The major difficulty has been designing an interactive interface that should have contained texts but without looking too much bureaucratic. Therefore we replaced, where possible, texts with animated icons.
Animations are used in the ideas menu where new, old and current ideas icons rotate; the subpages of this section, showing an “interactive wall”, contain animations too.
In the ideas menu the rotation has been processed using images that change when a key is pressed and again when it is released. This has been a compromise with Mobile Processing since we could not find any references concerning scaling and rotating objects as in Processing.
The wall is a metaphor for a classic directory. Instead of scrolling texts, people can slide along an interactive wall and look at SMSs as they would do with stickers in the streets.
In this case the difficulty has been selecting things on the wall since arrow keys had to be used also for sliding; thus we decided that the selected ‘stickers’ would have been always the ones in the middle of the screen.
At this stage the challenge has been to code a sliding background containing various icons, to place a cursor on them, and allow any to be selected.
Finally, we have coded the filling of text boxes, trying to give a realistic appearance of the whole system working; in addition, we also coded the sending of SMSs (not having a server, as supposed in our concept, we used an existing mobile phone number).
CODE SKETCH FOLDERS (3,2MB ZIP)
Download the .jar file and transfer it via Bluetooth or infrared to a java-enabled phone or Put the sketch folder in your Mobile Processing program folder (usually in Documents on the Macintosh). Open the file from within Mobile processing (or drag it onto the Mobile Processing application icon)
TECHNOLOGY
We thought the real project could work on a UMTS mobile phone in order to download interactive pages from a server in real time.
However for our prototype we used a Nokia 7610 mobile phone, including:
. display with 65.356 colours
. screen size of 176×208 pixels
. SMS and MMS
. Bluetooth
. CLDC 1.0
. MIDP 2.0
HOW TO USE THE PROTOTYPE
Press SOFTKEY RIGHT to go on and SOFTKEY LEFT to go back.Press FIRE KEY to fill text boxes and write msg.Press DIRECTION ARROWS to navigate on the screen.
In the first page, both LOGIN or SIGNUP are selectable but only LOGIN continues with the prototyping. In the next page USERNAME and PSWD can be filled in but are not compulsory to proceed. Pressing SOFTKEY RIGHT one gets to the Personal page. Here, pressing FIRE KEY one can set online and offline mode, or other options to continue. In the real application one is supposed to visualize only old performances if offline and if one is not participating in any performance, “canovaccio” is not selectable.
If one chooses “hacktions” the prototype continues to the Ideas menu where new proposals can be made, “current” and “old” ones visualized. The database of old “hacktions” has not been coded in this prototype.
From the “new” icon one gets to a page where it is possible to write information and then continue onto a second page where pressing SOFTKEY, corresponding to the “send” command, the prototype goes back to the Personal page.
From “current” one gets to the sliding wall where ideas displayed with corresponding inspiration images can be read. Even if the wall is working the only sticker selectable is the first one sees selected when getting in this page. Selecting the sticker one can read it and then go back (“participate” command has not been coded).
If one chooses “canovaccio” from the personal page the prototype goes to the discussion wall; this works on the same principles as the previous wall but here small avatar images are shown as users contribute to the discussion. One can select the sticker in the middle of the wall (a cassette image) or the one on the right (image of a hand holding a star) and so get to the message page. One can send an SMS. One can do that but it may be that one of the team members will get spammed with your trials! Pressing back one goes back to the server