David Phipps' Blog

Here is the final iteration 3 prototype for team whereismycaffeine? Our site is now both IE and firefox friendly and everything is working.

Site

Presentation

No on really liked the way that our photos page was working. Users didn't want to actually have to type in the tag names themselves so we scrapped the whole format and went in an entirely different direction. Instead of having a text box for users to type in our suggested tags, we actually linked the tags for users to click on and display the picures. It looks similar to the way that the AJACS team displayed their pictures in their infowindows. The thing I like about how we did it, is that the pictures are much larger since they are not confined to the small space of the infowindow like they are on the AJACS site. Hopefully this final correction makes all the naysayers happy and we move up in the rankings. This is my last blog! Everyone have a great summer and maybe we'll meet again on the job some day.

Well we solved our problem in IE. In the end we decided that why even do 3 tabs when all the info can easily fit onto 2. We burned up many hours trying to figure out why the info windows cut off in IE and then decided to just get rid of it. I styled the new info so it would be distiguished from the other info and it acually looks better with only two tabs. If you want to take a look at it now click here. Now everything is working in both IE, firefox and opera.

We've updated our site with the suggestions from other groups.

- Placed the city and state above the map so that users would be able to tell what part of the world they are looking at.

- We updated the info windows with new data, including the website and special features.

- We also aphabetized the side bar for easier lookups.

I found a great site for developers to find out more info about AJAX, XML, JSON, .net, php, and pretty much anything else you can think of. Specifically I was looking for more information on JSON. This site describes JSON as being clearer and has less redundancy than xml does. It goes on to say that JSON is ideal for data interchange since each instance of a JSON document describes only one object with nested object, arrays, strings, numbers, boolean values or null values. The biggest plus I came across is that you can parse JSON with one line which saves time and looks neater.

I came across an article that talks about the new generation of flat screen monitors that are coming out. They are ultra-thin because they do not need a back light for it to work. They are going to be call OLED because they are using organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology. Since they do not use a back light, they draw far less power and, and when powered from a battery, can operate longer on the same charge. They are currently making a few thousand 11" models to test the market later this year. Witnesses say that LCD and Plasma displays look faded compared to the OLED. The drawbacks are that they only last about 5,000 hours currently but they are already working with new materials that will extend it to 20,000 hours.

Here is my mini project iteration 3. And here is my presentation. I had to start from scratch to get rid of the innerHTML that I had in my previous two iterations. Here I am pulling an RSS feed from the msnc.com technology and science top stories. It has event handlers, uses the DOM and works in both firefox and IE. My previous iteration did not work in IE which probably had something to do with the innerHTML that was in the code. It's simple but it works and I got it done quicker than 3 minutes before it is due this time. Last time I spent way too many hours trying to get something fancy to work.

I would like to address Chidambaram's suggestions on how to make our site better. I hadn't thought about putting what city they are looking at above the map. The markers pretty much cover up the name of the city and I can see where someone would be confused initially. We are going to add Ypsi for the next iteration too so I'll add a header that indicates that this is the Ann Arbor/Ypsi area. We are still working on our IE issues. Thank you for the error information which will help troubleshoot. Having the sidebar on the bottom is better for people viewing our site with a low resolution. It keeps them from having to scroll side-to-side as well as up-down. The blank info tab is going to have the coffee shop website, live band, special features info. We didn't get that far before iteration 2 was due.

Jeff had a couple of suggestions that I will be using for next iteration. The suggestions that we will use will be to expand to Ypsilanti along with Ann Arbor. It's going to make our xml page a beast but at least the template is there to add more locations easily so there will be a lot of cut and paste. I had considered once before making the sidebar alphabetical and now that someone else has suggested it, I will go through with my earlier plan of doing that. We don't want the pictures in the infowindows because they are too small and having the flickr finder on the main page will only clutter it so it needs to stay separate. We don't want people to have to scroll around on the main page. I will be removing the tags section that displays before the pictures or I might move it to below the pictures, I haven't decided yet.

Dave offered some suggestions for iteration 3 that I would like to address. Unfortunately we can not automate the process of somebody adding a new location. One of our strengths is that the data provided is as correct as possible. To prevent someone from adding a hundred new markers to our map, the submissions need to be screened by us to verify that there is actually a coffee shop at the address they provide. We had considered putting the flickr photos on the main page in an infowindow, but there are not enough pictures that are specific to the businesses located in Ann Arbor. It didn't make sense to do it that way. Some of the coffee houses we found were so small, they did not even have a website. What do we do for those types of businesses that have no pictures? Our answer was to have it all on one page separate from the map.