...code that is! Yes, I've been working on my own little project for some time now. Here's a sneak peak of one small part of it I worked on just the other day that is still unfinished...
Now before you go and jump up and yell it's a scheduler / time management system, it's not! Hah. That's just a nifty one-day agenda thing to display some stuff that may or may not be scheduled for that day. How ambiguous.
Well then, I just wanted to let you know that displaying events that have conflicting times (concurrent events) is a PITA and requires what you might call preventative collision detection (for lack of better words). Normally events would be displayed one after another on a timeline, but if *any* times of a single event conflict with another event, one of the events is moved onto a new column. This process will go on and on until the loop can allocate enough space on the timeline to fit an event.
Now, back to real life and real (home)work.
I've been recieving lot's of emails recently from Ringo, an online photo sharing service, and they've really been annoying me. Here's why.
When you sign up, you can put in your normal email password, e.g.: sign in with gmail, and it gives you the option to invite ALL of the people on your contact list. This in itself is nothing bad, if anything it's a smart way to get the word out, but what really annoys me is the emails that they send. The first email that I recieved was titled: "New Photos" and advertised new photos from one of my friends. Being bored and generally interested in photos that my friend might have posted on Ringo (and for some reason not on facebook?) I went to check them out. But first I had to sign up.
So when I went to sign up, it asked me to log in with my Gmail email and password and that's when it prompted me to send invites to all of the people in my contact list. I realized right then and there that this really wasn't the type of crap I wanted to send out to people.
Since deciding to never go to ringo again I have recieved several more similar invitations. I just wish that Ringo wouldn't advertise my friends having photos in their profiles when they don't and when they have probably been suckered into going to their website for the same reason I was.
All in all, Ringo looks like a sub par photo sharing service trying to compete with the likes of facebook and smug mug. It has a terrible user interface and is dependent on viral marketing to get users. Pffft. How cheap.
So I've been busy lately, I have my last midterm exam coming up this saturday, I have two papers due in a few weeks, and I've found a project that I'm interested in coding! Yes, back on coding. I'm not giving any details on the new project, but I'm hoping that it will be done by christmas. Otherwise, there is a slightly newer version of FileArts that's not really out but available to me ( :P ) that's making the whole job much easier and more enjoyable. Finally, if there are any neat programming things that you would like to see explained/explored, just leave a comment.
So I decided I would make a simple hooks system, and although there is a lot of code to it, it is still VERY simple. At first, the goal was to just be able to tell the class to hook functions onto specific hook ids. This is a stupidly simple task so I was on the fence about posting about it. Then Geoffrey said I should make a function to apply a function to all of the hooks, or so I thought...
» read the rest of this entry.
... And this time it's not because of a plugin! Check it out, all the images are aligned nicely and when you hover over one, it gives you more details about it.
Notice how the second image is highlighted with a blue box and has more detailed information. If you could see my cursor, it would be hovering that image, but oh well.
I have mixed feelings about this possible look. I noticed the difference right away, and it's obviously simpler in terms of looks, but it just didn't seem right because I'm so used to the normal way Google lays out its image results. Also, all of the images are vertically aligned at the bottom of each row, and that leads to some odd looking mouse over boxes when, for example, hovering over the "Fire Dancer" image which is right beside the "The FIRE Place" image with the text in it. It looks odd because all of the boxes start just a few pixels above the tops of the images and extend downward. (sometimes overlapping images on the next row)
So before I get onto the next programming topic, I just want to mention an insanely cooling looking app that was on Digg earlier today: Scrybe.
As I'm sure with everyone as they first look at this, it just seems like yet another web 2.0 thing. And it is, but woah have they ever taken things to another level. It works seamlessly off/online! That's a cool feature, but obviously if it were the only noteable one, this post would be done here and now.
Everything has to do with context. This is a very neat idea that I am getting really interested in exploring further. Here's an example of how Scrybe does it: you will be on the main calendar view, then you can zoom into a day, zoom into the hours, zoom out to monthly view and further zoom out to yearly view! It really is worth seeing.
To be a bit more clear about how they deal with context, think of the average calendar grid. Then imagine sticking your fingers into one of the cells and prying it open to see what happens in that day in more detail while still seeing the rest of the month. Everything scales accordingly, etc. It really is quite an effect. Here's another way of looking at it. Imagine a door. Now imagine being able to look through the lockhole in the door and seeing everything in the room behind the door and still being able to see the whole door! Very neat indeed.
This idea really is turning out cool ideas in my head, I'll be back soon with a post about a simple plugins system, assuming I code it to a point where it lives up to my expectations.
I've been pretty sick the last few days. I've got a sore throat and a really stuffed up nose. The other night I randomly got an ear infection... that really took me off guard. So yesterday I saw a doctor here at Western and was prescribed some medication. Then last night my other ear got infected! Yuk. So right now I'm sitting in my computer science class listening to the teacher talking about Java and enjoying a headache. School still rocks though.
So, today there was a school shooting at Dawson College (a cegep) in Montreal. My cousin becky told me about this, apparently there are 2 people in critical condition, 4 in serious and the rest are okay. I'm in Ontario at university right now but it still hits close to home for me. Wow.
So, no activity lately.. that's because I've moved into the University of Western Ontario and have been enjoying frosh week! It's a "dry" week so there's a bit of fun sucked out there (I'm from Quebec and the drinking age there is 18, here in Ontario it's 19) but I will definetely find a way to get drunk soon. You might call me an alchoholist, hence my participation in the Facebook group: "I'm an Alcoholist, Not an Alcoholic. I go to Western and Here Drinking is a Science!".
Okay, well, enough joking around. I'm having lot's of fun and things should cool down by Sunday. I'll try to think of some interesting programming thing to write about then.
Until then..
Wooooooooooo!
I'm leaving in a few minutes for Toronto. I will stay in Toronto overnight then on Sunday I'm going to the University of Western Ontario to move in and start frosh week. Woo!
