Staying low is darn hard

With Quiky I'm once again trapped in a feature loop. You know, you came up with something small and easy to make and during development you found many other (easy to make) features, that ultimately take much more time than the original idea combined. Or you figure out you gonna need this, and this, and that, so the original idea wasn't easy to make at all. That's what happened to me.

The PoC (Proof of Concept) was one evening stuff, but to make a product out of it it would need MUCH more grooming. Like settings form. I hate settings forms, it's always pain in the ass, because there's so much to do with uncertain result (of usage), but if you miss anything, you'll find an user, who will request that.

I had to stop coding, when I started playing with RichTextBox for WYSIWYG. I realized this is so much off the former road and that I need to go back to what's important.

Or you have a functionality on few lines of code, beautiful. But then it's time to sanitize all inputs, make some exception handling, value checking and other stuff, preventing the block of code from making unwanted stuff, suddenly you have a couple of new methods and from three lines are three screens of code.

Besides desktop app (which I can see I'll be reengineering in WPF, sooner or later) I made a nice progress with web app. Unfortunately I realized I'll have to redo the master code, because if I want the script to be cached, it can't show any content and therefore everything has to be made by XHR (AJAX). And it's harder I can't just delete the old code, because I want to preserve the original functionality for the improbable occasion some users may have JavaScript turned off. But I always took care of such events and this will be no exception.

Beacuse Quiky is getting serious, I registered a .net domain and created Facebook + Twitter pages.

Quiky

It has been a busy (and successful) month. First, I spent 2 fabulous weeks in Eastern and Southern Asia, exploring crown jewels of that area.

Right after that I attended Microsoft conference "MS Fest", where I've been introduced to MonoGame - an open source implementation of Microsoft XNA platform for easier game development. Because I have few games in mind for many years (and crashed'n'burned many times trying to make them come to life), I immediately tried to create the most ingenious of them. Thanks to wonderful YouTube tutorials from Coding Made Easy it was even easier.

I used Evernote to track all my ideas, but the lag between mobile and desktop sync was kind of frustrating. I had to deal with conflicts all the time and I got an idea to try (again) to make offline wiki editor for desktop. It supposed to be a tool for quick wiki editing, so I decided to call it "Quiky" (quick + wiki). To my surprise, quiky.net domain was available, so I took it.

For QetriX I created nice wiki parser in PHP in the past and it wasn't hard to convert the code into C#. I really love this language and .NET platform, I have to say.

Quiky for Windows

After about 12 hrs the core stuff was done and I really like what I did. I made few design flaws here and there, but it wasn't hard to get rid of them. Application can work with multiple wikis, represented by a directory. Each page has it's name as filename and it's contents in the text file. When saved, a HTML file is generated thanks to my parser, and displayed in WebBrowser component.

OK, that's the desktop part. What about a mobile app? Because I have an iPhone and I don't want to jailbreak it, it was a no-go for me. Therefore I decided to try HTML5 with localStorage for offline situations.

I started slow and low, but quickly expanded into much more complex script. My main target was low data footprint for network transfers and I like to deal with such stuff (optimizations for speed and resources).

My goal was to create a web version of that desktop app, plus extend functionalities of the app to communicate with the web app. Web app will be able to merge changes line-by-line (I already have a working solution in my drawer, it was one of my little challenges :)

It will need few more hours and hours of testing, but I can feel I'm on right track there. I'm still thinking how to tie it into QetriX and the same applies for the game. I want it all to be into single environment.

Oh and the game went south a little bit :) I decided to stay low and make something simple at first, than to add more stuff and make the desired game. Until then, do you remember Tunneler and Atomic Bomberman? ;-)

Making progress

I'm aware I didn't publish a post in more than a month, but during the time I was (and still em) cracking on the final cut of QetriX for PHP.

So far I have the object and database model, I have HTML template for all major components: page, table, navigation, time sheet, form with controls etc.

I also determined file uploads and messaging/notifications thru the system. Still need to implement user accounts though, that involves user groups, roles and privileges as well. There's no general configuration at the moment, but it's also designed.

I tried to recycle some code from the previous version, but It was mostly useless, which made me to realize, how different these versions actually are, even if I'm doing pretty much the same.

It takes quite a lot of time, because I'm developing many different things at once - to make it as similar as possible across different platforms and languages it's not only PHP and HTML, but also C# with WPF and Java with GWT and Spring. I heard many great stuff about Node.js, so I'm going to include it to the process as well.

Everything I figure out I immediately publish on Wiki.

Video from PowerPoint presentation

I've been looking for ages for some easy-to-use animation software, preferably vector, where I can design simple product videos or video tutorials. I tried many of them, but none of them was quite user friendly for a newbie.

I always liked drawing in Microsoft PowerPoint. Sometimes I created simple pictures or schemes in it, recently I drew a QetriX Logo. And then it hit me - why don't I use PowerPoint as an animator? It supports export presentation as WMV (Windows Media Video), even the final quality is not quite good and max output resolution is 960x720.

First step is to change slide size from default 4:3 to 16:9, using "Page Setup" button on a "Design" tab. If you do it later, the graphics will be deformed (following the change of an aspect ratio) and you'll have to change the scale of a size from 133 % back to 100 % (in Format Picture / Format Shape, then Size).

Second step is to define all objects in the slide. You can use various shapes, such as lines, circles, rectangles, polygons, arrows and much, much more. You can also add some text. It doesn't matter, if you choose Text Box or a Word Art - it's the same.

You can use more slides, or just a single one. I definitely recommend more slides, because sometimes on a single slide it gets quite complicated :)

Now add some (tasteful!) animations for shapes/pictures and transitions between slides as well. Less is more, don't get carried away and make something like 1990s website. You can make some gorgeous stuff, but you need to play with it a little.

I'm not going to describe the full process of creation, because there's tons of options and it's not that hard to figure it on your own.

You can add some music and/or narration as well.

When your job is done, choose "Create a video" in "Save & Send" option. Make sure quality is set to Computer & HD displays and click to "Create Video" button.

Now wait, until it's fully rendered and there you go.