This week had our weekly class meeting and we all decided it was time to get a working version of the iPad application we have all been working on. Even if it was the basic framework, it was just something that we could deploy and for Tim and others at the Worcester Art Museum to view.

That was one of our goals this week was to get the puzzle demo up on GitHub for the development branch. A working demo is now deployed on the development branch as of this morning. We where having difficulty this week trying to get the puzzle activity application to work. We before had a demo that would allow the user to move puzzle pieces as the shape of squares around, but Tim was looking for the actual jigsaw piece type. So we had to go back to the drawing board and figure out how this could be done. I found online there was a tool called kinetic.js which allowed you to move pieces around by creating kinetic.shapes, objects, etc. I thought it was a very cool tool. If any of you want to look at it for future projects down the road or just for fun to learn here is the link:

http://www.html5canvastutorials.com/kineticjs/html5-canvas-drag-and-drop-tutorial/

We then found someone had an open source code that allowed the user to give it a image and it would separate them into many puzzle pieces that you could move. Unforutnatly we tried giving this a shot and every time the image would come out black. We asked another student in the class and they looked at it over night and still had no luck to get that to work. So this was then when we said we cannot use Kinetic.js any longer. Jason who looked at our puzzle activity code, pointed us to another open source code from Google that had everything we where exactly looking for. The link that he had sent out to us, I actually came across along my way at the beginning of researching how to create puzzles with HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. This one was using all of theses languages along with the jQuery UI tool. I think that was the key feature that we where missing. I had a feeling we where going to need to use jQuery at some point for this.

So after looking at the link for the open source code again, we had a working puzzle activity that can now be viewed by everyone on the CS401 Repository Development branch. Here is an screenshot of the layout:

It allows the user to move pieces all around on the screen, has a timer which I wanted to implement into the original first Demo we showed and tells you the number of movements. Along with bringing a nice frame around the puzzle. It has the snap feature so when the piece is in the correct location the frame lights up green and then snaps the piece there and you can move on to the next one.

That is all for this week. Looking forward to seeing this first deployment with everyone’s work together.

From the blog rwilliams5262 » cs-wsu by rwilliams5262 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Hello,

No matter how much time you have put into a project, is good to keep an open mind about going back to the drawing board and making changes. There are always new ideas, new improvements, new and exiting add ons.  I say this because, during the first part of the semester, there has been, at times, a little bit of miscommunication  with our client, and thus some of our ideas have probably not gone totally in the right direction. Well, I guess that is part of any software development process and definitively a part of the learning process as well; fortunately is still early in the semester and there should be plenty of time to correct for this.

Last week, our clients suggested they would like to have a brief intro to the coloring book and the puzzle sections. The intro would say something like “These sculptures are white but back in the day they used to have colors. Help us color these”. In response to that, one idea is to have a small slideshow of floating images and a brief legend next to them. Once the user wants to start coloring, there is a button that takes to the main coloring app.

The slideshow and the link to the page are working now, and the idea could be adopted in the coloring app or maybe adapted somewhere else in the main program, in any case, it can be further stylized with css. The images here provided are just  snapshots but the code will be available hopefully soon in the CS401 server.

Until next week.

Beto

From the blog betoluna » CS WSU by betoluna1 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

I figured I should post an update about this. Whether it was suppose to work or not, I was able to get onto the server at home using the “209.xxx.xxx.xxx” address. I blanked it out since I’m not sure if that should be public knowledge yet?

Two things I would like to say. firstly, the Jquery slide functions DO work on the ipad. Their were no issues there. The only thing as of now with it is you can’t drag. It is more of a swipe which in turn moves the screen, instead of a dragging and scrolling type deal. I’ll try and see what I can do about this, if anything. But it is functional as of now.  The second issue that is probably a main function in KioskPro, is that you can swipe up and down the page. As in you can pull a page up and see underneath it (the rubber band like effect). This is probably what KioskPro fixes, I just haven’t heard anyone mention it.

Now that we know Jquery works, I’m hoping the rest of the teams can get their things up on GitHub. I’d like to do some testing on my ipad! Best of luck!

From the blog Sean » cs-wsu by shorton1 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

I figured I should post an update about this. Whether it was suppose to work or not, I was able to get onto the server at home using the “209.xxx.xxx.xxx” address. I blanked it out since I’m not sure if that should be public knowledge yet?

Two things I would like to say. firstly, the Jquery slide functions DO work on the ipad. Their were no issues there. The only thing as of now with it is you can’t drag. It is more of a swipe which in turn moves the screen, instead of a dragging and scrolling type deal. I’ll try and see what I can do about this, if anything. But it is functional as of now.  The second issue that is probably a main function in KioskPro, is that you can swipe up and down the page. As in you can pull a page up and see underneath it (the rubber band like effect). This is probably what KioskPro fixes, I just haven’t heard anyone mention it.

Now that we know Jquery works, I’m hoping the rest of the teams can get their things up on GitHub. I’d like to do some testing on my ipad! Best of luck!

From the blog Sean » cs-wsu by shorton1 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

For the past fews weeks, beside learning more about Javascript, HTML and CSS myself, i and my group was doing researches on how to save data on the local machine within the web browser. We came to the decision that we were going to use a hosted server to save data because although we can store data inside web browsers, we can not access them. By using a hosted server and Kiosk, we can save data on the hosted server (of course it is accessible) and also provide the copy of the data to the local machine (so it wouldn’t cause any problem if the connection between the machines and the hosted server is lost). 

