working on the paper. presentation done.

We presented our Facebook application yesterday.  It’s a wonderful feeling to have that under our belt.  Now, we are currently in the CSB 115 lab writing out our paper.

My part is:

1.  Intro (inspiration, description)

2. Method (artistic- photoshop, illustrator)

3.  Discussion (problems, solutions)

4.  Conclusion (what we learned, future)

The only difficulty is getting started…

Our goal is to have it done by Friday so we can have a relaxing weekend studying for our OTHER finals.  =)

Overall, I feel very satisfied with this class’s project.  I had the best possible group.  We were efficient.  I think it was a wonderful experience to have all of us striving for the same goal, taking our own initiatives and opportunities.  We really supported one another.  When one of us couldn’t find the code, another would find it.  It was an optimal blend of tasks and skills.

I would say that Jill and Jen were very good at finding information in google searches and looking on the facebook wiki.  i am horrible at finding things.  it’s as if the internet was a maze that purposely shifted to keep me at a  loss.  But for them, it appears on their first search.  It’s amazing.

Though i would have liked to do a lot more programming, I found myself attracted to the visual aesthetics of the application which did swallow up a lot of time.  Figuring out how to change colors on Photoshop was a lot more difficult than I thought.  Many revisions, trial and error…

As for the code, i think the biggest contribution i gave was the CSS styling of the lids.  I also helped clean up the code at the end with Jill.  But the functions for tabs and invitations and profile boxes were mostly Jill and Jen’s doing.  I think Jen did the profile box.  Jill did the invitations.  And both of them found the functions for tabs and we all tweaked them around.

I revamped the appearance of the presentation while Jen and Jill input the content.  I uploaded images into it… We really were a team.  It was very good.

week 9 and counting…

Our last programming meeting was yesterday at our usual time, Wednesday 4-8pm.

There was a great feeling of triumph and accomplishment.  “finish strong!” we would say.  And i really feel like we’re on a good stretch towards the finish line.

We finished programming.  Our wonderful Jen Santos did away with the last CSS error that was showing up on Facebook.  I added some more buttons/caps to even out the list.  And we spent the last hour of our meeting looking up fun facts and enjoying ourselves with the ridiculous randomness in the world.

We are planning on meeting up tomorrow, Friday at 9am to figure out and delegate the paper.  Jen and Jill had already formulated a basic outline containing, Intro, Methods, Discussion and Results.

one thing i realized was that i really forgot the specifics of all the programming difficulties that really made life miserable.  We struggled so much but now, we don’t even remember what we struggled with because it’s solved in such neat little lines of code.

it’s amazing how much our code has shrunk.  there are like two lines of code for each major function and that’s it.  that’s all that’s needed.  while it’s refreshing, it also is kind of annoying because the process of getting to those few lines were hours and hours of experimenting and trying things out.

so a major lesson i learned was that one can always learn things online.  i don’t need a formal class or anything.  only motivation is necessary and required.

week 8 past- tabs, pages, and profile box

so the facebook app is coming together nicely.   of course, there’s always a few kinks but overall, i’m feeling very good with our progress.

the only thing we need to do now is:

1.  Allow the “Share” button coexist with the image that one posts to the profile box.

2.  Find a way of KEEPING the image one chooses- in the profile box regardless of logging out.

3.  Cleaning up our errors and CSS.

4.  Make sure that the “Share” button sends the correct image and URL.  find a way to record or capture what specific button one picks.

Man, it was seriously hit and miss.  Me and Jill were in the lab last Wednesday and we would change ONE thing at a time.  constantly saving our work because the order of the callbacks are still confusing.

If we move a certain callback, it has an error because it relies on another one to first define the function.  So, I pretty much spent a long time doing many different combinations of code lines and functions.  Can I put this code in this function?  What would happen?  All the buttons would disappear.  Then i’d put it back the way it was and try to take this other line of code and put it in another function, nothing happens.  So i leave it there and try to experiment with something else.  It’s pretty much getting a feel for what parts need to go where and ascertaining what its function is from the errors that they produce.

but yes, we’re almost done.  we’ll probably start our paper this week.  I think we’re almost right on schedule.

once more… appearance

we met once again this past week on wednesday in CSB 115.

the biggest problems of the day were how to create tabs that were functional.  honestly, i wasn’t involved too much in this.  Jill and Jen were the ones who were wrestling with that while i was trying to find a way to make the logo look nice.  i created a bunch of div tags- and at first, it really wasn’t working.  i couldn’t figure it out.  i thought perhaps div tags were not allowed or it was a different language- i actually don’t really know which language it belongs to.  is it just html or is it java or javascript or css?  but then, css is just a better way of organizing html… but at the same time, it does use its own language.

so i was a bit confused.  aimlessly looked around for examples, didn’t make sense.

and so i just did exactly what we did for previous assignments.  and i found that it really was a matter of a curly bracket enclosing the styles… that’s why throughout the assignment, the fonts didn’t change with the styles specified.  so after that, i just moved things around… put the logo at the top, put the tabs in the middle, then the finding friends search bar and then profile link.

another huge chunk of my time went into designing the logo and explanation.  it irks me a bit to see that the quality of the image is not that great.  it’s fuzzy.  but i suppose it will have to do.  i’ve been uploading images to my facebook photo album… so perhaps in the future, it will be able to randomly pick one out…

so now, my biggest obstacle is how to make a button template and chagne the worrds that appear- so that we don’t ahve to manually do everything.

