Carb Exchange Colophon

Designer / Developer Bio

My name is Richard Farley I am currently a final year studying Interactive Multimedia Design (IMD). I am the designer and developer of Carb Exchange, I am located in Belfast Northern Ireland. I spent my placement year at Extranomical Tours in San Francisco, this is were my interest in mobile design and development started. While on placement there I had the opportunity to get stuck in to developing a native iPhone application for Yosemite National Park which was to display and promote the top 30 attractions within the park and also Extranomical's tours which go there. I have a great interests in both web and UI design along with front end development and mobile development, while on my placement I gained a lot of development skills both in the web and mobile development. I see my self as more of a developer than designer but like to dabble with both.

About The Project

I myself am a diabetic, I took this opportunity to build a mobile application which I could use to help me control my Diabetes. The application basically works out from your carbohydrate intake at meal times how much Insulin you should inject to keep your glucose levels under control. I have been using the application for more than 2 months now tweaking it as I go and I now have an extremely accurate convertor which I now use at every meal and snack. It has helped me gain control of my diabetes to an extremely high standard

Target Audience

My target audience for this application is type 1 diabetics, unfortunately at the minute this application is only for me as everybody's conversion is different. The aim is to release this after professional medical approval is given as I do want to make sure this application is safe for all diabetics to use.

Design and Development

As this project has more of a functional use rather than simply content like the Yosemite Top 30 application both designing and developing was a lot different. Giving that Diabetics are of all ages and a lot of varied abilities my main aim of this application was to make it as simple and user friendly as I possibly could. Along with including some useful facts, tips and information about diabetes, this information ranges from how to prevent future complications to whats the best foods and diet structure to have. The initial design plans were simple user interface which I have kept along the way. The layout has changed many many times due to feedback from various people in and outside of out IMD year. The development of this application started out in xCode, this did not work as well as I had hoped as the function I needed the application to do would require me to learn another language. So I decided to stick with what I knew which was Titanium. This platform enables cross platform development and it is the platform which I knew. I knew from the get go that it was capable of producing what I needed and how I wanted it. I am happy with the outcome and also the Titanium framework throughout the development stages of my project.

Future of Carb Exchange

The future for Carb Exchange is a positive one, I have decided not to drop this after university but take it on as a main side project developing it up and releasing it in the near future for both iOS and Android devices. The exact timescale of this is unforeseeable at the minute but I would like to have it out on the app store before the Autumn of 2013

Sources Used During Project

The sources used During this project were a small variety of design bloggs and tutorial sites and of course the Titanium WIKI

Software Used During Project

Contributors

Day to day feedback while working at Farset labs from Vincent and Peter