BaconFriedRice.com

GitHub repository, view experiment here.

I’m “done” as much as a random experiment can be done.  I’ve got a parallax effect based on mouse movement – I still can’t really figure out the best movements to make it look more 3D – and clicking on the landscape moves you “forward”.

My images are kind of retarded looking :( The overall effect is kind of confusing; I think I tried to put too many levels, so there’s too much going on at once.  I originally had this really complicated background too, with mini trees and bushes and mushrooms, but it didn’t make sense for that to stay so still while the other levels were moving forward.  Also, I didn’t draw that many possible images, so when they’re randomly selected, they repeat a lot.  It looks cool when they move forward on click though.

Oh well!  It was a fun experiment and I learned a lot.  Most importantly that I’m really bad at anything graphics related and should leave that to other people.

Now, on to use what I’ve learned to redesign BaconFriedRice!

Repetition in the landscape

My 6 possible images

GitHub repository, progress so far.

I’ve got it to “move forward” when you click, and today I animated it.

Originally I was moving forward by just moving the images into the level in front of it.  The levels are stacked divs with different z-indexes, so when I just moved the images into their new levels on click, it was a bit jarring.

The jQuery class I was in had talked about animations, so I decided to try it.  Unfortunately, this meant I had to change how I was doing things.

I assume that all the images I use will be the same size, to make calculating positions easier.  For the two back levels, I had been using transform scale in the stylesheet to make the images smaller.  However, jQuery’s animate function can only animate properties with number values.  This meant that I couldn’t use, say, transform: scale(0.8).  However, I could animate the change in width and height – so I decided to do that instead.

Now, to animate it, I move all the existing images forward a div; the front-most level is moved into a temporary div on top of all the other ones.  When this is done, there is no visual difference.  Then, I fade out and remove the images in the front-most level, animate the change in width, height, and position of the second and third levels, and fade in a new back level.

If the mouse was moved during the animations, there was a bit of weird jerking movement, so I just made it so that the mousemove handler has no effect until the animations are done.  Good thing the jQuery animation functions can take callback functions!

I also changed the temporary images to different temporary images of just numbers.  It’s a bit easier to see the movement, but still kind of weird looking since they don’t have borders.  All that’s left is to draw the actual images though, and then it should be done!  Unless I find some weird bug or think of something else to add to it…

I’m taking a jQuery class right now through work, and it’s so cool.  You can do so much with it, and it’s so amazing to imagine how much work went into making it all cross-browser-compatible and easy for you to use.  It made me even more excited about playing around with this infinite parallax idea.

Here is the GitHub repository, and here is the progress so far.

I actually worked on it last week, but didn’t have a chance to write about it.  I can’t really remember what I did last week… but today I edited some of my JavaScript based on some jQuery tips I learned in the class, and also added movement to the three levels.  I don’t really know what kind of numbers to use to make it look 3D, so they’re kind of random.  I guess I’ll tweak them after I add the real images, as it’ll be easier to see then.

Next step is to do the “moving forward on click” part!  I learned some stuff today that makes it a lot easier than I thought it would be.  Excited to do that tomorrow!

More notes

I’ve always loved the cute little parallax effects GitHub has on their site.  The three I’m specifically talking about are their About, 404, and 500 pages.  Aren’t they adorable?  These are based on mouse position, where a lot of the common parallax effects seem to be based on the scroll bar.

I showed this to my friend Rosemary a few weeks ago, and she mentioned that it would be cool if it there was even more of a 3D effect by moving you “forward” infinitely, so that whenever you clicked, the front-most layer disappeared, the other layers moved forward, and there were new elements in the back layer.  It’s been on my mind since then, so I decided to play around with it and make it a quick little experiment.

So far it’s also been a good chance for me to become more familiar with GitHub (and Git!) and jQuery.  I’m putting the source for this experiment in this infinite-parallax GitHub repository, and you can see what I’ve done so far here: Infinite Parallax.

It isn’t much yet.  So far I’ve just made a test background image for the landscape, and had the image move around based on the mouse position.  When the mouse is at the top of the window, it shows the top of the background image, and as the mouse moves down, the background image moves up, so that when the mouse is at the bottom of the window, it shows the bottom of the background image.  The x-movement is kind of arbitrary right now, as I don’t know what the final image will be, and it will probably need to be tweaked based on that.

