Things are heating up for SyncAssist! With only two and a half weeks left until our Final Design Review, we definitely have our work cut out for us. This week, we showcased our app at Prototype Inspection Day and despite testing our app quite thoroughly the day before, we ran into some unexpected bugs during the actual live demo. Fortunately, we were able to relatively quickly recover from these issues and resolve them before the next round of judges came, so our PID was overall a success!

On the technical side, we’ve essentially completed the mobile app, aside from testing it to ensure compatibility with iOS. Last week, we mentioned hurdles with getting keyboard-based remote control on Android to work as expected, since there were key combinations like ‘Tab’ and ‘Alt + Tab’ that were reserved for certain actions by the OS. It turns out that in order to block these, you need to create an accessibility service, which essentially grants your app full control of the device in order to help users with disabilities interact with your app. In our case, we used it to block all keyboard commands after remote control begins and instead send over the command to the remote control target — which is exactly what we want!

Other than that, we’re still in the process of stress testing our app and having some issues linking up child nodes with the parent node to make our Selenium Grid work. Hopefully by next week, we’ll have some metrics for CPU usage and bitrate are affected by the number of peers in a conference, but you’ll have to stay tuned until then!