Behold life on iOS 10.

My apologies if this report is a little late. I have been under the weather the past 24 hours and only now have a clear head [so additional apologies if this report is rough]. In general, a lot of little things happened this week.

First, I think my idea to scan the depth data along a spiral path is going to work. Before, I got too far in idea, I spoke to my friend in Australia, Titus Tang, who has done a lot of similar visualization work. He was able to offer some good feedback on my algorithm idea and how to manage retrieving of points from the depth field for analyzing them. The biggest idea, Titus suggested it that I rescan the closest points first for each consecutive pass. Fortunately, I think that can be handled using a priority queue but I am still trying to refine a couple of details in my head, before I put anything to code.

Still, I feel like I have enough of the scanning system, that I can move on to building the audio tree and linking them to each region. This is actually the scariest part for me. Dealing with audio programming is always a little nerve racking for me. It is basically real-time programming. With graphic and most data programming, one is able to freeze the state of the machine to examine to debug it. One cannot actually do that with audio. Audio only exists in the context of passing time. You either code everything right and hear something or you do not. Plus, since will be the first time I am use AVFoundation so I am not sure what to expect, even though it does seem it will be easier than using Straight CoreAudio.

Finally, I moved to iOS 10, this week on my iPhone for development. This transition actually was not all that painful because I made the smart to move to shift development to Swift 3.0 and XCode 8.0 a couple of weeks ago. When, I recompiled for the new OS, I did not have any problems which was a relief. Still, trying to develop for and on ‘bleeding’ edge technology is challenging. The main reason, is the documentation for much of iOS and Swift’s API does not seem to keep up. For example, in trying to build the scanning points set I mentioned above, I started using Grand Central Dispatch, iOS’s concurrency technology. On the plus side Apple, greatly simplified the syntax for creating queues [high-level threads] in Swift 3.0. On the down side, there are just not many examples online on the correct usage of the new syntax. So I had to spend a bit of time try to cobble together answers, and I am still not sure I doing everything 100% correct.

In other tangentially related tasks, I also started writing a first draft of the final report. This is going to be an interesting report to write not because I am afraid I might be tempted to write too much. I have been working on this idea for so long, I am constantly find myself having to exercise restraint from writing my life’s story and just focus on the project. I have also begun to apply for positions after school. It is always a little odd when I see positions describing projects similar to what I working on now. I do apply to them, but I wonder if I will stand out to all the other applicants.