My scribbly notes

Clicking on the landscape just pops up a temporary alert I put in the function where I will be manipulating the different layers of images.  I still have my test numbers in there, so right now the landscape is showing mouseX, mouseY, and the x-position of the background image.

Next step I’m just going to put in three layers of images and play around with the x and y positions to see how far to move them for it to look okay.  Then after that, putting in random images with some random movement offsets on each, and finally removing/moving/adding layers on click!

The hardest thing will be deciding what to theme this experiment and what images to use.  I took a look at my Inspiration Pinterest board, and I think I’ve decided to use the color scheme in this pin.  Maybe a foresty theme with trees and bushes that have purple berries, and some grey bunnies or something.  Who knows!  Rosemary also showed me how to “draw” (…or rather, trace xP) in Illustrator, so I think I’ll sketch simple cute little images and trace them in Illustrator.

My first (messy) tracings!

I wanted to finally fix some lingering issues with Renoki and get the final version up on the market. This will be version 4.0 and I believe that this will be my final version for now.

I have been struggling with tablet resolutions for a while now. When I was first designing the graphics, I made a stupid decision and created them for a 480×854 resolution, because I thought that would be the largest resolution I would support. Unfortunately, a bunch of other phones came out with enormous resolutions (1280×720) and I realized that my app was still showing up for tablets.

Supporting Tablet Resolutions
One of the annoying things I ran into was that I set Renoki to have a minimum Android API level of 7 (froyo). This means that any device with froyo or newer can download it. Given that ~25% of phones are still running froyo (, I felt this was a good decision to make. Unfortunately, if you do not want to support tablet resolutions, there is no way to make your app not show up,). There are some things in the Android Manifest you can do (support-screens, compatible-screens) but the useful mechanism were not introduced until API level 9. This means it is IMPOSSIBLE to prevent a level 7 app from appearing on tablets.

The next best thing I could do is run the app in screen compatibility mode. What this would do is create the smaller resolution game in the middle of the screen and surround it with a black border for all the unused pixels. While this doesn’t offer a full experience, it would at least prevent the game from crashing. The problem was that the view the game was in was still the entire screen size (e.g. 1280×720), but I was only drawing within my original 960×540. I had a few things based on the screen width which were screwed up by this, and images I had go “offscreen” didn’t really go offscreen and instead just drew on the black border. It was in general a very screwed up thing.

The solution I realized was to hardcode my base view to a specific height and width, and use the view width to do my calculations. This basically solved all my problems and allowed it to run correctly on any resolution.

My app has 1 FrameLayout (@id=frameLayout) that contains a single custom SurfaceView. By creating a set of LayoutParams and setting the width, height, and gravity, I made that root FrameLayout conform to the size I wanted. Then, my app always thinks it is running on the correct resolution, regardless of the actual device resolution. I also made sure to multiply by the pixel density “dip” to make sure it works on all devices.

So now I have an app that “works” on all resolutions, although it is extra tiny on big tablets. However, this is good enough for me and I definitely don’t want to spend the time creating all the images for this game at bigger resolutions.

I got my new book HTML&CSS in the mail yesterday.  It’s a very basic introduction to HTML and CSS, but I got it even though I know both because it is absolutely gorgeous.  I wish more books taught like this – I’ve actually been searching for more books on web design like this.

Anyway, as I started reading through it, I realized that a lot of HTML I thought I knew is obsolete.  For instance, apparently using <a name=”blah” /> is now obsolete in HTML5, and you should instead specify anchors for links with id attributes.  I didn’t even know you could specify anchors with id!  At that point I realized that my HTML is way outdated.

Why?  Because the HTML I know is what I taught myself from a book in 4th grade.  After this one semi-structured introduction to HTML, everything else I picked up as I needed it, and I definitely haven’t been keeping up with new specifications.  I have a very haphazard knowledge of HTML, with a lot of gaps.  Same with CSS – I don’t think I even bothered with CSS for years because that intro book never mentioned it.  I’ve definitely been able to get by with what I know, but I think it’s time for a more structured refresher – and to get myself updated to 2012!

