzers is used to calculate the BAC for the application.
“I took the formula a breathalyzer uses and I made it add based on time and the amount you’ve had,” Hardy said.
Gender and weight are associated with BAC level, with males having more tolerance than females.
“You get drunk a little bit quicker if you’re a female,” Hardy said.
Other applications Harmonist Inc has created include DrumPro, LensTrack and StudySound. DrumPro allows the user to play select instruments, such as the maracas, triangle, tambourine and cowbell. LensTrack reminds the user when it is time to change contact lenses. Hardy said StudySound plays different soothing sounds, even in sleep mode.
“It’s something to play in the background to help you focus,” Hardy said.
Zapple echoed its usefulness. “It’s actually one of our best-selling apps,” Zapple said.
Zapple said that while they are focusing on iPhone applications right now, they want to move to software development in the future. According to Zapple, the inspiration for Harmonist, Inc came from Kenan Simpson, a sophomore in economics and the CEO of the company.
“I met him on Craig’s List,” Zapple said. “One night we were in the library and we talked about starting a company. We went out the next week and got all the paperwork from downtown.”
Hardy said their original ideas stemmed from discussion about things the iPhone did not already offer.
“We were just sitting around thinking of ideas and started brainstorming about things the iPhone could do that they can’t do already,” Hardy said. T
he fourth founder of Harmonist, Inc is Charles Gras-najjar, a freshman in First Year College.
SixthSense – Mobile Interactin in the Physical World
Jan 30th
Pranav Ministry: The Thrilling Potential of Sixth Sense Technology
Sorry it’s a link, I tried to embed it but I failed. This is truly fantastic. Capabilities are going to be endless.
GOOD – Imagining Augmented Reality
Jan 26th
This article and video is about the future of augmented reality and what can be good about it. It’s from a GOOD magazine resource:
www.good.is/post/imagining-augmented-reality//r:t
Animation Types
Jan 25th
Here’s the different ways or techniques of animation that we worked on in class. 5 minutes each.
FirstButtons
Jan 23rd
Here is some process work from our first button tutorials. We were working on how to create and code buttons using EventListeners and the such.