All hell has broken loose. We’ve now started our final projects.

Day 1 was pretty much a disaster. Based on our initial discussions and research, not knowing if one team member was in or out and a general lack of excitement about the project theme we decided to completely change our project idea. It was good that these misgivings were out in the open early, and the win for the day was that when we left we had an idea we were excited about working on. However there was a lot of uncertainty about how many team members we would have and therefore how much be could plan to achieve. Plus if we were to be a four, would the fourth member be happy to work on the new idea? Not a good start.

We decided to create a smartphone app for children that’s based around the idea of an iSpy book for the digital youth of today. It’s aimed at tourists or daytrippers who have children with them and want to give them a fun, educational, game-based activity to do to prevent them getting cranky and ruining the whole outing. I think the idea has a lot of potential and it’s interesting to be creating something for a different target market and on a mobile platform too.

Days 1-3 are research, prototyping and design days. We’re looking at Ionic and Cordova as our potential tools and I’ve been experimenting with a plugin that accesses the iPhone/Android camera. It’s quite satisfying when it works, but terrible to debug since you actually have to upload the app to your phone to test the camera function, so there goes the option of using your usual debugging tools e.g. the blimmin console. David and I have been debugging by outputting objects and values all over the shop, to try and keep a track of what’s doing what without a console. Natalia has used her Photoshop skills to create a design for the main view, which looks pretty amazing. We’re back to a four now but we’re a bit all over the place in terms of who’s doing what and crucially whether everyone is on the same page after our slightly unstructured discussions. Some things we disuss in detail seem to emerge completely different to what I thought had been agreed. This stuff is really hard. I’m nervous about whether we can pull this project off, but if we do it will be a very satisfying achievement.

Nat x