I was surprised to find that I actually had that book from 1998 (14 years ago!) in my bookshelf.  I must have missed it when I was unpacking – otherwise I would have reminisced over it for hours.  Take a look at how awful it looks:

I got it from a book order in 4th grade.  Remember those?  I was always so excited to pick out new books to get.  I have no idea what possessed me to get this book, but I’m glad I did, because I’m pretty sure this book is the reason I’m a software engineer today.

Here’s the back cover.  I cringe just looking at that example site.

I’ve already checked, that website doesn’t exist any more.

I’ve been on a book-buying kick lately, mostly about web design.  I figure the money will be worth it in the long run since I’ll be learning something I have a lot of interest in, and I haven’t sat down and read for a long time.  I still have five or so fiction books in my bookshelf that I haven’t gotten to, but at this point in time I’m more interested in learning.  And reading is dying out!  Why don’t people relax and just read any more?  That used to be all I did when I was little.  Now instead of staying up really late reading I stay up really late browsing the Internet.

The HTML&CSS book is so pretty.

Even when they show the example pages that correspond with each code snippet, they don’t just show the page – they display them on different monitors in beautifully decorated rooms.  I’ve even been getting some book suggestions from the books they show in the background.

I also got Above The Fold a few days ago.  It’s also really pretty, and there’s a lot of fascinating background in it.  I never thought about the fact that tabbed browsing was based on file folders, although it seems obvious now that I know.  It talks about the structure of web pages, but it shows a lot of them full-length.  Web pages look so different when you look at them full-length versus the height of your browser.  They feel so much more cluttered to me when I see them full-screen – but then I guess that’s the whole reason the “fold” is important!

I’d also been reading The Design of Everyday Things before I got into this big book kick, because my user experience friend recommended it.  Before I started work on my current team I never thought about user experience at all – but now it seems so important.  I guess if I don’t have to think about the experience of doing something while I’m doing it, it was probably designed well enough that it was natural and made sense.  On the other hand, the book says that when something goes wrong, people tend to blame themselves rather than bad design.  I don’t think I believe that 100%, because some people are just retarded, but if the majority of people have difficulties, something is probably wrong.

Another book I recently bought but haven’t started is a little different… I got I Am Jackie Chan, for no reason other than that Jackie Chan is awesome.  Sadly, I had to get a used book because they apparently don’t print it any more.

I’ve decided to set aside a specific amount of money each month for my “splurgy” purchases, and these books fall into them.  I’ve already ordered Responsive Web Design – now that people browse from phones so much a responsive site is pretty much expected.  Here are some other books I’ve decided to buy so far, in the order I want to get them:

• The Printed Smashing Books Bundle (#1 + #2) – I only wish the second one wasn’t hardcover, I prefer softcover books.
• Introducing HTML5 – I actually saw this in the background in the HTML&CSS book.  I want to get up-to-date on all the new stuff in HTML5.
• HTML5 & CSS3 For Web Designers Bundle – To get more familiar with both, but with more emphasis on design
• DOM Scripting – To fill in the gaps of my haphazard JavaScript knowledge
• jQuery: Novice to Ninja – To learn jQuery for real, not all this haphazard self-instruction!  Although I’ve already had to teach myself some jQuery… I wanted to get a clean start :(
• Undercover User Experience Design – Learn more about user experience
• Designing For Emotion & Mobile First Bundle – Just more useful knowledge.

After I read more I’m going to stop being lazy and actually design BaconFriedRice instead of using pre-made templates.  Yes, I’ve been saying that for a long time, but now that I’m reading all these I want to do it right.  I’m excited to get to that point!  Now off to read some more!

I want to do this experiment right, so rather than jump right in I’ve decided to do a lot of research and planning before hand.  I’ve also decided to review JavaScript and learn Node.js “correctly” by reading introductions and tutorials.

But two things before I begin:

