Practice pitches. Second round (III)

The second round of practice pitches has completed last Monday. This time, it was the turn of Automaton, VisualScheduler, and G.E.R.A. I am going to discribe their pitches and my reactions, as well as the reactions from others in class (classmates and Professor Ackley):

- AUTOMATON

• They used 3 speakers again. I think they should cut it to 2.
• Good introduction, the slides flew smoothly...
• Basics of Automaton. From my point of view, the best improvement, because this time, the explanation about how the game works was much more accurate than in the first presentation. The slide they used to this part of the pitch was very clear.
• Live demo. Several examples (much better than the first round) and test, from the simplest to hardest ones.
• They had time enough to complete the pitch (1 minute before the time limit). In this sense, a classmate suggested speaking a little bit slower.
• Other classmate proposed comparing Automaton with other applications (if any).
• Ackley suggested not to read from hand cards when speaking, and avoid using pronouns to refer teammates (use their names instead, much more professional).

- VISUALSCHEDULER

• This time, they focused on comparing their application with the old method used on the UNM. 
• Good coordination in general, the slides flew well.
• They also explained how they will generate revenue of the project.
• Spreading the world: Basically Facebook and Twitter, fair enough in my opinion.
• Live demo: Some minor problems when trying to show an example. Anyway, they clearly explained how the schedule builder worked. They went through a real case for the next semester. Nice demo.
• The schedule generator is going to be a premium feature ($5/month)
• The website will be available on October.
• Their pitch fitted with the available time.
• A classmate suggested trying the application with volunteer students. Good point!
• Ackley liked the schedule generator and the presentation itself. I also believed that their second pitch was slightly better than the previous one.

- GLOBAL EMISSIONS REDUCTION ALLIANCE (G.E.R.A.)

• They changed the dark background on the handout. Much more legible this time.
• The problem: They used the Goldilocks Method to justify the creation of their app.
• Similar apps: Again, they went through two kinds of applications ("Pure game based" and "Pure data entry"), explaining their pros and cons. Then, they showed the advantages of Demigod, which gathers all of both approaches in the same app (Goldilocks).
• Approach: "A gamified of carbon emissions tracking" (good definition). It uses real data and it is focused on the real world impact by engaging stories or missions. Thanks to these missions, users can win spendable points as well as unlock badges.
• Live demo: The first time an user logs in, a "step by step" tutorial is displayed (I liked it!). They showed how the missions worked, and how users could create their own missions. In general, the demo was OK.
• Unfortunately, Ben forgot part of the pitch in the middle of the presentation. But this kind of things usually happens. 
• Ackley told them that they spent 5 minutes on the introduction. I agree, in fact, I think they should cut some time from the comparison between G.E.R.A. and other apps.
• I particularly liked the statistics page (nice charts).

Last team meeting

Yesterday morning, we met together in order to start preparing the final presentation. We checked again the classmate's feedback of our last practice pitch (both from the question time and some blog posts), as well as Professor Ackley comments.

In my last post, I wrote about our weaknesses during the last practice pitch. Our main goal was to fix all these things, trying to improve the slides in some way. Therefore, we spent two hours redesigning the slides by:

• Removing several facts and statistics (a cleaner design means easier to follow for the audience).
• Adding three new slides corresponding to each one of the stages of a Harvard study for changing to a healthy behavior (Preparation, Action and Maintenance).
• Removing the technology choices slide. Instead, Matt S. will talk about it during the demo.
• Searching other applications and websites that provide similar services as Demigod. 
• Based on the previous research, creating a slide named as "The Competition" in which we compare and contrast Demigod with other apps. We would like to justify the creation of our application, and the Goldilocks Method should be the easiest way.

Additionally, we made some changes on the footer of the website to adapt its size to the mobile version. Besides, we removed three small rounded buttons that we initially add to eventually link whatever we need, but finally we did not find anything to link, so we decided to cut them out.

As we had a lot of interesting stuff in our presentation slides, I suggested to use it in order to create a new Frequently Asked Question page in the website. This page will include different paragraphs with commonly asked questions and information about our website, so we will use some data from the slides, but we will have to add new things to complete the page (I created a new Google doc shared with all the team members, so that now we all are able to add new stuff.) 

On the other hand, I also proposed creating a new Contact section. Basically a simple form to provide users a way to contact us directly if they have any question or problem that needs support. In this sense, I think that put an email address instead of a form is obviously much simpler, but this may lead in spam issues. So if we have time enough, we will create this new section.

Practice pitches. Second round (II): Demigod

It is time to evaluate ourselves. This week we had a second chance to show our project to the rest of the class, and practice the final presentation, which is going to be held next May, 13.

