The Goods Have Arrived

The project become much more "realistic" this week with the addition of an iPad2 to do testing on. In reality I will still be using the XCode Simulator quite frequently because a lot of the tasks don't require me to actually interact with the device. However, it will be super sweet to do UI design tests with a real iPad. Using the mouse to scroll the iPad Simulator just is not nearly as fun as it is to do with your finger.

Up to now I have just been looking at videos or blogs of iPad apps in order to get a feel for which user interfaces work and which ones don't. I have also been to the computer store on campus a couple times to try out the iPads that they have on display. Having an iPad to work with will make the process of UI testing much easier, and will hopefully enable me to figure out the type of design that I want in a much shorter time. I will also be able to let other people test drive the application, a task that could have been done with the Simulator but would have been really unintuitive for a lot of people. Collaboration on the UI design will help me examine the way people interact with the question-response interface, which could lead to very interesting results. I am predicting that it will be difficult to get people to stop answering questions and look at the solutions, or on the flip side, it will be difficult to get people to stop "flicking" through the solutions and answer a question. Either way, it will be interesting to see what happens.

My first impressions of the device are all positive. This evening I coded up some abstract image classes that I will use for all my image objects (images that go along with questions, images for the solutions, etc.). The images are all responsible for fetching themselves from the Visipedia server, so I am really starting to exercise the networking code that I have written over the past couple weeks. I wrote up a quick program that filled a UITableView with a bunch of images, and I was happy to see that the device downloaded the content quickly and appropriately, and the UI stayed responsive. An example of this table can be seen below.