While my group is waiting for the server provided, i and Sompop formed a team working on the screen saver for WAM project. The way it works is that when the iPads are in idle status, the screen saver will be activated. When a user comes and touch the screen, the screen saver will be deactivated and the homepage will pop up.

For the last week, i was searching around and found some sources of information on how to make the screen saver. I’m still not clear on how to make the screen saver, except some ideas of where possibly to begin. Here are what i found: 

Create screensaver using jquery | jquery screensaver

http://www.getallfix.com/2012/08/create-screensaver-using-jquery-jquery-screensaver/

How to Create A JavaScript Web Page Screen Saver

http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/gr/column7/index.html

Create Your Own Web-based Screensaver

http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2005/08/create-your-own-web-based-screensaver.

I’ll have what i got more organized and try to have something to show class next week.

From the blog daunguyen10's Blog » CS-WSU by daunguyen10 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Not much was done on my part during the past week, I mostly just played the waiting game while our WSU IT guys configure the server for us, since we need that in order to progress further. Originally my group had planned on doing it ourselves since most of us have a good amount of experience using VMWare, but that just wasn’t to be. More coming once we get the server!

From the blog CS:401 » CS-WSU by dcarlin2013 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

So we finally were able to have a class meeting after the 2 weeks of having to meet on IRC chat due to snow storm and no school. It gave us the chance to get a better view where everyone stands. We got a chance to show Tim a working demo of the puzzle application. He liked some of the features, but was hoping for the pieces to be jigsaw shaped instead of having pieces that were shaped as squares and move those around. So this week has been trying to figure out a way to creates pieces in that shape. I found a couple ideas that might work. There is a tool out there called kinetic.js which allows us to create drag able and moveable pieces. I found that somebody had created a puzzle with this feature and was looking at his code to get an idea how we could do this. We would have to change the code we have so far to get this to work. I still have had no luck with getting this up and running. I also was looking online finding ways to do it with jQuery UI and javascript. I have no experience working with jQuery tools. So I think I would need some help within that area to get this going. Overall a decent week but kind of stressful due to not knowing how to implement some of theses tools and hope for a working demo in the end. I will be bringing this up in our discussion tomorrow during class.

From the blog rwilliams5262 » cs-wsu by rwilliams5262 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Hello again.

Not so much a busy week as much as a busy weekend, as far as the drawing app goes.  I did not have a single free moment to work on it during the week with the middle of the term upon us.  However last night, or should I say yesterday at about 2pm I began working on the app again and I did not stop until around 2:30am the following day only to sleep five hours and then continue working.  So despite hold backs throughout the week I have made some significant improvements to the drawing app. Oh and all the code is on GitHub at https://github.com/JasonHintlian/WArtMuseumColor  I will work this week to get this added as a branch of of our 401Project on GitHub, hopefully with all the  comments too.

There have been some major advancements in the User Interface UI this week including new cool buttons a new size selection menu and a few new ancient approved colors from the Worcester Art Museum WAM.  On top of that I have corrected the issue of thumbnails squishing which was nothing more than a quick change to some css and added a few arrows to symbolize a scrolling option.  I now that the WAM would like the button to disappear when the scroll reaches its end like many iOS application but that may not be so easy to do in a web application.  It will certainly be a topic for research this week.

So too the implementation.  First the new buttons just set there background to the current color, like the old color button but now they are overlaid with a partially transparent image.  This is achieved in css by setting the background to the desired image.  I creates the illusion of a wet paint brush and bubble styled sizes.  Next I built a new pop up canvas to hold the different sizes.  I chose this method as opposed to size buttons linked through html because it allows the user to easily expand or hide the menu.  In addition we can reference the x and y coordinates of a mouse-down event in order to set the size based on the position of our mouse.  There are six images that make up the size menu one permanent partially transparent background  and five different pointer images drawn with respect to the current size.  Though I am quite certain I can reduce this down to one pointer image and then just redraw it were necessary that will have to wait till next week.

The third new change this week is simply the proper sizing of the coloring images and  fe extra colors.  In addition I did add a few arrows to the scroll menu, but they have no functionality other than being a visual queue to the user that “this area can scroll”.  I would certainly like to add some functionality to those buttons so I will look into that this week.  Other than that all our coloring images are now the official images form WAM. That was a quick change, I did resize the images for the thumbnails but that should not make any difference visually but it goes a long way toward improving the smoothness of scrolling.

Overall this weeks effort was geared towards creating the UI that WAM wants so hopefully they approve of the newer buttons and the size selection menu.  There new set of colors made a nice addition to the app but I would like to find a copy of photoshop we can “legally” use to make a better looking color wheel with ultimately more color and shades to select.  So this weeks agenda will most likely be focused on scrolling and a better color wheel as well as creating a branch off of our 401Project repository.  Should all the UI expectations be met early enough I would also like to work on  a sub-pixel curve algorithm to create a smoother painting experience, but we will see how it goes.

Anyway till next time.

Jason

From the blog jasonhintlian » cs-wsu by jasonhintlian and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.