One of the factors of the Node Garden project is how the different nodes are connected. Since this is a Windows Phone project I wanted Tweet Garden to build on the twin themes of connectivity and a chrome-less/content based user interface. The basic concept is that each user is represented as a node, but their node is visually constructed by their tweets. The tweets travel around the node to form the circular shape. When another user's tweet node is displayed the nodes form a two-way connection. As more words from their tweet feed are displayed the node starts to sends older words to its connected partners, and vice versa. The stream of words between the connections again give the impression of shapes (lines) without actually drawing the line. The result is that connected user begin to share their collected tweet feeds without previously knowing each other.
Tweet Garden works best if you enter your Twitter name at the start screen. If no one else is using Twitter Garden after every minute a fake node will be created using the twitter name from one of WPUG’s members. If there is a network connectivity problem then fake data will be used. The user can move their node by tapping the destination on the screen.
NB. The application currently has none of the usual phone functionality such as tombstone support.
The original development started on Windows Phone 7 with the intention of moving to Windows Phone 8 when I could access the correct development environment. Once on Windows Phone 8 the idea was to utilize the speech-to-text engine to share the user's spoken words between the nodes. However, on porting the application to Windows Phone 8 it became clear there is a bug in one of the fundamental controls I used (confirmed by Nokia Support and is currently with Microsoft). I did not have enough time to change the control so the current version is unfortunately only running as a Windows Phone 7 application. Unfortunately this impacts on performance. Should Microsoft provide a speedy update to the problem I will move to Windows Phone 8.
Figure 1 Application starts to get user's tweets |
Figure 2 Tweets form the boundary of the node |
Figure 3 Nodes visually share tweets with each other |
Figure 4 Multiple nodes are connected |
Figure 5 Random movement and sizes