HCI

Lecture

To start this weeks lecture we went through what was needed for the blog, as some people had forgotten and left out parts of it. We then went on to last weeks tutorial, which we were shown how to produce a motion tween. The main aspect of the lecture was HCI, "The user interface (or HCI) is the aggregate of means by which people (users) interact with a particular machine, device, computer program or other complex tools." (Wikipedia, 2007). To start covering this topic we were show a MS - Dos command line and shown some functions such as "dir". We then went on to GUI's that are used in opperating systems such as MacOS or Vista. "A graphical user interface is used to allow users to interact with the computer and computer controlled devices which employ graphical icons" (Wikipedia, 2007). As another type of HCI we covered speech recognition. Once we had covered these types of HCI we went on to website user interface. The first website we looked at was called "..radioqualia..", this was a simple website with a simple navigation system. The next website was for the composer Michael Kamen, this was a much more advanced website with more complex. We also looked at a website called "Accept Jesus, forever, forgiven" this was a very poor example of HCI.

Related Links

http://www.michaelkamen.com/
http://www.dokimos.org/ajff/
http://www.radioqualia.net/

External Reading

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-Computer_Interface
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_user_interface

Tutorial

In this weeks tutorial we were set the task of creating a shape tween. The initial steps were the same as normal, creating a new flash file. To create a motion tween we did not need to convert the text/image to a symbol. We were asked to create a shape tween of a word to another word. This involved spliting the word up using the break apart option in modify, we then had to insert a keyframe along the layer and replace the text with other text to allow it to tween. The instructions for these processes were very clear and concise. The instructions then went on showing us that you can make 1 shape tween into several and the other way around.

Reflection

This weeks lecture was interesting, covering the different types of HCI. We started with the MS Dos command line, which i don't know much about so it was helpful to see how a few commands work. We then went on comparing types of operating system GUI's, we went through MacOS, Vista and Linux. Following this we discussed Vista, and why Microsoft changed so much, In my opinion XP was perfectly fine and didn't need changing. We then went on to speech recognition which I'm quite interested in as i think its something that will become really useful and eventually come a part of everyday life. We then looked at the three websites as examples of user interfaces, the only one that impressed me was the Michael Kamen website, i thought the navigation, music and colour scheme really went well together. The radioqualia website was really boring with a plain black and white scheme throughout with simple buttons as navigation, the buttons weren't even labled so you couldn't navigate the site successfully unless you knew it already. The "Accept Jesus, forever, forgiven" was poorly designed and had very annoying music playing in the background, the background was multi-coloured and the text didn't stand out well which made it difficult to read. The work set in this weeks tutorial was fairly easy to do and the instructions were easy to follow, near the end of the tutorial i was trying to get a button working but was unsuccessful.

Dancey.