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Progress Report 1 12 March 2009

Work so far:

• Worked on project proposal.
• Started transferring proposal into LyX.
• Found new literature.
• Investigated parsers.

Goals for the week:

• Finish proposal, in LyX.
• Read more literature on the topic.
• Begin refining what tests will be needed to evaluate strengths and weaknesses of text and graphics.
• Begin designing how to conduct the tests and evaluate their results.
• Begin work on a framework for later systems
• i.e. write records/structs/classes to describe parts of code
• functions, their names, return types, parameters etc.
• classes, their names, fields, methods, parent classes etc
• Must be simple and flexible to adapt later once design of the final systems begins.

Progress Report 2 19 March 2009

Work so far:

• Read literature
• Relevant papers: visual programming systems
• Pict
• Tinkertoy
• Garden
• Thinkpad
• Found literature: 52 pages of summaries and comments on papers in the field till 1997.
• Refined ideas:
• 3 components to project:
• Encoding: read and writing graphics, set of symbols or icons to be associated with different meanings.
• Interface: layer between user and underlying language, control what user can or cannot do.
• Presentation: layout, logical associations, mapping representation to properties eg. size to value, colour to type. How close what the user sees is to how the user thinks.
• Programming languages consist of components (data structures & algorithms) and sublanguages (sublanguage for loops, conditionals etc.).
• These should be considered independantly.
• Different representations may be better suited to different components - choice between icons, graphs, text or others.

Goals for the week:

• Compile a list of the most relevant literature still needed to add to docarc.
• Read more literature.
• Complete proposal writeup.

Progress Report 3 26 March 2009

Work so far:

• Worked on proposal writeup.
• Included goals and possible tests for them.
• Included some promising papers that may be useful to the project.
• Worked on possible ideas for final system.

Goals for the week:

• Finish writeup.
• Keep working on tests needed before design can begin.
• Finish compiling new list of literature to download.

Progress Report 4 02 April 2009

Work so far:

• Worked on writeup.
• Found masses of new literature available on Google.
• Found visual programming journal with full access via ScienceDirect.
• Wrote some GUI helper classes to simplify later development.
• Worked on webpage - read tutorials, downloaded CSS templates.

Goals for the week:

• Finish writeup by end of holidays.
• Finish design of tests by end of holidays.
• Setup a basic project website by end of holidays.
• Download rest of available literature from Google.
• Download relevant articles from visual programming journal.
• Compile list of literature still required but not available from these sources.
• Start reading new literature.

Progress Report 5 23 April 2009

Work so far:

• Finished proposal.
• Taken out IEEE and visual programming compilations.

Goals for the week:

• Collect all design and theory questions raised in proposal to guide rest of work.
• Begin investigating questions.
• Begin getting ideas for systems to demonstrate claims.

Progress Report 6 30 April 2009

Work so far:

• Worked on ideas for systems.

Goals for the week:

• Work on ideas for systems.
• Work on literature review.

Progress Report 7 08 May 2009

Work so far:

• Data representation - City diagrams.

Goals for the week:

• Finalise representations.
• Work on literature review.

Progress Report 8 14 May 2009

Work so far:

• Experimented with analysing code files.
• Looked at representation.
• Looked at patterns and anti-patterns.

Goals for the week:

• Work on literature review.
• Looked at representation.

Progress Report 9 21 May 2009

Work so far:

• Read up on ontologies
• Shift focus from how to write code (Encoding) to how to read, analyse and get information out of code (Presentation)

Goals for the week:

• Finalise project specification.
• Work on literature review.

Progress Report 10 28 May 2009

Work so far:

• Project specification
• Mock interface
• New ideas
• Folders & file system
• Start with simple blob or squiggles and add complexity
• Backpack
• Sign language (point to ideas)

Goals for the week:

• Literature review.

Goals for the holiday:

• Grow mock interface
• Add and try out new ideas
• Begin implementing successful ideas
• Find a clean and simple representation for data flow

Progress Report 11 06 August 2009

Work so far:

• Groundwork (Scrollmap, Minimap)

Goals for the week:

• Cleanup and consolidate groundwork
• Make class trees from intermediate representation

Progress Report 12 13 August 2009

Work so far:

• Some big IDE related bugs resolved.
• Started on class trees.
• Outline of poster.
• Upgraded minimp.

Goals for the week:

• Finish class trees.
• Show relationships between classes.
• Show and edit comments.
• Finish poster.
• Start on code documentation tour.

Progress Report 13 20 August 2009

Work so far:

• Poster

Goals for the week:

• Finish class trees,
• Show relationships between classes.
• Show and edit comments.
• Start on code documentation tour.

Progress Report 14 27 August 2009

Work so far:

• Class Trees
• Editing
• Highlighting data relationships
• Outline of writeup

Goals for the week:

• Class trees
• Textbox for comments
• Drag editing / re-arrangement
• Begin work on classes
• Show methods
• Show data
• Begin work on code documentation tour
• Work on writeup

Progress Report 15 03 September 2009

Work so far:

• Class Trees
• Cleaned up and debugged
• Highlighting fully implemented
• Implemented global control of appearance
and behaviour of all trees and nodes
• Packaged as an IDE control
• Implemented dragging of controls (allows moveable text boxes and drag editing of class tree nodes)
• Restructuring of writeup

Goals for the week:

• Class trees
• Textbox for comments
• Drag editing / re-arrangement
• Convert between class tree and text
• Show details of classes
• Methods
• Data
• Code documentation tour
• Writeup
• Define aims in terms of evaluation
• Begin design of evaluations

Progress Report 16 20 October 2009

Work so far:

• Writeup
• Introduction and background
• Code tour
• Presentation
• Recording desktop
• Converting to animated gif
• Implementation
• Parser
• Expanded intermediate format
• Code generation from intermediate format
• Code tour
• Updated scroll window to work with code tour
• Title bars to move trees around and show/hide/close trees and text boxes

Goals for the week:

• Writeup
• Add to literature review
• Evaluation scenarios
• Diagrams for implementation section
• Implementation
• Code tour: Allow user to specify actions/animations/images/text to display at each waypoint
• Tie together parser and main interface