some mockups

my main role so far has been in designing the appearance of the TopsBottom caps as well as sketching out a mock-up of what the final site would look like.  it’s amazing how time-consuming it can be.

here’s what i have so far:

      

enjoy…

just some thoughts about the project

today in class, some groups presented their projects.  ours (TopsBottom) will be presented on Thursday.  our group is meeting tomorrow again from 4-8pm at CSB 115.  most of that will be devoted to tinkering with Facebook again.

our wonderful Jill miraculously connected our code/server to Facebook.  i have yet to explore exactly what she did, though she sent an email specifying the steps she took and what we would need to take to understand the workings of it…

but now, all that we need to do is create the code, update the Facebook app and add features such as buttons and links and functions.  i say, “all that we need,” knowing that it will be much more complicated than we can ever imagine.  there are always bugs that crop up.  impossibly little and ridiculous bugs.  so at the end of our last meeting, last week wednesday, i started trying to create a nice, shiny, attractive lid bottom.  it was actually quite difficult.

i had forgotten how … limiting Adobe Photoshop can be.  I copied an image from Google images.  I opened it in Photoshop, got rid of the “Real Fact” on it… then adjusted the contrast, brightness, color and pixelation of the thing to make it look as appealing as possible.  That was okay.  It still took some grueling time but it was okay.

THEN, the problem of changing the colors of the outside edges of the lid bottom got difficult.  I remembered using Photoshop before and i KNOW that there’s a way to change the color to a shiny ruby red or a dark blue with the same luminance and reflecting qualities of the original.  However, I kept getting light, washed-out colors that were not satisfactory whatsoever.  The technique I used first of all was to copy only the area that I want the color to change, which was essentially a thin outer circle.  Then I could modify that into many reiterations with different colors and then paste it back onto the original and wallah!  I can have multiple colored lids.  Most of my time was swallowed up by simply erasing pixels to create a smooth curve or to blend the colors because it looked to jagged.  I’m sure there’s an Unsharp Mask or Sharpen tool that could easily solve my problems but I just can’t find it.  I suppose I can google it.

Look at our project page on the wiki for preliminary images:

 http://cogsci121.wetpaint.com/page/Images+and+Screenshots

1st meeting

we met last wednesday for the first time officially to get work done.

erik also met us in the CSB 115 lab.  we spent a lot of time figuring out our possibilities and whether changing the color scheme of facebook was do-able.  there was the talk about firefox plug-ins.

we all added the Developer application.  erik told us about AppJet which was a nice in-between platform between the user and Facebook.  but apparently, it’s unreliable.  so we created an application and spent a lot of time finding out what exactly we were going to do.

Jill came up with the idea of Snapple “Real Facts”.  you know, the caps always have random facts underneath the lid… and it seemed to really agree with what Facebook allows.  we also spent some time looking through all the applications that were already created.  my goodness!  there were soooo many!  previously, before the Snapple idea, there was the idea of doing a Guess Who? game but using your mutual friends as the faces.  we looked, and someone already made one!  it was so discouraging… we’d come up with a really exciting idea and we find out that our original brilliant brainchild was already done by someone else.

but we looked up Snapple and there weren’t any…  and then erik mentioned that there might be some copyright issues.  so we thought really hard… .pretty much the entire time when Jen finally came up with a winner.

TopsBottom. 
What’s under YOUR lid? 

hehe… get it?  the facts are on the bottom of the top of the bottle…

then today in class, we went over the Facebook API and it really helped.  it seemed … straightforward in a sense.  but i feel like when we actually try to do it, there will be so many confusing complications.  but anyway, no point in imagining future troubles.

we’re meeting tomorrow bright and early at 8am and working straight til 12 noon.  our goal is to get what Erik got done in class today, which was:

1.  Set up a box in the profile.
2.  Set up an Application page.
3.  Set up a link in the Side Nav.
4.  Display something in the News Feed.

the next week, we want to get some functionality, images, and understanding of Javascript, AJAX, and Facebook merging of the two…  see the schedule for our project page for more details…

Project preliminaries

so i met up with my group, which is me, Jill Iwasaki, and Jen Santos.  i really think we have a star team.  someone remarked how we were all very similar personalities, which is mainly: get it done as soon as possible and make it the best you can.

so i’m really excited.  we laid out a master schedule.  and we’re even going to meet on fridays at 8 in the morning!  needless to say, we are not going to have a problem meeting up and being consistent in getting things done.

our project is going to be making a facebook application that changes the colors and fonts of facebook.  it’s a simple concept but we think it’ll make a dramatic change.  because really, colors and visual appearance makes a big difference.  as it is, facebook looks like an office.  it has that drab, pale, drained boxy look.  and if we could just “spice” it up a bit, i’m sure everyone would appreciate it.

an exciting thought is that this is very usable.  we can see it really permeating the facebook culture.  we might even be going through our friends’ profiles and suddenly come across one that is colorful.  and we’ll know that “Hey!  That’s from us!”  it’s a sort of notoriety that is very possible.   and i suppose that’s the power of these laymen-built applications.  anyone can make it if they have the right ideas.  people attract people.

so the biggest obstacle is figuring out exactly how on earth this is fused into the facebook platform.  a quick glance shows a strange and alien markup language.  it looked quite daunting.  it might help a lot if we got more sites on how to do this.  and hopefully, if the TA or professor is actually reading through this entire entry, they could maybe drop by the computer lab during our meeting times?  mainly wednesday 4-8, or even friday 8 am-12noon?  that’d be absolutely wonderful.