We prepared a new handout, much more simple,  and including just a couple of keywords. This was one of the task I did last week, and I am think that the new design is much better than the first handout version. However, I made a grammatical mistake when writing the text on the handout: "Improve your health, fitness, and nutrition through challenges that help you build heathly habits and create the lifestyle you want"

A classmate noticed that there was a mistake on the text, and he told as where it was. So, I fixed the error (heathly" to "healthy) just after the Monday's class. I think it is always good to accept your own errors, and the handout was my responsibility.

Apart from the handout mistake, these are my reactions on the pitch itself:

- Matt S. spoke more fluent in general, but we still had too many facts in the first part of the pitch. We definitely have to cut down the number of facts and references about the current state of America.
- Despite testing the slides on Matt F's laptop before the pitch, we had problems (again) with the screen resolution.
- The demo was more interesting in general, because we change from a prerecorded video to a live demo.
- On the demo, we made another relevant mistake when Matt F. tried to login via Facebook using his account, and it did not work (his account was blocked). We should have tested it prior to the demo. Anyway, next time we are going to use my account, or the one of Natalie.
- We should deal somehow with the potential cheating made by the users.

Reactions from classmates and Professor Ackley:
- A classmate suggested speaking a little bit more about the intellectual challenges, because we talked too much about the nutritional/physical challenges (tons of studies and references about the body, nutrition, etc.)
- Ackley said that we spent a lot of time in the first slide.
- Compare our application with the competence. It could lead to the use of Goldilocks Method, which may be interesting in my opinion.
- Avoid using the "Our solution" slide.
- Hide Ubuntu's sidebar when displaying the slides (i.e., use fullscreen mode).
- Use short challenges on the demo, for example, a challenge that needs only 1 check-in along 1 week. This would allow us to show how a success challenge looks like.

Based on the mistakes we made, and especially on the feedback we got, we will try to prepare the final pitch. Only 15 days left...

Practice pitches. Second round (I)

Last Monday, we had another opportunity to show our project to the rest of the class and practice the final presentation, which will be held in just a couple of weeks. However, on this post, I would like to focus on the other two teams, leaving our own pitch comments to my next entry (maybe next Friday or Saturday).

So, these are my reactions and comments to second round of practice pitches (MechanApp and Powderade):

- MECHANAPP

• Again, a clear, clean and solid presentation. No major mistakes in general. I think they did the best pitch so far.
• They cut the number of speakers to 2 (there were 3 last time)
• The handout was pretty similar to the one of the first practice pitch (but it is good!)
• They started the pitch introducing themselves, and then, they went through a brief introduction, main goals of the app, and a justification (Why MechanApp? -> Basically do it yourself, saving money and improving your auto mechanical skills).
• Business model -> revenue: targeted advertising 
• The demo was again very good, perfect execution, slightly better than the first pitch. They chose a specific car, model, and year in order to give an example. The app guides you through different possible workarounds. This system reminded me to the Troubleshooting problems system of Windows.
• Awesome design. I believe it is actually the strongest point of this project.
• They also explained how the Greedy algorithm worked by showing a tree structure and using other real example at the same time. Key-point of the app: It statistically learns from previous problems, and intelligently selects most likely causes for the selected vehicle first to investigate.

- POWDERADE

• Major changes in the way they organized the pitch.
• This time, they only used the video to show the demo (much better!)
• The handout was not bad, but I believe that they can easily improve it (they should reduce the amount of text).
• They started comparing Powderade with other existing skiing and snowboarding apps such as Snocru (Goldilocks method).
• They talked about the different achievements (speed, GPS stuff, distance, etc.).
• They also mentioned a Facebook sharing feature, which will be available coming soon. In my opinion, they should not have said nothing about it...
• They made an important mistake when tried to play the demo video using Youtube (the movie did not load). Fortunately, they finally managed to play it, but it would be interesting to play a local copy of the video instead. Anyway, the video was focused only on the demo itself. It was OK, but I believe that they included images recorded with an on-board camera along too much time. In my opinion, these kind of images distracts the audience's attention, and besides, they do not match with the information they display in the demo.
• Technology choice justification was OK in general. However, Ackley suggested moving all the Technology choice stuff before playing the video (demo). I agree.
• The application will be available on Google Play for the next winter season.
• A classmate suggested (again) that the name of the app is quite similar to "Powerade" (the sports drink). It could be overlooked by the team, but in terms of marketing may be a trouble to promote the product, especially in online search engines. Anyway, I think it is too late to change the app's name...