1. I need a name for the project!  It’s bothering me that I don’t have one, and I don’t want to go through the bother of going with a temporary name and renaming everything afterward.  Any ideas?  It needs to describe the “resource blog” idea, but also maybe be cute and easy to remember.  These are some random thoughts I’ve jotted down:
• bacon links?
• piggy links?
• library?
• repository?
• reference?
• collection?
• anthology?
• compilation?
2. I want to be organized, so I’ve started a notebook for this project.  I write notes on introductions/tutorials in it, and also just jot down any thoughts I have.  I like writing things down on paper rather than just typing them, because it helps force me to think through it – when I type, sometimes I type so fast I can’t even think fast enough to keep up.  I also discovered Trello, this awesome “collaboration tool” that’s perfect for organizing a project, especially projects with multiple people.  I found it when I was looking through code52 about their most recent project.  Here is their Trello board for their project Samurai.  It’s awesome – there are lists of different types of tasks, and you put cards in the lists, which represent tasks.  The cards can have notes, comments, and checklists, and can be labeled with categories and even have people assigned to them!  Here is my Trello board for my experiment.  I’ve just started putting it together so I’ll definitely be expanding it.  Comments on the cards are welcome :)  Also I feel silly assigning myself to everything, but when I finish things it makes me feel like I’ve accomplished a lot!

Here’s a table of contents again:

Research
Review
Learning

Research

First I expanded my feature list so I could figure out what I would need to do.  Here is what I have in my notebook:

• Log in to post
• Only me for now
• Goes to admin center – like the WordPress admin page
• Add/edit/delete resources
• Save versions eventually?
• Save drafts
• Moderate comments
• For posts:
• Create/select category (can only belong to a single category)
• Add tags
• Title
• URL
• Note
• Rating
• In the future, expanding for more users
• Admin can manage users
• Manage user profile – name, email, picture, URL, bio, etc.
• Add/edit/delete own posts
• Versions?
• Drafts
• Same as above for posts
• Permissions model – everyone sees same functionality but can only act based on permissions
• View resources
• Summary view and full view
• Summary view – multiple summary views on a page, “more” link will show full view
• Title
• URL
• Snippet of note
• Rating
• Category
• Tags
• Number of comments
• Votes with ability to vote (like Reddit)
• Full view – each resource on a single page
• Title
• URL
• Note
• Rating
• Category
• Tags
• Votes with ability to vote
• All comments
• Name
• URL/email
• Comment
• Add comment
• Name
• URL/email
• Comment
• Recaptcha
• Default view
• Display resources by time, most recent first
• Show each resource in summary view
• Category view
• All on one page
• Alphabetical categories
• Show in category tree
• Show minimized by default, can maximize to see summary view
• By category
• Same format as all on one page except each page is for each outmost category (subcategories don’t get own page)
• Can sort by date, rating, votes
• By tags (user search by tag)
• Show summary view of results, by date as default
• Can sort by date, rating, votes
• Minimized by default, maximize to see summary view
• By highest rated (my rating)
• Same format as tags view
• By highest voted (by visitors)
• Same format as tags view
• Index page
• Default view of resources
• Tag cloud
• Short list of highest rated with “more” link
• Short list of highest voted with “more” link
• Link to page with different category views
• Search bar for tags
• About link
• Contact link

Now that I’ve typed it out, I realized that there may be too many different views of a single resource – full view, summary view, and minimized view.  I need to think more on that.  I figured that showing the full view of every resource would be too much information if it wasn’t the index page so I think there should be at least two views, but it may not be necessary for both a summary view and a minimized view.  I may get rid of the minimized view, otherwise someone would have to first expand the minimized view, and then click “more” on the summary view to see the full view.

I’ve also come up with a list of tools/frameworks that I think I’ll need for the project.  I did quite a bit of research on the best tool for each function, and I think this is the finalized list.  They’re in no particular order under each category:

• The general code – server and client side
• Node.js – obviously
• Express – web development framework
• Jade – template engine
• Stylus – CSS pre-processor
• nodeQuery – DOM manipulation framework with JQuery methods
• everyauth – authentication and authorization
• Async – utility module for asynchronous code
• node-UUID – generate UUIDs
• node-recaptcha – renders and verifies Recaptcha captchas
• Database
• MongoDB – document-oriented NoSQL database system
• Mongoose – MongoDB object modeling tool
• Testing and debugging
• Vows – asynchronous behavior driven development
• should – assertion library
• Node Inspector – debugger interface
• nodemon – development monitor script
• JSLint – static code analysis
• node-jslint – JSLint from command line
• Deployment
• Forever – tool to ensure a script runs forever
• Logging
• winston – multi-transport asynchronous logging library
• Documentation
• NDoc – documentation generator

I’ve always had this really weird attitude towards using external tools.  On one hand, I feel like doing everything myself is “better” in terms of me being a programmer and not being lazy.  But at the same time I guess it’s not lazy, it’s being resourceful and using what’s already out there.  I never know how I feel about it… I still get conflicted about it all the time.  But I’ve got this huge list now, so I’ll have to deal with it!

