Jscrip, Jquery PHP and God damit!

I am currently working on a feature for the wild project which I envisioned when I was drafted in to help. When a tutor wants to add, edit or embed an activity, they will need to get the correct one from an activity set. Let me put this context:

Dr. Livingstone (no not that famous guy) teaches the University of Hamburg(er). The good Doctor is building a presentation for a lecture on the African jungles, and has decided to use an existing activity from another lecture he made with the wild project. Doc L picks the Activity set in the tutor interface via a drop down list and selects the "jungle bells: stories from the green forests" activity set. The next selection drop down list is then populated with the activities from that set, in which Doc L picks "the hills of stranglethorn vale" activity.

On to my problem:

That "cannot" be done with PHP (I "" because I haven’t found an example of it been done) you can set up the query, but that’s about it. Now it can be done with Jscript and something called JQuery which is a Library for java script. I have been looking at Different examples of JQuery and I find it could be useful in a lot of different things for wild, but it something we will be looking at later versions.

I have done some searching around and found a good example of what I am trying to achieve:

http://remysharp.com/2007/01/20/auto-populating-select-boxes-using-jquery-ajax/

(Thanks Remy)

at the moment I am trying to follow the Example he has given but am struggling to get it working locally (not sure I have the correct code in the correct files Etc) but I am confident I can convert this to use a database Ids rather than the values of the select or use the Values of the select to reference the table ids.

~Keith

Amusing Interface Quirks!

I have spent a few days building templates for the interface for wild. I have found a few things that amuse me with Mozilla FireFox and IE (7/8). I will show you what I mean shortly but first i want to talk interface!

Client:

Originally I envisaged the client being to different interfaces (one for high end devices, one for mobile devices)

But after some tweaking I feel that we might be able to work the larger interface for the mobile devices, simply because of the way the browsers (IE and Firefox) scale the web page:

moving on...

Tutor:

In the previous post I stated that I wish to move away from the traditional web page. its hard for me to explain what I mean but I am going to give it ago.

My idea is to make the web interface feel and work like something you would have in a kiosk or information booth, for instance the interface will not have a navigation bar, in the traditional sense. Also all navigation will happen within an area of the page (a bit like frames but not as evil) and will be in sequence or will be fluent (so one option will lead on to the next until completion).

So I went about creation the tutor interface to mirror the client. The thing I found this was the Scale effect for the tutor client became annoying and I mean REALLY annoying. If I where a lecturer or a teacher, I think I would of being seriously narked with the thing and ditched it.

After this, I decided to set the whole thing as absolute positioning with in the CSS (some people say this is a no no, well to you I :P ) the interface looks and feels a lot neater with this and I have give it some scalability for different browser sizes, I might have also fallen in the trap of creating for 1024X768 but then we cant change this at a later stage.



Display:

the display page was really a no brainer, its just a simple page that displays the data. i had little problems with setting this up.

Right the browser quirks:

as daft as it sounds there is one little quirk that i have noticed;

Firefox:

IE:

I'm using a reset CSS file.... but still it happens... love IE!

~Keith

Interface Design

First and foremost I am no designer, never have been, never will be. I have the artistic talent of donkey, so if this designs don’t look “pretty” go figure. :D

To start with I tried to make a “nice” design; I thought about themes and wanted something “wild” looking, as in wild life or jungle. So I came up with this:

After been told off by my partner (she is a web developer) I was force to re-think, So I decided to go with something more simple and use more neutral colours. I also decided that I would like to move away from a traditional web site, and Try and make the site look more like a system interface, to make it feel more like a program and make the user forget it is really just a web client.

So I created this:



It’s not pink….its blue…I swear!

This interface was "built" in Photoshop and am hoping that i can use the layers to construct the full working interface from it.

~Keith