Blacksburg, VA., Apr 17, 2015 – An image that described the theme of the week is of a roller coaster. With so many up’s and down’s and a Friday night deadline, the project’s status wouldn’t remain constant. In the end, however, Cumulonimbus made their application live and received good feedback from their colleagues!
In the beginning of the week, the team’s goal was to move everything to the VT server. “Everything is functional on the local server. We need to set it up on the VT server provided by the Computer Science department. Then, we’ll add features that will only work when running it live,” said Tyler. When they asked Dr. Luther, their advisor, to setup the server, many random small errors prevented success. Monday wasn’t the most exciting day, but Dr. Luther recommended another technology to use called Heroku. Heroku is a different cloud service that comes with Django.
Long story short, hosting via Heroku instead of Virginia Tech proved to be a great recommendation! Setting up on the VT servers continued to cause problems and the team decided to use Heroku instead. It provided a server that was easily configurable. The only downside is that data storage is limited to 5GB from Amazon’s services, compared to the storage that the Virginia Tech server gives allows its users.
For something that hosts media, 5GB of data is slightly concerning. “Our focus for the short-term are photos. Smartphones typically have high-resolution cameras, so they take high-res photos. High-res photos do take up a decent amount of space, but to evaluate the applications, 5GB should be good enough,” said Romico. Video’s are a different story, since they take a considerable amount of space. A solution would be add more storage space, but videos are currently out of the scope right now.
The team asked their peers to check out the application. They were given little instructions; essentially a QR code was given. It was a hit! People generally liked the application. By judging the positive user experience, Cumulonimbus concluded that the application’s UI was simple to understand and navigate through.
With a working prototype, a decent amount of work remains. The website’s information architecture needs more tuning, which includes the organization and navigation of data. For the website’s design, the team is in the process of finding a color scheme, adding icons (based on the low-fidelity prototypes), and additional focus on the main page.
Another focus is to lower the barrier of entry. Currently, the QR code is the best way to navigate to the website. The downside is that a user must have a QR code scanner on their phone. If the user doesn’t have one, he or she must download one from their respective app store. This extra step can be a major obstacle that will make it difficult for users to locate the website.
Cumulonimbus will try to prepare their application for the evaluation phase. The live event that will be used for evaluation is called “Relay For Life”. “Relay For Life” is a 24-hour event where communities gather and honor cancer survivors, lost loved ones, and “fight” back against the disease. Each member knows a couple organizations that will participate and will ask a few of their members to use PhotoClouds.
Team Cumulonimbus is a team of three senior level computer science students at Virginia Tech: Matthew Bock, Romico Macatula, and Tyler Haines. All three of them have extensive skill sets in computer science after their years of study. With several semesters of experience in the field of human-computer interaction at their disposal, the team is dedicated to creating the best experience possible for their users through rigorous testing and design iteration. Any questions or comments, contact Romico Macatula at rmac817@vt.edu.