There are still some things I need to consider for the project, and need to do research on – I won’t fully go into them here but they’re on the Node.js Experiment Trello board.

Review

Since all my JavaScript is self-taught, and JavaScript is kind of important to Node.js, I decided to fill myself in by following a introduction tutorial.  I also want to learn to use Node.js the “right” way, so I am following an introduction tutorial for that too.  I decided on Felix’s Node.js Beginners Guide, which was suggested by a lot of people when I was researching best Node.js tutorials.  And as luck had it, that tutorial suggested Eloquent JavaScript as a JavaScript tutorial, and it had good reviews when I researched it, so I’ve decided to follow that for my JavaScript review.

I’m up to chapter 9 in Eloquent JavaScript and it’s been great for me so far, as someone who already has programming background in other languages and wants to just pick up the little nuances about JavaScript (it still throws me off that you don’t have to tell a variable what kind of variable it is.  And null vs undefined?  == vs. ===?  Closures?!  Prototypes?!?!)  However I think that as an introduction for someone who has never programmed before, it’s kind of a mess.  It doesn’t explain things very clearly and kind of brushes over some programming concepts as “magic”.  I had to do some outside research about closures and prototypes, and I still don’t fully understand them.  They also try to shove too much down your throat – they had an entire chapter that was based around the concept of graphs but never explained graphs and just sort of threw code at you.  I love the in-browser console though; it’s really easy to follow along with their code samples and edit it myself.  Try out the in-browser console – it’s awesome.  Overall I think it was a good choice.  Still need the finish taking notes on the last few chapters though.

I’m also playing around with Codecademy to keep filling in any knowledge gaps I have.  It’s neat, I like the tutorial format, with the skeleton code in the editor and the console to run it.

After that I’m going to take notes on Felix’s Node.js Beginners Guide.  Then I’ll see what other knowledge I may be lacking and research some more good tutorials.

Learning

I guess I kind of already covered this with Felix’s Node.js Beginners Guide.  But I’m also going to need to become familiar with all of the tools and frameworks I’ve chosen to use in the experiment, so I think that I will have to do some reading on each of those and code through some small sample projects for each of them, before I try to use them all together.  I still need to come up with a plan for that – not sure what order I’ll be going in, as the list of tools and frameworks above are in random order.  I wonder if it’s better to familiarize myself with testing tools first so that I can use them while I learn the others?

Anyway, it’s late now, so I’m going to bed.  Goodnight!

What kind of skills do I need to call myself a web developer? 5 answers on Quora

What kind of skills do I need to call myself a web developer?

(Just testing out this share-to-Wordpress feature in Quora)

Edit: Well that’s kind of annoying.  It posts to Uncategorized with no tags.  Have to change them myself later.

I’ve decided that my technical project will revolve around Node.js.  And now I will start my long convoluted story about how I came up with my project…  I guess I will provide a table of contents again since I tend to ramble a lot :)

The back story
The idea
The goals
Future considerations
The plan

(I just want to say here that I accidentally deleted a whole bunch of stuff I wrote and WordPress didn’t auto-save a draft before it happened so now I am an extra sad panda.)

The back story

At work, I was working with part of our team in China, and right before the winter vacation they gave us the code to a web socket server in Node.  I’ve always been interested in web technologies – I taught myself HTML from a book in fourth grade and self-taught whatever PHP I needed in middle school for my embarrassing (and luckily now-nonexistent) EatenCheez.com – but I’ve never had any formal training.  After I moved to Virginia in high school, I stopped playing around with HTML and PHP in my free time, and since I focused on embedded systems in college, I don’t really have any idea what Node was.  I was curious, so I looked into it, and it’s so fascinating!  A web server written in 6 lines of code?  Awesome!

(Side note Easter egg – I found a snapshot of EatenCheez.com from 2003.  I don’t know what happened to the formatting but I thought it was a funny reminder of way back when.  Cliques, rings and clubs?  Guestbooks?!  At least this version of EatenCheez.com didn’t have a splash page with the obligatory hit counter!)

