Living in Oblivian

This movie has a smart way to tell the story with real life and dream are mixing together. The way it divided into 3 part make me remember about the Lola rennt (run Lola run) movie.



However, like other movies such as The Butterfly Effect which using a quite new approach in narrative, I think people who just want to watch movie for entertaining purposes might not like this movie. They may prefer movies like Rambo or Rebound.

I really like the acting of Steve Buscemi. He's really a great actor and I wonder why he doesn't have an Oscar. I used to watch his performance in ConAir (with Nicholas Cage) and The Island. Although he was only a supporting actor in these films, his performance was still very impressive.

Back to the movie, this is the first movie I've ever watch tell about relationships between members in a film crew. It is just like a movie in another movie. The change between color and grayscale scenes is also brilliant.

Change in the XML files' structure

As I posted before, the Hiragana project use XML files to hold multiple question for quiz. And in the project proposal, I specified that this file contains sections with each one is one question as following:


_ url address (or identifier in the Flash library) to the Hiragana symbol
_ correct answer
_ wrong answer
_ wrong answer
_ wrong answer





However, I have made a new structure in the current version of our project which is more compact and flexible.

New structure of XML files

In this structure, I don't keep the whole multiple choice question as the previous one. Instead of that, I only keep the url address of the Hiragana symbol and its right pronunciation. Therefore, the Flash has to work more. In the old structure, it has only one task which is choose questions randomly from the file and display them onto the screen. Now, it has to create the question by itself.

Firstly, the Flash choose randomly a Hiragana symbol from the file (including the url address and the pronunciation). The pronunciation of this symbol is also the correct answer. The Flash will continue to seek for 3 other wrong answers from the remaining file. After having 1 correct answer and 3 wrong answer, it shuffles and display with the image of the Hiragana symbol.

Insert a movie clip from the library in Flash

As I've posted before, our project has a quiz part which requires loading external image files to the Flash. However, the disadvantage of loading an external bitmap file in Flash 8 is the loaded pictures become jaggy.

Jaggy picture (the "ra" hiragana symbol)

Although hiragana symbols are originally vector images (they are drawn in Illustrator), they become bitmap images when we exported them into jpeg files and Flash 8 doesn't have the anti-aliasing function for bitmap images.

To avoid this problem, the solution is to make each hiragana symbol to be a movie clip. This will keep the image at vector format and get rid of the the jaggy problem.

Firstly, we have to make movie clips for hiragana symbols. They are just simple 1-frame movie clips with the content are Hiragana characters. However, we have to set the identifier in the linkage property of the movie clip.

The identifier of the movie clip of the "a" hiragana symbol

After that, we just have to put the action script into frame 1 of the Flash.

// attach the movie clip onto the stage
_root.attachMovie("a","canvas",1);
// position the new movie clip
setProperty("canvas",_x,"300");
setProperty("canvas",_y,"150");
// stop the movie
stop();

And the result is the appearance of the movie clip on the stage without creating any instances.

TheJapanesePage.com

This is a website teaching Japanese. It has many sections including grammar, writing, vocabulary and even Japanese culture.

People can also download video file here to learn vocabulary and daily conversation. However, the most interesting part is the learning culture section. People can learn here Japanese holiday, Japanese tradition songs and even how to speak like a samurai. Here is the list of some Japanese holiday.

Jan 1 - ganjitsu - 元日 - New Year's Day

Feb 11 - kenkoku kinen no hi - 建国記念の日 - National Foundation Day

April 29 - midori no hi - 緑の日 - Greenery Day

May 5 - kodomo no hi - 子どもの日 - Children's Day

Dec 23 - tennou tanjoubi - 天皇誕生日 - Emperor's Birthday (Emperor Akihito's birthday)

Talksushi Website

Talksushi is a website which teaches Japanese. The structure of this site inspired us in arranging information for our Flash application.


The navigation of the site is put at the left. They are links to lessons (although they are kanji lessons instead of hiragana lessons). The main contents is display in the centre of the area.

This website also has a multimedia contents. It contains an audio file of the letter. So you can read the letter in Japanese or listen to it. It will help users become familiar with Japanese text and can use vocabulary in context.

Not just the meaning of kanji characters. This website also teaches about grammars and some common sentences used daily in Japan. It is quite similar to our project's content about dialogue.

