I have a duplicate bridge scoring application with two different sorting modes.
Let me fill you in on how duplicate bridge works so you have an idea what I'm looking for. You sit and play a few hands of bridge against one set of opponents. Then you and the boards move and you play a few more hands of bridge against a new set of opponents. Repeat until the end of the night (usually around 24 boards). You don't necessarily play the boards in order. For instance you may play 1-3, 7-9, 13-15, ..., and eventually 4-6. Other people play them in a different order.
So now for the two sorting modes. There's sort by board order (fairly easy to come up with an icon like the "1-24" I settled on) and there's sort by order played.
Which of these choices is appropriate?
A. A clock
B. A calendar
C. Something else
P.S. I remember reading an article a while back about how using a clock for this would be cause for rejection, but haven't been able to find it.
Thanks in advance for any help/suggestions!
I think a down arrow with a clock.
An hourglass(saves you from the clock metaphor) with a horizontal arrow, as time is more likely perceived as a horizontal flow.
Related
I'm creating a simple application which does certain things depending on the accelerometer. At the moment it initiates the things if i move it in -z-direction fast enough. My goal is though to make it so that if i tap the phone in the table twice it will perform the tasks.
The phone is going to be orientated face up and therefor the back of the phone will "hit" the table twice. The settings I would want for it is so that if the "strong" enough taps in the table happen within one second it will perform the tasks. So the setting of one tap is not an issue but it is, for me, to make it only respond to it if it happens twice within the given timelimit.
Huge thanks before hand!
Depending on the accelerometer you have you either have to sense two peaks within a reasonable, and separated by, the latency time interval, or you can get the hardware to detect a double pulse in the axis you wish. I'm looking at the spec of the MMA7455L, which can do double pulse. If you hardware doesn't do it, you can just sample the acceleration in measurement mode, or even easier set the device to level mode and wait for the interrupts on the threshold you specify.
I have a database of images of one person who is using his hands to show various words and phrases in sign language. The background is white and the only thing changing is the shape of the person's hands and their locations. Now in my gui in matlab, I want the user to be able to choose another image from the same person that was taken at another time doing a sign but wearing the same clothes and then the program will have to compare this against the images in the database and show the most similar. Obviously I can't do pixel by pixel comparison as the images were taken by a hand held mobile camera and slight movement has been inevitable so I should try and locate the hands in the images and compare their shapes. I have no idea how to go about this? I have to say I am new to image processing toolbox in matlab.
Your help is much appreciated
I am doing a phD in computer vision, and I can tell you that it is an unsolved problem. (even in your simple framewrok, with white background)
If you are interested, you might read some works about it ar MIT:
http://people.csail.mit.edu/rywang/handtracking/
or at Oxford:
http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/research/sign_language/index.html
http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/research/hands/index.html
I disagree with you. Such a project can achieve results quickly.
This becomes a problem as soon as the project has to deal with "real life".
Using a single camera, and a completely known background; Opencv provides a simple way to extract hand shape in a image (in about 20 lines of code). You will find plenty of source on the web (have a look at calcbackproj).
After that, what you will have to do is to play with shape, and search for characteristic points.
Begin with some simple signs (example : a circle and a V). How would you recognize one from the other?
There are thousands of papers on sign language; just read the older one to simple ideas flowing :)
I am in the process of adding Game Center to one of my apps. What I would like to do is set up a leader board per "continent" (North America, South America, Asia, Europe, etc.).
Question 1: If I do this, does game center have the ability to show all results for all leader boards on one leader board? Meaning, I can allow users to see if they are top in their continent, but then also allow them to check their ranking overall. Possible?
Question 2: Since my app is Universal, is there a way to force the standard GC Leader board on the iPad to full screen? I have played around with the GKLeaderBoardViewController view.bounds and although this does allow me change the size, it still maintains the original border of the default size. Meaning, there is a square box around the middle of the view, but the data is actually expanded like it should be. (I wish I knew how to include pics here) Have also used the modelPresentationStyle but same results with the box around a smaller portion of the screen.
Finally, concerning both questions above, is it just better to create your own custom view? I was hoping to avoid this especially since the newer look from iOS 5 Leader boards are actually very nice.
Thanks in advance for any and all suggestions.
Geo...
So yes the do allow for one main combined leader board. Just a matter of creating a combined one and adding the others as you see fit.
As for making Game Center full screen on the iPad, no response and luck with searches.
Geo...
How to implement a way to measure distances in real time (video camera?) on the iPhone, like this app that uses a card to compare the size of the card with the actual distance?
Are there any other ways to measure distances? Or how to go about doing this using the card method? What framework should I use?
Well you do have something for reference, hence the use of the card. Saying that after watching the a video for the app I can't seem it seems too user friendly.
So you either need a reference of an object that has some known size, or you need to deduct the size from the image. One idea I just had that might help you do it is what the iPhone's 4 flash (I'm sure it's very complicated by it might just work for some stuff).
Here's what I think.
When the user wants to measure something, he takes a picture of it, but you're actually taking two separate images, one with flash on, one with flash off. Then you can analyze the lighting differences in the image and the flash reflection to determine the scale of the image. This will only work for close and not too shining objects I guess.
But that's about the only other way I thought about deducting scale from an image without any fixed objects.
I like Ron Srebro's idea and have thought about something similar -- please share if you get it to work!
An alternative approach would be to use the auto-focus feature of the camera. Point-and-shoot camera's often have a laser range finder that they use to auto-focus. iPhone doesn't have this and the f-stop is fixed. However, users can change the focus by tapping the camera screen. The phone can also switch between regular and macro focus.
