Website Updated

Website has been updated to reflect my new position at Colorado State University.

Details:
-Custom installation of Concrete5
-Wordpress for the blog
-Responsive Design (works well on phones and tablets)

Paper on User Defined Motion Gestures Given Google Honors

My paper on User Defined Motion Gestures for Mobile Interaction has been named an “Excellent Paper of 2011″ by Google Research. Google Research choose the most “influential papers authored or co-authored by Googlers covering all of 2011″ and selected my paper for the field of HCI.

Read more at http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2012/03/excellent-papers-for-2011.html.

Accessing Action Variables in your Layout

Lately have been spending some of my free time trying to learn zf2. So far I have found there to be quite a steep learning curve, and I am usually good at picking up things quickly. One problem I have encountered while developing a sample app is accessing variables set in the ActionController in my layout.phtml. After some googling I found this great blog post:

http://akrabat.com/zend-framework-2/access-view-variables-in-another-view-model/

However, it did not work for me. When I tried to access the child nodes using:

$children = $this->viewModel()->getCurrent()->getChildren();

I consistently received errors because the method getCurrent() returned null. After a lot of trial and error, my solution was to set the layout variables in the ActionController. For example:

    public function indexAction()
    {
        $myvars = array('myvar' => 'test');
        $this->layout()->setVariables($myvars);
        return array('myvar' => 'test');
    }

While this is a horrible hack, it accomplished my goal. Now in my layout template I can simply use the following to output the variable.

   <?php echo $this->myvar; ?>

Paper accepted to AVI 2012

Our paper titled “Tap, Swipe, or Move: Attentional Demands for Distracted Smartphone Input”, which examines the temporal and cognitive cost associated with using motion input on smartphones has been accepted to Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI) 2012