Reference
http://www.talksushi.com/kanji/kanjipage1.htm

Basic Japanse sentences used in conversation

This week, I will post some basic sentences which are normally used in Japanese conversation. These sentences are parts of our project's section teaching simple conversation.

1/こんいちは - Konnichiwa
It means both "Hello" and "Good afternoon". Notice that the は(ha) character is pronounced as わ(wa) in this case.

2/ おはようございます - Ohayou gozaimasu
This sentence means "good morning". The gozaimasu part makes this greeting more formal. So this sentence is used when you talk with some one you don't know or people like your boss. In informal situation, Ohayou is enough.

3/ こんばんは - Konbanwa - Good evening

4/ さようなら - Sayounara - Goodbye
This sentence is only used when the speaker is going to leave for a long time. ではまた (dewa mata) which means "see you later" is more common in daily life.

5/ 何時ですか- Nan ji desu ka? - what time is it?
Although this sentence use some kanji characters, I still put it here because of its popularity. 何(なん) means "what" and 時(じ) means time (hours). In the internet, there is a very good free Japanese-English dictionary name Mayjay which helps users look up the meaning of kanji words. It an opensource project written in Java so people can download it for free.

6/ 元気ですか - Genki desu ka? - how are you?
元気（げんき） means "health" and the partical か(ka) is used to indicate this is a question.

7/ はじめまして - Hajimemashite - Nice to meet you

8/ 日本人です - Nihon-jin desu - I'm an Japanese (日本 - nihon means Japan and 人 mean man,person)
The full sentence is　私は日本人です - Watashi wa Nihon-jin desu. But Japanese rarely used watashi (which means "I") in informal conversation.

9/ すみません - Sumimasen - excuse me/I'm sorry.

10/ ありがとうございます - Arigatou gozaimasu - thank you
ありがとう is often used in informal talks.

Wireframe

This week, we focus on doing the project proposal. Drawing the wire frame is one of my parts in the proposal.

• Global Navigation: contains links to lessons and quizzes.
• Cartoon Character: the place where we put the Nekoshiro cat – the instructor for the lessons.
• Status Bar: displays the status of the program and texts which the Nekoshiro cat used to communicate with users.
• Main Area: shows the Hiragana character, play button for sound, questions and results for quizzes.
• Sub Area: shows example vocabularies using character from the lesson, local links to other lessons, choices for quizzes.
  
  
  

Hiragana characters' animation

This week, I spent a lot of time into animating Hiragana character. Lien Anh has drawn 48 basic hiragana characters by using her tablet and my job was just animating them and coverting them into movie clips. The dark green colour was chosen for the background colour because it is the colour of the blackboard in the mockup.

The following demo just show 5 example hiragana characters after animating.

Flowchart for the quiz

This flow chart will show the logic in the quiz part of the project. The question bank is stored in the xml file. The application then reads this file, suffle the order before showing to users. This step make sure that if a user do the quiz twice, he will have 2 different list of questions. Depends on the user's choice is right or wrong, the application will increase the number of right answers or wrong answers. The 2 numbers are finally show to users to let them know their result.

Hiragana chart

The hiragana chart is the main function of our project. These are the 48 basic hiragana characters.

Using XML with Flash

In our project, we have decided to have a quiz which help users check their improvement in learning. However, the problem is if we make a flash with each frame for one question; it will be very cumbersome and difficult to change. A possible solution for this is to have an external file with questions and the Flash is going to load this file when it is executed. Therefore, to change or add new questions to the Flash, we only have to change the external file.

The external file should be written in the XML because this markup language is easy to understand by both human and computer software. This is the sample structure of the question file.

quiz.xml


In this example, there will be 1 question in the file (num="1"). The structure of this question are an URL to the picture of a hiragana character (hiragana/sa.png), a correct pronunciation for this character (sa) and 3 wrong other answers.

After having this XML file, the Flash will read it to get questions, suffle their order and display them to users. This is the example for this Flash. It shows users 5 questions in a random order and users can only answer each question once. After they finish 5 questions, the Flash will show the result: how many correct and wrong answers.

As I just focused on the coding part, this Flash's interface is not so interesting. However, this is its screenshots.