Bruno Abrantes

Project Timeframe

December 2007 – January 2007

Motivations

Caixa d’Óculos was the final project for a Dynamic Internet Technologies course, taken on the first year of my Masters in Multimedia Communication at the University of Aveiro.

This web application would allow for students in all degrees of teaching to manage their school related tasks, calendars and learning content in a shared, community space accessible from anywhere. It would differ from regular e-learning solutions in that it was strongly student oriented, and focused on those same students to publish and share educational content (videos, images, even their own notes) with others, while allowing everyone to view and rate those contents. The application also featured a private section which allowed every student to keep track of tasks they needed doing or an upcoming test, for example. Besides support for RSS feeds, there was an alert system that was configured by the users the way they wanted, just in case they’d forget to write that really important paper.

Interface Design

The interface designed sported a clean, professional look, inspired by products such as Basecamp. Users could select different color schemes that fit their taste a little better than the default blue shown in the screenshots here. The design was built around simplicity and tried not to get in the way of the user as much as possible, using clearly defined areas and nice, big font sizes.

Application Development

Apart from the interface design and XHTML/CSS coding, one of my main responsibilities on this project was programming the application core and the private calendar and task management services. The whole project was programmed in PHP, using the Ruby on Rails inspired CakePHP framework, which allowed for the application to be developed extremely rapidly, while its foundations and security were kept strong.

The Script.aculo.us Javascript library was used to add a few classy touches that made the interface sleeker and more responsive, and was present in little things like interactive task completion progress bars and a fully AJAX voting system.

Final Thoughts

It was fun seeing how me and my partner were able to deliver a semi-complex, almost 100% working product in the space of a month, and it allowed me to get to know the ins and outs of the CakePHP framework and its extreme usefulness in cranking out products in unreasonably short periods of time. At the end of the project I made a promise to myself to one day develop it further, as I think the premise, if delivered correctly, can have a great impact in how students share their resources today.