Last Meeting Before Thanksgiving

Our Team had a great meeting last night.
We made progress on a number of fronts.
Jeremy is going to re-visit and probably re-write much of the parsing code he did in the summer in order to try and speed up the downloading of Gmail. Also, we have made a decision to limit the number of emails downloaded. So, the user will download only their first Gmail to number 1,000. This will allow for faster downloads, and it will give users a chance to actually "beat" the game.

Dave has been creating some great music. He's working on a few more seasonal, ambient songs and an intro song.

Eric is finishing his amazing art and animation. We should have a testable beta by the end of the semester.

After Thanksgiving, I am going to begin work on getting IRB approval for interviewing participants. By the end of spring semester, we hope to have a publishable paper with, hopefully, very rich empirical data.

Music!

It's been a while since I have updated our progress, but fear not, we are doing great!

1. We had a great meeting the other night with the team. Eric has made wonderful progress with the art and animations. It is really starting to look better and better.
2. We our proud to announce that fellow PhD student David Bello is now creating original music for our game! Dave is going for an ambient, seasonal sound, and his first audio file sounded amazing. I would post it here, but I will wait until he has tweaked it some more.
3. Jeremy is continuing his work on speeding up the downloading of Gmail. He has found a new python library that will make use of IMAP, so we are hoping this will work better than our current technique.

We are going to have another meeting before Thanksgiving break and keep pushing forward. We anticipate being--hopefully--completely finished at the end of the semester, and I will start informal testing asap.

We are close!