Platform and Software Requirements
Our design specifies that our User Interface is for a mobile application. Therefore, we chose to use the Android operating system for our first computer prototype. Android makes it reasonably easy to distribute and debug a prototype of an application.
Our prototype should work on Android 4.0 ("Ice Cream Sandwich"), but it also has backwards-compatibility enough to work on phones as far back as Android 2.1 ("Eclair"). You should not need a large amount of free space to run our app's first test; having a few megabytes free should be far more than enough.
Instructions on using our Prototype
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In general the shallow areas can be divided into several categories: first, inter-user interactions are shallow in our prototype. We currently only use canned interactions. Second, we do not provide actual information about the laundry machines. This step will only be fixed once we have hardware to interact with; in our exploration of the user interface, this component can reasonably remain shallow forever. A final shallow area, and one that also would require some hardware functionality to truly work, is that of planned actions or timed actions. For example, our app says that it can provide a notification "when the next machine is free". Knowing this information - determining when a machine becomes free - is a hardware problem. There is also a software problem; right now, we don't actually send a notification. This is an aspect we could test by setting the notifications to send after a fixed, short timer instead of when an actual timer expires, and this is an aspect which we will want to make some progress on for our next iteration.