Parse Master

For the last week, we have been working hard on our two apps. Trevor and Omar have been mainly working on Brick Bash while Ben, Logan and Grace have begun working on Sketch Send and getting that project off of the ground.

So far, we have improved Brick Bash by making a more detailed leader board. The new and improved leader board ranks the top 5 scores (instead of 3) and now has a feature to add a name to a high score. If player who is already on the leader board beats his or her score, the score will update when he or she types his or her name. Right now, all entries are case insensitive so for example, "grace" and "Grace" will be regarded as the same name. One problem that we have come across is limiting keyboard so that the user can only type in letters when entering a name.

In addition to the leader board, we have also made progress toward the in-game upgrades. We have begun with the simple upgrade of "clicking power" which just takes more of the brick's health away per click. With this upgrade, we had a couple of bugs in our program. For example, the round numbers would not be chronological and the game would skip from round 2 to round 7. Fortunately, we were able to fix these bugs. Now that we have a simple upgrade working, we hope that it will be easy to build more complex upgrades.

Meanwhile, we have started working on Sketch Send, our non-game app. So far, we have mainly been working on the layout which now has a main menu with buttons that link to a blank canvas to draw a new sketch, the user's inbox, and the user's contact list. In addition, we have been researching parse.com and figuring out how we can use it to be able to send the sketches from one user to another. Ben jokingly declared himself "Parse Master" (because titles inflate his ego) and has agreed to do a majority of the  research on how to use parse.com so that we have somebody on our team who knows what they are doing. So far he has been working hard to make sure that we implement the parse.com SDK correctly and trying to figure out the logic behind sending and redrawing the sketches. Right now we think that we will have to somehow save each event of the sketch in a data structure and then the receiver will rebuild the sketch based on that data structure.