http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~cc5581/week04/interactive-comic/
Allie and I created a comic of where we were at specific points in time. We collected images from our lives and put them together sequentially. I think that the biggest issue that we ran into with this project with formatting and trying to figure out how to implement other interactive features into our comic. Because our comic doesn’t follow a specific storyline, and it instead functions as more of a ‘scrapbook’ type, we realised that it was much more difficult to incorporate interactive elements that would push forward a storyline. After coming to that conclusion, I thought it was a good idea to focus on the scrapbook element and try to play up on that medium to transform it into an interactive and fun digital scrapbook.
We after adding the images into a slideshow, we decided that it would be interesting to also add a distance meter that indicated how far we were from each other at each point in time. Initially, I tried to figure out how to create a timeline using javascript and CSS, similar to trying to create a timeline, it was very difficult to create shapes from scratch, and we later on concluded (with consultation) that it would be much more reasonable if we constructed vector images of the timeline and of the distance meter, and implemented them into the page afterwards. The biggest issue with that was also the fact that each distance meter had to be of the same dimensions, had to be the same size, otherwise, the meter would bounce around in between pages and wouldn’t stay stable on the screen.
Another issue that I struggled with was the organization of the code. Because there were so many images that we had to incorporate into the page, it was difficult to keep track of every image, and eventually, there were many repeated codes or redundant lines of code that appeared in our code. I think that we tried to find a way to compress many repeated lines of code into one, but because of time restraints and our current level of knowledge, it was really difficult for us to compress it, and kept what we originally did.
Whilst I was putting the images in order, and trying to get the Javascript to function between clicking back and forth arrows on our page, we realised that there was a default page that would show up, and would go away after we activated the button function, however, whenever the page was refreshed, the default page would reappear. We took this issue to Professor Moon, and he showed us how to clear the default page by setting the original count to 1.
Overall it was a really fun but challenging project, I realised that there was a lot more potential to use this project to create a storyline and to incorporate more interesting features. I think it has taught me an immense amount and am definitely keeping in mind other options for the future!