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The project was completed by 3 HCI Masters students at SUNY Oswego. HCI is short for Human Computer Interaction which is "the study of interaction between people (users) and computers. It is an interdisciplinary field, relating computer science, psychology, cognitive science, human factors (ergonomics), design, sociology, library and information science, artificial intelligence, and other fields."[1] This project was completed as a requirement for CSC 520: Graphical User Interfaces which has the following goals for students taking the class:

• Understand and apply the essential models, designs, and architectures of graphical user interfaces.
• Understand, use, and extend interface toolkit systems.
• Effectively develop the interface portions of applications.[2]

The hardest problem we encountered during the course of this project was building our own widget from scratch. The canvas which is displayed on the right side of the screen is drawn based on mathematical formulas for generating various x positions that correspond to specific times within a day. Not only did we have to completely draw this widget, but we also had to use a mouse listener with "if statements" to check x positions. These x positions told the system whether the user was clicking on an event or if he/she wanted to view conflicts for a particular event. It would have been very convenient if java provided a tool for the type of thing we wanted to do with our system. However, since no such tool was provided, we were left with the daunting task of building one from the ground up. We ran into a significant number of stumbling blocks along the way but with hard work, brainstorming, and perseverance, we were able to overcome these obstacles and learn a lot in the process. This was a valuable experience for all of us.

[1] Dictionary.LaborLawTalk.com
[2] Course syllabus