If the API exposes the current focus settings, maybe there's a way to use this to determine range?
Another solution may be to use two laser pointers.
Basically you would shine two laser pointers at, say, a wall in parallel. Then, the further back you go, the beams will look closer and closer together in the video, but they will still remain the same distance apart. Then you can easily come up with some formula to measure the distance based on how far apart the dots are in the photo.
See this thread for more details: Possible to measure distance with an iPhone and laser pointer?.
I'm starting a new project which involves developing an interface for a machine that measures wedge and roundness of lenses and stores the information in a database and reports on it. There's a decent chance we're going to be putting a touch screen on this machine so that it doesn't need to have a mouse or keyboard...
I don't have any experience developing for full size touch screens, so I'm looking for advice/tips/info from you guys...
I can imagine you want to make the elements a little larger than normal... space buttons out a bit more.... things like that... anyone have anything else to add?
A few things to consider:
You need to account for parallax error when touching controls. Basically, the user may touch the screen above or below your actual control and therefore miss the control. This is a combination of the size of the control (eg you can have the active area larger than visual control to allow the user to miss and still activate the control), the viewing angle of the user (which you may or may not be able to predict/control) and the type of touch screen you're using. If you know where the user will be placed relative to the screen when using it, you can usually accommodate this with appropriate calibration.
Depending on the type of touch screen, you may need to ensure that your users aren't wearing gloves or using an implement other than their fingers (eg the end of a pen) to touch the screen. Some screens (eg those depending on conductance) don't respond well to anything other than flesh and blood.
Avoid using double clicks because it can be very hard for users to reliably double click a control. This can be partly mitigated if you've got experienced/trained users working in a fairly controlled environment where they're used to the screens.
Linked to the above, if you are using double clicks, you may find the double click activated when the user only wants to single click. This is because it's very easy for the user's finger to bounce slightly on touching the screen and, depending on how sensitive the double click settings are, trigger a double rather than a single click. For this and the previous reason, we always disable double clicks and only use single clicks (or similar single activation controls).
However big you think you need to make the controls to allow for touch activation, they almost certainly need to be bigger still. Make sure you test the interface with real users in the real deployment environment (or as close to it as you can get). For example, we deployed some screens with nice big buttons you couldn't miss only to find that the control room was unheated and that the users were wearing thick gloves in the middle of winter, making their fingers way bigger than we had allowed for.
Don't put any controls near the edges of the screen - it's very hard to get your finger into the edges (particularly if the screen has a deep bezel) and a slight calibration problem can easily shift the control too close to the edge to use. Standard menus and scroll bars are a good example of controls that can be very tricky to use on a touch screen and you should either avoid them (which is preferable - they're not good for touch screens) or replicate them with jumbo equivalents.
Remember that the user's hand will be over the screen, obscuring some of the screen and controls (typically those below where the user is touching, but it depends on the position of the user relative to the screen). Don't put instructions or indicators where the user's hand or arm will obscure them when trying to use the control they relate to (eg typically put them above rather than below the control).
Depending on the environment, make sure your touch screen is suitably proofed against dust, damp, grease etc and make sure it's easy to clean without damaging it. You wouldn't believe the slime that can quickly accumulate on a touch screen in an industrial or public setting.
The other obvious one is that there's no equivalent of pointer 'hover'. Not that that affects many apps though.
If you decide to put in analog controls (scrollbars, rotation widgets, etc) be sure to put in a digital control also. Some companies think that a touch screen means perfect control over something with your fingers. In real life, this translates to minutes of frustration trying to fix a number that's just a little off.
The most obvious thing is that everything on the GUI needs to be big enough for a fingertip to hit, which is sometimes bigger than you think.
As has been mentioned, there's really no way for a right-click action to happen. Also, double-clicking can be tricky with a fingertip on a touch screen.
The other major thing is that you'll want to create a on-screen keyboard that pops up for text entry and an on-screen numpad for number only fields.
I wrote my own set of controls for a POS application designed specifically to be touchscreen friendly.
Remember to allow enough real estate for stubby fingers and talons. In our application the users can have these manicures that necessitate them to use the pad of their finger instead of the tip. This means that you need to allow more space for activation areas than you would normally consider in any other type of application.
I would also recommend that you accommodate yourself as a programmer from a testing standpoint and from the point of view that things change and there may need to be a keyboard/mouse attached to a non-touch workstation. I cannot tell you how many times I went to touch my flat panel LCD expecting something to happen, before remembering that I had to use the mouse.
Make sure to read your basic UI principles like Fitz law (The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target).
Also consider whether or not the device is stationary or not when it is in use (e.g., like a palmpilot or iphone), research shows that you must accomodate that into your design.
The larger gui elements is the major thing. But it applies to all elements, scroll bars, tabs and even text fields.
The other major thing that I can think of, it's hard for the user to right click. So things that require a right click should be avoided, context menus are the only thing that comes to mind at the moment.
The other responses are pretty good, but are you totally sure that a touch screen would actually be easier to use? There are a lot of devices where a touch screen actually makes them much harder to use, not easier. The main problem is that you can't use the device when you're not looking at it. If users are going to be doing a lot of repetitive actions, a keyboard could be a lot more efficient.
Also, a touch screen might be a lot harder to use by someone with a disability, if you think there's even a small chance that could happen.
Even though this is quite old now, I found it to still be useful, as a starting point for design considerations.
http://www.sapdesignguild.org/resources/tsdesigngl/index.htm
If you've not already done so, have a look at some of the documentation available for developers on mobile platforms, eg Windows Mobile, iPhone.