A Positive TabletPC Note... & Cookies

Well, after a bad first week with my tablet, and several emergency restores... *crossing my fingers* *knocking on wood* I believe the problems have gone away on their own. We'll see if anything happens over the weekend... but anyhow, on to my project.

I've completed a basic write/read/parse cookie javascript functions that will be part of my design. At first I was going to implement already made routines, but I found it easier to understand if I wrote it myself so I did. It's not pretty, but a basic hard coded read/write/parse javascript code can be found at the following here.


*the html file will display status checkpoints including key points during the parsing, effectively showing how the parsing is being done at each step. If any problems occur down the line, this will help me debug it.

Next step is to write some functions that will create the CSS styles on the fly depending on values found in the cookie.

Btw, some research has found that there's some serious limitations to cookies that must be kept in mind. From what I've read, cookies have a 4KB limit (virtually unlimited), but are restricted to only 20 cookies per server/domain. Each variable is treated as a cookie. So my original plan to store each page in its own cookie "variable" would not have worked... which is why the entire site structure is being defined in one cookie "variable" and I'll be using the parser to read the data. The downside to this is that I'll be loading and parsing variables for the entire site that a certain page may not need, so it'll be wasting processing... although it's negligible, it's still bad coding, but it's the only workaround for a fully client-side design and the limitations of cookies.

CSS Customization

I'm aiming at having the following CSS fields customizable by the user/profile:
Modules
- Placement
- Text Color
- BG Color
- Title BG Color
- Title Text Color
- Collapsed/Extended
Background
- Gradient / Solid Colors
Masthead BG
- Special FX / Solid Colors
Menu
- Menu Order
- Menu BG Color
- Button BG
- Text Color
- Font Type
Page
- Left/Center/Right Align

Each page will have its own set of values that will define the settings. These values will be stored in a cookie file. Within this cookie file will be the entire configuration of the site. Defined variables would be along the lines of:
main_module_left_1=""
main_moedule_left_2=""
main_page_align=""
main_module_textcolor=""
and so on...

When the page loads, it will read these values and build the CSS stylesheet dynamically. At least, that's what the goal is.

Project Update

Well the good news is that I'm only 1.5 days behind instead of 2 days as of yesterday. So according to my schedule, I did 1.5 days worth of work today, now I just have to do the same thing for the next two days and I'll be on track.

Completed today:
- Design Rough Sketch of Layout
- Design Main Graphics
- Differentiate between CSS/Graphics on layout
- Layout default graphics

First version of final product:

I will definitely do some more work tonight and hopefully I can cut down my lag to only being only 1 day behind, but first I must fix my tablet. Yes, I broke the digitizer "writing" functionality of my tablet. I had originally installed Wacom's digitizer drivers to get more functionality out of the digitizer (ie. adjusting pressure senstivity) but I noticed that my screen calibration was off no matter how many times I ran it. Ultimately it seems that all tablets have an error range, but I believe in perfection, or at least close to it. So I figured I'll uninstall the Wacom drivers and see if the manufacturer's drivers calibrated better... well what do you know, after the uninstall it couldn't find the manufacturer's drivers and their not available online... heh... need to explore those CD's my tablet came with.

Project Progress

At this point, I'm officially 2 days behind.

What has been done:
- Select and order Amazon books
- Study IA
- Determine significant info/grouping of data
- Develop navigation outline
- Sketch rough draft of layout

Studying and deciding the focus and direction of the website, aside from the CSS customization goals, took longer than expected. One of the major obstacles that has come up is to implement more of push technology/strategy to the website in order to achieve its desired goal of being an active and successful resource for the students at the University. A major limitation is the lack of server-side technology such as PHP or any kind of CGI, so I'm just relying on pure client-side technology, mostly focusing on CSS and Javascript.

Tomorrow I will shut myself out and dedicate my entire time to getting back on schedule.

In the mean time, the following sitemap has been designed as the first step in restructuring the information to be found on the website:

New sitemap stats:
Number of levels: 3 (met initial goal)
Number of links: 20-25 (met initial goal)

The sitemap is not as specific as I would have liked it to be, but the details will come.

Schedule for the next three days

Major Milestones
- Create flat image concept
- Design default website
- Integrate CSS Customization
- Implement Flash Video Streaming

Monday 8/1/05
- Select and order Amazon books
- Finish studying information architecture
- Determine significant information
requirements/grouping
- Develop navigation outline
- Sketch rough draft of layout
Tuesday 8/2/05
- Develop first draft of CSS customization range
- Define graphics work from CSS work
- Design graphics
Wednesday 8/3/05
- Layout default graphics
- Code default CSS
- Develop test code of reading/writing to cookie file
- Develop test code of changing CSS dynamically

Video: Illusion

When we were given the assignment to shoot some video, I figured I would make it a bit more ellaborate and recruited Nico and Andrew to come up with something nifty in the short amount of time we had.

Here it is: If you have problems playing it, download the latest Quicktime 7 for Mac/Win. For Win, Quicktime 7 is in beta, but the original file was encoded with the latest codec...