Senior Project Week 5

Richard Banister
CSC 4790 Senior Projects
Work Log

Week 5: 29 September - 5 October, 2008

Wednesday

• "Finished" functional requirements for Player, Interactive Content. 2h

• Found out about Google/YouTube Annotations and Captions/Subtitles. Uh oh! Investigated their interface for creating and using these. 1h

Thursday

• Met very preliminarily with Japanese and East Asian studies professors. Dr. Toyoda mentioned the possibility of meeting with Professors from UPenn and going over my project with them, which could be a good opportunity. 0.25h

Friday

• Met with Dr. Beck to check progress and outline goals for Wednesday's sprint review. I will now freeze some very basic requirements and try to get something working. This will likely be unimpressive stuff, but at least it will be something. I'll probably break it down into mini-sprints, with goals in mind. First, get a video player working or playing video. Next get an interactive region. If I can combine the two I'll be really happy. I doubt I'll have time to be reading objects from a file. Also, be good to see if I can find out how Google is doing it. 0.25h

• Installed Adobe Flex SDK at school. Started playing with prebuilt components and gauging capabilities. Looks real easy to add components with slick functionality. The question is, how easy is it to load in new objects dynamically? 1.5h

Saturday

• At home: Download and install flex sdk. Download and install Eclipse. Install prerequisite plugins for Eclipse. Configure Eclipse to work with Flex (maybe?). Compile and run sample applications. Realized I don't have any idea how to even begin working with Flex. 2.5h

• Created first and worst Flex application. 0.5h

Sunday

• Learning how to do video in Flex. Watched presentation on same, found tutorials and examples. Found source for a site that works with video in much the same way I will, which should be a valuable resource. 2h

• Dynamic object creation in Flex via ActionScript. 0.5h

• Better descriptions of the preceding can be found in the Development Blog

• Trying to work with events. Fought my way through the simplest of all possible tasks. I was being held back by a lack of understanding of some of the fundamentals of Flex/Flash/AIR. Went "back" to the basics, working through Flex documentation so I can have some idea what's going on. Finally managed to establish some minor event handling. Have a better grasp of the whole thing now. 3h

Total

Total work time: 13.5 hours

Plans:

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