While running the newest version of our prototype, I ran into some unexpected difficulties. Whenever I touched a Word object to see the associated artwork thumbnails, the application would halt with an Operation Exception. After some investigation, I realized that the thumbnail images in each grid were previously assigned as logical children of the grid generated from previous contact with the same Word object.
I had designed the Word class to generate, remove, and regenerate a grid for each contact up and contact down event on a Word object. I couldn’t find a simple way to logically disconnect the thumbnail images from each grid after each Contact Up.
I later realized that the getImage() function in our Art class simply returned the image instance variable generated with the Art object. So, I revised the getImage() function to return a new Image object generated from the thumbnail image file.
The new method:
public Image getImage()
{
Image image = new Image();
String path = "Resources\\" + imgFile;
image.Source = new BitmapImage(new Uri(path, UriKind.Relative));
return image;
}
Afterwards, I:
- Continued to finesse the look and feel of the grids populated form the Word objects,
- Removed canned data and got the surface to display working results for my parsing of the Artworks.xml file,
- Wrote event handlers that would display the associated for the “Movement” and “Medium” tags,
- Got screen to display working results for tag event handlers from my parsing of my Collections.xml file.
I still had some problems to solve regarding each token’s tag event handlers. Previously, when a “Movement” or “Medium” token was placed on the surface, all of the items were cleared from the screen, including any Art and Panel objects that were generated. In the intended version of our application, only the Word objects populated on the native screen would be replaced by the Word objects associated with “Movement” or “Medium”.
The solution was a RemoveWord() function that removed each Word object’s ScatterViewItem from the main ScatterView, which was kept track of in a List structure of ScatterViewItems.
private void RemoveWords()
{
foreach (ScatterViewItem svi in sviList) {scatter.Items.Remove(svi);}
}
Given the high volume of programming that had to be done in 3 weeks, Lia and I can both agree that this project provided a valuable opportunity to practice our programming logic and modularize the problems at hand. Although we often worked on separate tasks, we found it necessary to communicate with each other about our programming problems and put our minds together to solve them.
Our desire to enhance the way people see and interact with the world, aided by our tenacity to make it happen, has allowed us to produce this final functional prototype of DavisTUI:
Student of Computer Science and Economics at Wellesley College. Cross-registered at MIT. Currently abroad at University College London. To graduate in May 2011. Web designer. Curious problem solver. Always an aspiring artist. Shopaholic. Family in Shanghai. Home in Sillicon Valley. Interested in HCI, user experience, interface design, product design and development, and all things progress and innovation. 
