The degree finished, we graduated, we partied and I've kept in contact with a few friends thankfully. Over the break I worked on a few websites, one for a friend and I updated my own one keeping in with the design that an original collaborator wanted for it yet still using webstandards. I'd improve it but I think content is more of the issue there. But the domain is mine and may as well stay that way. I also edited a film for a friend that I shot in November. I think I also attempted to learn Objective-C again in preparation for the year ahead. I'd been pitched a project last year for postgraduate study, a mobile app for Documentary Edge. That fell through before I got to look at it properly right on the cusp of starting the new academic year which was really helpful. Oh yes, and the last thing I did was move this blog to my own host and in Wordpress. The idea was to merge my portfolio into the same site. It's a work in progress, the site currently looks almost exactly the same as the blogger one and the portfolio has most content uploaded but no real stylesheets or functionality. In time...

Colab

Creative Technologies was always an interdisciplinary degree and quite difficult to define to outsiders, and it was supposedly part of no one faculty though it seemed to align itself with Communications and Art and Design. This year it sits under CoLab, a research arm of AUT that is also interdisciplinary. It draws from Communications, Art & Design, Engineering, Maths & Science and Business. The postgraduate students can select research areas that CoLab might be interested in or industry partners might be interested in. This gives you something to study with some purpose, industry gets something out of it and you may get your study funded. Being one of the first students in this new arrangement, I took interest in a possible project that CoLab might want of it's own; a CoLab app. My research question had changed a little bit, I was interested in Native vs Web applications because recently Mozilla has been getting a bit of news time due to releasing a Firefox OS. I suspect this innovation could change things to some degree in the mobile ecosystem. I'm also interested in social applications but had no real formal question that was totally applicable to the project, but I did have a big question that needed answering: Just what is a CoLab app?

It's mid-May. I've been here several weeks and have just completed a literature review. Now I can finally get stuck in to developing something. The general idea is that I'll build a series of mini-single purpose apps to see what sticks and get more ideas. The literature review turned out to be helpful; one piece of literature spoke of a game on a large screen display controlled by mobile phones.

Creative Technologies and Communications moved into a new building this year. WG is purpose-built with a large social area at the bottom and giant displays. I want to use them in an initial app to draw people in. Utility functions of the app can come later. I'm exploring a multi-user mobile/social experience utilising the facilities - namely the large displays - of WG. Before I explore that I have to explore javascript in more detail. I'm rusty. Using a JQuery plugin for touch, I demonstrated an app last week to our small postgraduate group that simply had a ball on the screen that you could move. Unfortunately it wasn't written from scratch and was merely customised from an existing app that demoed the plugin. I had limited time this last week and that was about as far as I got. This week I intend to demonstrate the same thing doing what I originally intended: the ball controls something on an external display connected through the web. I also intend for the code to be written by me or at least intelligently repurposed from something else.

I intend to keep this blog updated from now on, but we'll see how that goes. Postgraduate is better for it's focus. I don't have electives draining my time. Well I have one, but it mostly feeds back into the project. Research Methods. I'll have another one next Semester. I have part time work of 20 hours a week now too, it's in my old profession so it pays well. But it's hard to juggle my time because the work doesn't fall on a weekend, but in the evenings, after Uni. But having enough money to live more healthily is something I've missed.