DR: Generating Notes Panel!
After spending approximately 12 hours in the HCI lab yesterday (3:30pm-2:30am), I have gained significant headway in generating the notes panel. My (specifically) goals of the night were to:
- generate each note as a button within the stack panel
- have the side icons matching each actor’s color (and have multiple show)
- have side icons match note type
- have multiple icons show
- begin a possible filtering method
- be able to scroll the notes panel
- order notes by time
I have managed to implement an interactive scrollPanel with each note displayed as button (for interactive purposes later) with icons matching multiple actor colors (however not shape). The notes are ordered by time, and I have an inspiration for doing the filtering. I managed to, in a sense, filter the notes by type, but not from the user end of the interface. Problems I encountered included:
- Notes not parsing correctly (format error involving, most likely, hidden characters)
- Having multiple icons display. Had to come up with an algorithm that could position multiple icons depending on how many there are. Simplistic math equations, but certainly stumped me for a bit.
- In general, creating the scrollPanel. It was a steep learning curve in learning how to actually generate complete scrolllers and whatnot, which we had just hardcoded in through xaml.
Still to solve:
- Displaying different shapes. For whatever reason, displaying different shapes did not work well at first. Also, my code currently generates different images than what is on the timelines so these must reconciled.
- Filtering by people. The filtering by different types of notes does work currently, though users cannot access it directly. However, I still need to work on the code for filtering by actors. At the moment, the code is very inefficient so ideally, I would be able to optimize the runtime of code.
- Filtering by users. The next step in filtering would be to allow users to filter the notes. This would involve generating a new notes panel according to their selected buttons and replacing the current notes panel.
- Individual notes. We also decided during our redesign it would be helpful to able to select different notes and pull them out in an individual note for later use. Hopefully it will be a drag and drop movement, however a click interaction wouldn’t be a problem either.
Yes, lots to do and not a whole lot of time. Off to work more!
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