Stairway To Heaven

My life is really buggy these days.  So buggy that I even cannot figure out what I am doing and where I am heading. I really need to stop and think for a while. 1. CS3216 is not about grades, but all that count are grades.That's a bit mysterious. Honestly, I do think my group is doing pretty good in the final project, except the time management is not well conducted. My group members are all very intelligent people. Hu Qiang has a very clear mind on what direction he should be heading(not only in terms of UI). Yingbo is fast in coding. Aldrian thinks really deep and  comprehensive. I am also doing pretty well in this project. In the first week, we've developed the ePub file handler(Aldrian), REST api(Me), reading page(Hu Qiang) and  the basic javascript functionalities(Yingbo). However, when I look at the final project requirements, it says the prototype needs to be as good as the previous assignments and that counts for 10% of the total mark! I'm very worried thoug...

I didn't realize the real problems our app is going to face until Zit Seng shared his thoughts on Monday's lecture. Loading time is critical. We won't meet a user's satisfaction if it takes too long (say more than 2seconds) to load. That's pretty disastrous for a HTML5 app as the app may include heavy framework js/CSS files. On one hand, we shall do as many computation as possible on the server side and cut down clients' JS files to reduce the loading time. On the other hand, we can hardly make it as we need these files to perform offline functions. This challenge will unfortunately happen in our new HTML5 app. Even people in China will be accessing it. What if it takes 10 seconds to load the page?! I also felt worried when Zit Seng said that we shall avoid .htaccess and reduce http requests. Thanks to him, we can at least avoid some of the bad designs in our app. We previously thought to use more javascript to process the ebook reader. Later we decided to u...

Prof. Ben keeps emphasizing that CS3216 is not about hard coding, but about solving problems and making a difference. 1. What is the app that we are going to build? We are trying to build a HTML5 reader that works on different platforms including desktop/laptop browsers, tablets (ipad,etc) and smartphones (iphone /android). I initially came up with the idea of making a HTML5 ebook reader when Hu Qiang and I discussed with an ebook retailer who are currently making a native ipad reader. We think that more people will be able to explore the app if we make it a cross-platform one despite of their physical devices limitations. We also would like to take the advantage of HTML5 and the cloud to allow content synchronization and offline reading.Yingbo enjoys reading novels on her ipod touch and she finds the idea pretty interesting. Aldrian also thinks it's a good project, then we four decide to work together and make it happen:) 2. What is the exact problem that our app is trying t...