BETA!

BETA!

After a few months of madness, I have finally reached BETA!

Since it would be easier to show then tell, here is a short video of SEAR-RL in action.

Remember: LISTEN WITH HEADPHONES, or a pair of stereo speakers with good stereo separation to get the effect.

A quick explanation: for those who don’t understand what they are hearing. Where there is an object someone could run into there is a sound. The color of the object determines the type of sound played. The sonar ping plays from the direction of North.

Anyway, after a few panics, I am just glad I am here. Knowing there is a working base makes it easier to improve now, but what did I learn the past couple of weeks.

First, working with external hardware on iOS is a pain. Mainly because you are playing with quantum mechanics. The reason being, it is very hard to run a program and debug it. The data either exists in one state or another, and trying to get to the data can sometimes destroy it. Part of this is because I need the Lightning port on the iPhone 6 for the Structure Sensor, so I cannot get debugging data straight from the iPhone. On top of that the Wireless Debug system that the Structure offers can be a little finicky to work with.

Aside from deal with hardware the biggest problem was with Swift itself. In short Apple, is not kidding around about making Swift type safe.

The simplest example would be as such.

for element in someList {

element.someVaribleToChange = theChange

}

With C or C++, element could be a reference to an element in someList which is a reference itself. Even with Python, all variables are references, so if I change something somewhere most of the time it is changed everywhere.

However in Swift when you change element.someVaribleToChange, the change takes immediately. Not so with Swift. First, if the list was passed into the function, the list would be passed-by-value. Next unless you state var before element in the for-in loop that too is passed-by-value element in the list. So unless you explicitly state otherwise you are often working with a copy of an object and not the object itself.

Therefore, when you change the variable, your change is totally forgotten about once you leave the loop. You have to explicitly replace the element from where you got it for any changes to stick. This can be tedious, but it does enforce good type-safe habits. All this caused me the greatest headaches, trying to make sure I was interacting with the objects in the way I wanted too, the object itself and not a copy.

Still, I feel a great bit of relief now, and hoping I can pull together at least one good user testing session in the next couple of weeks. This weekend, a break from code, and work on my report.

About ForeverTangent
Was a Masters of Computer Science Student at the University of Kentucky. Previous Masters of Entertainment Technology from Carnegie Mellon. Before that Graduated from Berklee College of Music. I have worked for Public Radio and the Video Games industry. Most of my interests now are UI and Accessibility Issues for Technology.

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