I started looking into Node, reading about what it’s best used for and following some cool tutorials.  I even installed Ubuntu on my Windows desktop just to be able to play with Node easier.  There are some really cool tutorials and projects out there – such as this Scrabble MMO written in 48 hours, this Twitter clone, or this awesome phone-controlled multi-player browser game written by an intern (try it out, it’s neat and cleaned up my rusty French) – but following someone else’s tutorial isn’t the same as creating your own project.  So I kept looking into Node to see if I could get any inspiration.

The thing that ended up really inspiring me ended up being… my laziness.  When I’m bored, I will lounge around on the couch or on the bed browsing the internet on my phone.  However, phone screens are tiny!  So when I find an interesting link, I will email it to myself to read later.  I like how mailing a link to myself from the iPhone will put the title of the page in the subject and the URL in the body of the email, because the title is obviously much more descriptive than the URL.  However, this means I end up with an inbox looking like this (I actually had 20 sitting in my inbox all day but I started moving them before I remembered to take a screenshot):

(I’ve been having insomnia for the last week, only getting 3-4 hours of sleep a day… hence the very early morning emails to myself)

I wanted to clean up my inbox, but I didn’t want to just have a big list of URLs and no descriptions, so I decided to just move things to a text document:

Now my email inbox was clean, but I had a list of titles and URLs on my desktop that I couldn’t access from anywhere else.  That is the same reason I don’t like to use browser bookmarks – I’ll put them there, then not be able to access them when I’m, say, at work and have some free time to read.  I started syncing my Chrome settings recently and they sync bookmarks, but I also use different browsers when I’m working, so I’d have random bookmarks saved across multiple browsers on multiple machines.  I tend to just avoid browser bookmarks in general.

On Saturday I was in the middle of this tutorial for a blogging system in Node when it hit me – I should make my own personal resource blog!

The idea

“Personal resource blog” doesn’t explain much.  I was formulating this idea while I was (yet again) lounging around on my phone, so my notes ended up like this:

Basically I want to make a “blog” where each post is a useful resource I found, so I guess a library of bookmarks.  Here is a cleaned up, better explained, and expanded version of this list of features I made.

• Log in – Since it is a personal blog, only I can log in and post
• Create category (can be nested) – Each resource is listed under a category, and there can be categories within categories
• Select category (tree view) – If I already have the category I need, just select it
• Input title, link, comments, tags – Each resource consists of a title, the link to the page, my comments about how useful I found it, and some tags.  I’ve also been thinking that maybe I could rate it.
• Submit – submit the resource, obviously
• Categories displayed in multiple ways (all on one page, each category level on one page, each resource on one page) – Now I’m getting into what the visitors see.  They could view all and see the resources listed under their categories, or they could select a category and view only those resources on a page.  I believe that in the last part I was referring to each resource having its own permanent link, so perhaps in the two previous views not all of the information would be shown, and the permanent page would be the full view.
• Search by tags – Users can search by the tags on each resource
• Tag cloud – Always nice to see a tag cloud
• Can add comments to each resource – User can comment on resources about what they think
• Can vote up – Or down too I guess.  Like stackoverflow or reddit
• Need to link to database – I guess this wasn’t really a feature, I was writing a note to myself that I need to look into different databases
• Sort by my score – Users can see what I liked best
• Sort by date – See when I added resources
• Sort by votes – See what everyone thinks is the best

Those are my ideas as of now.  I think that I could definitely expand it – for instance, if it actually works and I don’t code up a catastrophe maybe I could make it so users can make accounts to submit resources so it wouldn’t just be a personal library any more.  I don’t know, I’m mostly using this as an experiment to learn, so I don’t even know if people would be interested or find something like this useful.

The goals

The main goal is obviously to learn to use Node.  However as I was looking into it there are also many other useful tools to learn and utilize in the process.  Here are the ones I’ve discovered so far that I would have to learn, use, and become more familiar with (on top of polishing my very rough Javascript):

• Node.js - server-side Javascript
• Express - Node web framework
• Jade – Node HTML template engine
• Stylus – Node CSS template engine
• JQuery – popular Javascript library
• MongoDB or CouchDB (or both) – NoSQL database systems

And of course the end goal is to create my own CMS.

Future considerations

There are quite a few things I need to think some more about, which will come in future posts.

