Home Page and Settings

Hello! JiaWei here again. This week, we focus on home page and settings.

Homepage

NusBuddy Homepage

Coming up with the homepage was rather challenging. We had a debate on how will it look like before we code it out. It has to fulfill our goal of "Viewing everything in one place" and look attractive to the users. After much debate, we decided to put Homework and Quizzes in - as they have due dates, as shown above in the right picture.

We drew inspiration from the Chrome app, momentum and Windows phone lock screen. And herein lies the challenge, how do you make the words blend in with the background? Not only do the words have to be visible to the users, they should not distract the users from the background as well. We want to establish the feeling of space, yet, show the important stuff.

After many trail and error, we finally got the right picture to go with our fonts. It wasn't easy as some backgrounds had drastic contrast between the top and bottom half. This makes it difficult to read the fonts in transparent white. Some were too dark, causing the black layout to become rather opaque.

Never knew something that looked so easy was actually so complicated.

How we separated the picture to find a picture that fits

Giving a sense of space

We used white transparent fonts on transparent black background. You can do this by adjusting the front 2 hexadecimal in your rgb colour. The first 2 number represents the transparency of the colour. "0" for fully transparent and "f" for full opaque. 

So after we finished the homepage, we continued to Settings.

Settings

As of now, our settings page will give users the option to "show homework" on their homepage, or not to. We also allow users to fill in their target CAP and current CAP. We have yet to finish First Major Specialisation and Second Major Specialisation.

"Test Days" setting allows users to set the number of days the task will appear in the homepage before the task dues. For instance, setting it to 1 day will cause all the task due on the next day to appear.

"Number of items" is dependent on "Show Homework". Unless "Show Homework" is checked, the user cannot adjust the number of items to show. As the photos are difficult to upload and arrange, I shall bombard you with collage that I have made that are pretty to follow and less taxing for myself.

"Number of items" is dependent on "Show Homework". Unless "Show Homework" is checked, the user cannot adjust the number of items to show.

Settings also allow users to set their target CAP and current CAP. This will cause automatic update on "My CAP" text field in cap calculator and take away the fuss of typing in their CAP.

Users can also fill in their target CAP from settings such that it appears in both the Profile page and CAP Calculator. The later helps since it reduces the fuss of typing in your current CAP whenever you calculate your CAP.

Users can also enter in their specialisation from Settings page, allowing it to be displayed in the profile page. This hasn't been accomplished yet as though. We wanted "Second Major Specialisation" to be greyed out if the user does not have a "Second Major Specialisation", similar to the effect of "Number of items" to display when "Show Homework" isn't checked. However, while the latter was achieved by the "dependency" option, this cannot be used on "Second Major Specialisation".

We will finish up on this problem and move on the Announcement page. In there, we have to create the refresh and make a setting for it - the time intervals to refresh announcement.

I also apologise for the "ugly" post, with the pictures out of alignment and all. 

Till next time :) 

Jia Wei