Hi developers and followers of UpStage!

First of all,we apologize for not updating the blog post since October, but from this week, we will be updating developers blog post every fortnightly! We have two exciting news to announce. Firstly, as we have entered a new semester, AUT upstage team has 3 new team members! Secondly, UpStage version 3.3 has been released officially with some major bugs fixes. (link to download)

In the past few weeks, we have been dealing with the academic side of the project. The old member has been working on mid-project review which is a process for our supervisor to view what we have done in semester 1 and assess the progress of the project. While new members have been working on project proposal to present ideas of future UpStage development which helps them to have a better of understanding of UpStage.

For those of you who has not heard yet, we are looking into developing renewed UpStage. We are currently identifying functionality of UpStage version 3 which could be replaced by new technologies. These technology problems include… Graphics without Flash, availability to mobile devices and text-to-speech, etc. Once we identified these functionality, we will start researching potential technology to implement these functionalities.

In the coming week, we will be defining research phases of ‘design science’ as integrating with our schedule. planning activities and deliverables in detail. This process includes which will give us to n of which potential technology will who and when we are going to start looking for possible solution (and provide proof of concept).

For the current version 3 maintenance, each of the new member is paired up with an experienced member.  This will give new members an opportunity to be up-to-date with the state of UpStage project as well as the coding details in the implementation. Programming in pairs will allow us to share our ideas from different perspectives. As a result, pair programming will help on bringing up better ideas via team discussions. In addition, we can guide our new team members and avoid making the similar mistakes in the past.

We also expect our team members to be able to get grounded up by studying on their own times. We know there are many things to be covered in UpStage project. We are sending our best wishes and looking forward to see their contribution for UpStage.

In the end, as we welcome our new team members. We would also love to hear from you as well!! Your participation will definitely push UpStage project going towards to the right direction. It doesn’t matter by what form, we would like to have your opinion on the current UpStage. We value our users’ opinions and we are dedicated to make progression for UpStage.

Takuma Sato & Yue Li
Developer on the AUT UpStage Team