Full definition of features

I need to sit down and write down exactly what I want before I do any coding.  I think the list I have above is a good start, but I need to clean it up some more.

github and open source

I’ve never used github before, but I think that I should make use of it.  Of course this means that since I am cheap and will be using a free account, my project will need to be open source.  I want to learn more about the idea of open source and different open source licenses.  I’ve already done a bit of reading, and I think one thing I need to do is look at the different libraries and frameworks I’m using to see what open source licenses they use, then pick one for my project.  Or is it even that important?  I have no idea, I’ve never dealt with any of this before…

Hosting the project

BaconFriedRice is on a shared hosting plan on A Small Orange, so I probably shouldn’t put my app there since it’d be persistent.  I’ve been looking into different places I can host a Node app, but I realized there’s quite a bit to think about.  I want to start off writing it on my machine, then deploy it on some free hosting as I test it.  The only problem is that the databases for free hosting are either non-existent or very small, and there are also limited options – for instance, I was looking at Cloudnode, but they only use CouchDB (and you only get 25MB), while it seems like more people use MongoDB.  But then, if all goes well and I actually write this thing, maybe I would just pay for hosting in the future. It’s hard to say right now… but I’ve also been looking into Nodester, dotCloud, Webbynode, Joyent Cloud Services, and Cure.  Also database hosting at MongoHQ and Cloudant.

Picking a database

Like I mentioned, the two options I’ve been looking at are MongoDB and CouchDB.  They seem to be the most popular for Node.  However it really depends on where I end up hosting.  I actually think that after I finish the blog tutorial with MongoDB, I’ll do this blog tutorial with CouchDB and see which I like using better.  That’s probably a better way to decide after all!

Picking a name

This is my top priority right now.  I need a name for my project!

The plan

1. Finish the MongoDB blog tutorial
2. Do the CouchDB blog tutorial
3. Pick a name!
4. Flush out the features and put them in order to add one by one
5. Pick a database
6. Pick a free hosting to start with
7. Start coding!
8. Utilize github
9. Keep coding
10. Figure out the whole open source thing
11. Don’t stop coding
12. Sleep a bit
13. Code some more
14. If it actually works… Move it to paid hosting with more space!
15. Celebrate

Sorry for the very long read :) Now it’s time for bed!

Renoki has been on the market for a while and I’ve gotten a lot of feedback on the game. Here are some of the improvements I’ve made so far.

Improving the Shop

People didn’t know what the items did. In particular, nobody had any idea what the wings did (which is pretty understandable). Anyway, I added a pop up box when you select the item and you have to press “BUY” in order to actually make the purchase. The pop up box has a short description of what the item does, hopefully eliminating all question.

Improving StartScreens

Having the informative picture on the start screen tended to be completely ignored. I’m not sure if it’s because the picture itself is unintuitive, or people don’t even realize that it has information on it. Anyway, I added some text to the start screens to make it painfully obvious what you are supposed to do. I really wanted to avoid using text but I couldn’t see any better way of doing it with the limited space I had.

Improving Number Monsters

Nobody understands the number monsters (correction, one person from work understood it). Anyway, I added text explaining what to do and also the first level with number monsters have the numbers painted on the door. This “should” make it painfully obvious what the point of this monster is.

Adding More Feedback
Someone brought up a good point that if sound is off, there is no feedback on good or bad hits. At first I thought of using the vibration feedback that Android already has built in for keypresses, but realized this might be too intrusive for users. Plus, it requires an explicit permission and I’m trying to keep my app permission free right now. So instead I have the entire gameboard briefly flash red when a bad press occurs. I think this worked out very well as it clearly stands out and indicates that something went wrong.

Enclyopedia
From an early stage of development, I wanted to add a Renoki Encyclopedia where I could list every Renoki along with funny descriptions/flavor text. I stumbled upon ViewPager, a brilliant little thing for Android that allows you to automatically do horizontal swiping of pages (similar to the current Android market). All you need to do is drop in some images to each page, and the user can easily swipe through each one. Now I just need to think up funny back stories for each Renoki.

Balance Tweaks
I think the game is too hard for people. I toned down the speeds for Normal and lowered shop prices. I realized that people actually mess up a lot so they have to buy hearts quite frequently. Someone mentioned that they got far in the game but were never able to save up enough to buy a hammer. I needed to amend this, as the later levels get really hard without the upgrades.