Ecologineers v.2.1

For this assignment, our professor decided not have a final exam, instead we were given the opportunity to improve our web apps. Since our last presentation, we took the critiques as the basis to improve our application. The critiques are mostly aesthetics that involves applying the best user interfaces given what our application is set out to do. These includes decreasing the size of our logo, which for some reason is supposed to be intuitive enough for us to realize and change right away, having default values for our grid info page and setting our pages so that they fit nicely with a lower resolution screen. The last problem provided a very typical mistake I think what novice programmers face when creating user interfaces, and that is we assume that people who eventually will use our application will have a similar computer set up just like ours. I learned from this class and the provided UI video lecture that we need to broaden our perspective to be able to account for a larger set of audience each having different different computer set ups.

Other than fixing our user interfaces our professor has given us some more functions to choose from as extra credit. We initially planned on doing five functions but as we go through our finals we wound up just doing two. Those two were the nice URL function and the AJAX stoplight page refresh. These function were not that bad to implement. Our team tried to learn AJAX just for this particular function. As for the function that didn't make it, date picker, and google visualization, we tried to implement them but were having problems that we just abandoned them. One thing to note is that during our presentation for version 2.1 we told how we were having problems with our date picker and one of our fellow classmates pointed out the bug. This made me realized that when an application is deployed, it's users can be very helpful in finding bugs. But I woudn't count on them because I learned from a different class that fixing programs already deployed are costlier than finding them during dvelopment.

All in all I really enjoyed working on this project. I also enjoyed working with my group. I'm really taking this experience as a good indication of how the professional programmers work in the real world since I plan on being one.