Thoughts On CampusMesh

Landay pointed me at CampusMesh, a project out of the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

It's a Cluster-esque app that's a part of a group of mobile social applications called SmartCampus that they're developing with the following stuff in mind (from their website):

1. Community building / social network impacts
2. Team / group coordination
3. User privacy [personal exchanges & location data use]
4. User Interface Techniques
5. Middleware design
6. Security [user authentication, access control, intrusion prevention, data integrity, etc]

There really isn't much actual description about the app available on their website and I wasn't able to find any screen shots, but CampusMesh itself is described as "a location-aware geo-temporal social matching, reminding and coordination system." They've really focused on their app being a tool - it provides reminders and fuels goal-based group interaction whereas we've kept Cluster broad to enable an open-ended and casual social-networking experience. Our adhesion to the facebook model has made Cluster a hobbyists' toy and kept it out of the "getting stuff done" space.

It's not that Cluster couldn't be used to facilitate work (by which I mean things you do for your job or for school). There have been dozens of times I've tried to coordinate project meetings with Sierra on the fly and we've both noted that a working Cluster could have smoothed the process. But it's more that we have been designing for our own demographic - college age people who use social-networking purely for extra-curricular enjoyment. Facebook and myspace might bleed into your "work life" but only in the areas where your private "friend life" does, such as going out for drinks with your coworkers after work on friday or blogging about work stuff.

To oversimplify, CampusMesh seems akin to running Outlook or Excel on your phone - so that you can bring your work with you and use your social network to enhance your productivity on the go. Having Cluster on your phone is supposed to be much more like having chat, facebook, and your social calendar so that you needn't leave your connection with your holistic social network at your PC when you can't be with your friends physically.

It would be interesting to spend some time thinking about what kind of tasks people will want out of their always available location-aware social network that never leaves their side. How does the tool help them conduct their broader life - not just a segment of it like work (CampushMesh) or play (Cluster). The telephone itself is an example of tool that serves a broad communication purpose but serves a specialized role in different areas (mobile, land, work phones, personal numbers, household) while the higher level concept remains the same (you dial someone's phone up, it rings, they answer, you talk...) . Cluster could still be a similar sort of tool since we really haven't committed to a specialization yet. However, we haven't been designing for the open-ended possibilities either. If there was more time, I've love to devote some effort here once all the baseline functionality we've already laid out is in place.

Okay. Apologies for the novel.

The SmartCampus Project Site

Usability Presentation Feedback

Nice presentation, Chris. Well done.

Feedback during the presentation:

• The ribbon doesn't look like a live usable feature. Visual changes (3D, drawing it as a button, showing arrows, etc.) and making a more intuitive hard-coded status message will help. "Clustering" is not a verb our participants understand.
• The missing functionality has impacted our tasks. We need to get things built.
• When demoing to the participants, we should demo the ribbon.
  

Code Jam/Meeting Monday

Attention, Team Cluster!

Check your Google Calendars and you will see a LOVELY event scheduled for Monday. We have a lot of ish to do and we will be doing it - starting bright and early at 9am in 002. We'll be putting our heads together to prioritize the rest of the implementation and beholding the gloriousness of Fred's sexy framework. Come with your codin' fingers on.

Don't be too sad - if it weren't for a bunch of dead Presidents you'd be in class anyway.

SVN + VisualStudio Integration

Peter told me about a cool SVN program that integrates with Visual Studio so that you don't have to mess with Tortoise. It's pretty good, although the setup is kinda weak.

You can download it here:
http://ankhsvn.tigris.org/files/documents/764/36344/AnkhSetup-1.0.1.2736-Final.msi

And, it tells you how to checkout a project here:
http://ankhsvn.com/AnkhWiki/Getting+Started.ashx

But, before you can actually check out a project, you need to do do this so you can do svn+ssh:
http://ankhsvn.com/AnkhWiki/Frequently+Asked+Questions.ashx#Imtryingusesvn+sshbutigetanerrordialogwhenItrytocheckoutorupdate

re-design notes

I was looking at the 'Revised Prototype' from Project 1 on the course page. I wanted to bring attention the 'Events' section of the prototype.

Right now the calendar screen shows the events in a standard list. The viewer navigates through the days of the calendar with the left and right arrows. The idea of scrolling through the days and not seeing events organized on a hour-by-hour basis throws me. I think that our next revision should either (1)leverage the DayPlanner metaphor a little more heavily, and space the events out on a scale, starting at 7am and ending at midnight or (2)go with the standard list but revise the navigation to a less formal 'earlier, later' scheme.

State of things...

I had some really slick stuff in mind for the Cluster UI, but the thing is, none of it can be done within the Visual Studio Forms Designer. The forms designer, especially the one for mobile UI's, is very inflexible and gives you only a small number of boring looking widgets to play with. Nobody makes fancy UI's with this thing.

So, I'm working on some custom UI classes/controls that do what I want. The problem is I'm going to be really really busy until Wednesday afternoon, so I don't expect to have anything to show until late Thursday.

Source Respository

I set up an SVN respository, that has almost absolutely nothing useful in it yet.

You'll need to download Tortoise SVN to access it.

To check things out, you would:

- Right click somewhere in explorer and do "SVN Checkout".
- Use this for the URL: svn+ssh://your_username_here@attu.cs.washington.edu/projects/instr/cse490f/wi07/a/svn
- That should be it.

To do anything, you'll need VS 2005 and the SDK for Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone. You can download the SDK from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=dc6c00cb-738a-4b97-8910-5cd29ab5f8d9&DisplayLang=en

You probably can't use the lab machines for development, as they won't have the SDK installed and we probably don't have the permissions to install it. :-(

I guess you can get VS2005 from that MSDN thing we get through the CSE dept.