Assignment 11: Mechanix - Do's and Don'ts

Do's:

1. The UX of the app is generally very intuitive. Like Being able to see the steps/progress on the left, double clicking for label, browse through all problems, questions on top and equations at the bottom etc.  - Traffic signal recognizer is robust in some ways. Irrespective of where I start my stroke, the recognizer does a great of recognizing it.
2. I really like the feedback system, most of the times, it tells me exactly what is wrong with my sketch. For example, when I mistyped the reaction force at a particular node, it points out that the force at that node is wrong, which makes it very easy to 'debug' my sketch.
3. The arrow recognizer is very robust. It recognizes arrows irrespective of where I start. It even allowed me to draw arrows with more that 3 strokes!
4. The recognizer does a great of recognizing the direction of the arrow. I drew 'Rax' slightly tilted towards the 'y' direction, it handled it well. But when I made it ambiguous (very close to 45 degrees), it rightly said the direction was wrong.
5. Handling of coordinate system directions. The equation box allowed me to select my own positive and negative direction for the coordinate system. For example, If I was able to use 'upwards' or 'downwards' as the positive y direction, as long as I was consistent for that problem.

Don'ts:

1. Drawing the traffic light was interesting, when I used a single stroke, the recognizer accepted a fairly 'shabby' traffic light. But when I used more strokes, it didn't recognize it as a traffic light, though the final diagram was closer to the original.
2. Seems like the ordering of sides matter when drawing the rectangle/square shapes. When I draw the parallel sides first, it fails. Would be nice if the square/rectangle recognizer can be more robust, like the arrow recognizer.
3. The message dialog box disappears fast. Can stay for a little longer.
4. Instructions for labeling forces was a bit confusing. For example, Problem 5 expects us to label the reaction force at B to be 'Rby', but in the previous problem (Problem 4), we labeled the force as '10 lbs'. Maybe the question can be a little more explicit.
5. The equation box accepts multiple force values such as '10 N + Rax'. But it also accepts the answer if I enter '5 N + 5 N + Rax'. Maybe the number of terms in the equation should equal the number of forces in that direction?