Re:writing

Well... so... the first four weeks of working on my thesis have passed and the first few major hurdles are being taken. I feel a bit like a hermit since I am working from home and hardly go anywhere except for the supermarket or for a walk. Meetings are about every month (with an option to come in at a walk-in time slot on wednesdays), so I have not seen the department for a while :-)

The implementation is coming along, I am currently at the point where I can list and monitor windows and can actually switch between them. The API for OSX is kinda... not intended for this kind of work, so it is factually one big hack and not all applications comply to my wishes, but it is enough to work with for now. The next big step is to be able to arrange and group windows into tasks. That bit is really getting into the touchy-feely side of iOS web-programming, so I am hesitant to start.

In the mean time, I have created a test application for touch events called Scribble (works only with touch-enabled browsers). It is a simple multitouch drawing tool, just go get used to the events. Turns out events are triggered in a digest-fashion with lists of which touches have changed and what the current ones are. Useful stuff to know O:) I also created a HTML5-canvas-based course drawing program (which I am haphazardly working on to actually finish it, expect that to pop up under projects), just to get more familiar with the APIs before really digging into thesis-work.

The target for the next meeting (next week) is to have grouping done and to have written the first part of my thesis: the introduction, the background and the starting points for the design from a literature point of view. That means I am (trying to) write my ass off; something that is not an one-hundred-percent success. Since I am combining my two papers on the subject into one, it requires more rethinking and aligning than I thought it would be. But then again, I suspected that it would probably be worse than I thought :-P

Until next time.