Creating static pages on Rails

Recently, I had to create three new pages for Demigod's website. These pages had a common characteristic, because all of them were based on static content (i.e., no data or information collected from a database, user input, etc.). So, I needed three pages to write a description of one each of the categories that we use to classify our challenges (Nutritional, Physical, and Intellectual).

I started creating three separate actions in the home controller (/app/controllers/home_controller.rb):

class HomeController < ApplicationController
  (...)

  def nutritional
  end

  def physical
  end

  def intellectual
  end
end

Then, I added the corresponding routes for each one of the actions (/config/routes.rb):

get "/nutritional", to: "home#nutritional", as: "nutritional"
get "/physical", to: "home#physical", as: "physical"
get "/intellectual", to: "home#intellectual", as: "intellectual"

Finally, I generated three new views to display the content itself (app/views/home/category_x.html.haml). I wrote the static content (in this case, just text and a linked button above the text to the sign up form) using Haml, which is quite similar to HTML. In fact, the easiest way from my point of view is to write HTML code and use an online converter to get the Haml code.

After that, I was able to easily add links to the the new pages from the homepage (/app/views/home/index.html.haml), for example, this portion of code corresponds to the Nutritional link in the homepage:

(...)
%p
  = image_tag("nutritional_icon.jpg")
%h3{style: "text-align: center;"}
 %a{href: "nutritional"}
   Nutritional
%p{style: "text-align: justify;"}
 Keep your body healthy and follow a better diet thanks to several interesting challenges...
#more-btn
 %a.btn{href: "nutritional"}
   more

Eighth client meeting reactions

Less than a month to finish the Spring semester, so we have just a couple of weeks to complete our project. The last client meeting took place last Wednesday with Nikan. We basically focused this meeting on the demo, which covered the following topics:

- Homepage. New module with links/icons to categories descriptions.
- Three new static pages with full descriptions of each category (Nutritional, Physical and Intellectual).
- Profile page: New design features (icons, progress bar, stats simulation, Facebook progress sharing button, etc.). Now, the progress bar color fits with the color pattern.
- Challenges page. Design (color pattern), new popup with information about the selected challenge (design).
- "My Challenges" section. New label system and "Finished challenges" feature.
- Check-in: The number of check-ins you have already done, as well as the current week are now shown when you check-in (Good job Natalie!)
- Mobile version: some improvements regarding the functionality.

Nikan's reactions and questions:

- The default avatar picture was Ok, but she thought that it should be smaller, because its size was, for example, much bigger than the Demigod's main logo. This did not happen in the mobile version.
- She liked our mobile version: "It is a positive point of your project".
- Nikan also asked about the performance of our application. Matt S. was working hard to improve it, and now, the website runs faster.
- She asked about the sorting criteria to show the challenges list (it is random so far).
- Nikan suggested to add a challenge description into the progress bar (as a reminder of what you have to do).

Next action:

- Prepare the second practice pitch.
- Progress page
- Descriptions for all the challenges
- Beta tests (family & friends)
- Looking for bugs and fix them (if any)
- Start thinking about marketing...

Ubuntu on Virtualbox. Screen resolution optimization

As I explained in one of my first post about the CS 460 project, I was running Ruby on Rails a virtualized instance of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS x86 using VirtualBox. Matt S. recommended me to use Linux instead of Windows because the ROR installation was much easier, apart from the fact that all this software is free.

I have been working along more than two months with ROR on Ubuntu, especially focused on the functionality of the application. However, a problem came up when we moved to the design, because my virtual machine could only be set-up to a resolution of 1024 x 768 px., which was not good in terms of design tasks. For this reason, I had to figure out a way to improve the screen resolution of my Ubuntu installation, and I finally got it after a research on some Internet forums.

In fact, there exists a resource to easily get better graphic performance, which is named "Virtualbox Guest Additions". By default, VirtualBox provides graphics support through custom virtual graphics The Guest Additions is a package available for Windows, Linux, Solaris, OpenSolaris and OS/2 that includes a special video driver for increasing video performance and also includes additional features, such as automatically adjusting the guest resolution when resizing the VirtualBox window or selecting fullscreen mode.

The installation is quite easy. In Ubuntu, open a terminal and run:

> sudo apt-get update
> sudo apt-get upgrade
> sudo apt-get install dkms

Then, you have to reboot your guest system in order to activate the updates. Again, open a terminal and run:

> sudo apt-get install virtualbox-guest-additions-iso

Once I installed the VirtualBox Guest Additions, I rebooted the Virtual Machine and selected "Auto-resize guest display" on the "View" menu. This allowed to see an optimal resolution depending on your screen (anyway, higher than 1024 x 768 px.). Thanks to this package, now I am able to work with the Demigod's design properly; even use my laptop to display demos in client meetings.