The Jey Group
18:51
Before this project is terminated I would like to say some final words. Although The Jey Store (probably) won’t be completed it does however provide all functionality that we set out to do with our interface concept. Since the last post the Shopping Cart function has been added. You can now put and remove items from it. The design has also been altered, slightly, and not to say the least: The Search function is working. There’s still some issues with the Shopping Cart since it sometimes “forget” to list items, althought they actually are in the Shopping Cart. This bug has put some serious ants in my head for the last couple of days. I need to take a break and attack the problem with new eyes.
We had our presentation a couple of days ago and not surprisingly we got feedback that it was way too much dragging going on. Hey, we’re aware of that. The concept was to take the dragging and dropping as far as possible. Anyway, I’ve met one of the demands by adding a close button directly on the widget, so now you don’t have to drag it to the Trashcan in order to close the widget (although you still is able to).
No image of the design this time. Check it out for yourselves at http://www.alvione.com/jeystore/
Finally I want to mention my Individual project, a mobile adaptation of the Jeystore. Off course there’s no dragging and dropping goin on. Instead you can search for DVD’s at Amazon.co.uk from your mobile phone and retrieve both the Amazon Price as well as the lowest prices for new and used items respectively. So, now you can compare the prices at your local DVD store with the prices at Amazon.co.uk.
Here’s the location of the mobile service : http://www.alvione.com/jeystore/mobile/. Unfortunately, since I don’t have a lot of 3G mobile phones in my possession I’ve only tested it on my Nokia N73.
The Jey Group
17:44
Some days late but now we are here the day before the deadline and we can finally see some big changes in the project. Almost all of the programming is done, you can now drag down the buttons to update, sort, go back and go forward. You can also change the genre to the one that you want (5 genres available at the moment: Action & Adventure, Children, Comedy, Drama and Science Fiction & Fantasy).
The things that we have left is to show what’s in the shopping cart and fixing some small bugs before we are done.
You can fint a working prototype of the Jey Store here: http://www.alvione.com/jeystore/ By the way don’t look at the design….
The project has been really great to working with and we have learnt a lot what you really can do with this drag and drop idea, and that is a lot. Here’s a little snapshot of the jeystore:
The Feed from Amazon.co.uk works really well, although the price sorting is a bit confusing since the feed we get is based on the lowest price among private retailers, not the Amazon stock price (which we currently display on in the store).
A little unplanned bonus was also created today. As soon as I (Johannes) was done with the drop code for the functions I was supposed to start with the Shopping Cart. But I really didn’t feel inspired to do that so I started off playing the an alternative way of selecting pages. It was almost uncanny how easy it was to create a page selector slider in javascript! And HEY! We’re not using any frameworks here. All code is done from scratch. Click on the page counter to open the slide and enjoy as you can go about 40 pages in any direction with just one click and drag. Don’t go to far ahead though, since there seem to be a bug on Amazons behalf that says that there are several thousand pages when there in fact is “merely” a couple of hundred. If you encounter a blank page you have passed the limit of actual pages… I’m off for today. Hopefully the rest of the planned functionality will be working be Monday, when our definitive deadline is.
Slashinspect
11:33
We’re getting closer to the summer and all the barbeques on the beach, but we’re also getting closer to the deadline for this project. This is a very bad combination, since it’s a lot harder to concentrate when there’s plenty of things to do outside; even though there’s stuff to do In front of the computer. This doesn’t mean we don’t work, I’m just saying it’s a bad time to spend a lot of time inside.
Anyway the previous text may have sound like nothing has been done, but that’s not the case. The web shop is done and we are in the same time putting all things together to connect and communicate with flash. Let’s hope everything will go as smooth as possible so we might have some time for a barbeque teambuilding in the weekend.
thebestgroup
10:42
Maybe a bit too late, but here’s our post anyway.
Organising structure and workflow
After the very inspiring lecture from Carlos Ulloa, we took a bit of Carlos for some thoughts and help on our project. Basically, he gave us a lot of tips and tricks on how we should structure our 3D space. These tips were very helpful to keep the preformance up to the average of 30 fps. It is great to hear these things from the master, no-one would have given us any better advise. Also Carlos inspired us to rearrange our workflow. The next day we took some time to set up FlashDevelop or FDT for standalone flash publishing. No need to use flash anymore! only compile a swf and a swc. Things got quite a bit faster, and we don’t have to wait all the time for Flash to export the movie. This has been a real breather. Next we set up an SVN. We all have been dreaming about this, but never really knew the pro’s and con’s. It was a bit confusing to figure out how this thing called SVN completly worked (especially on the import/export/commit part). But the nice part is, everyone works together on the same project on the same server, no duplicate files. Every update committed by one is stored as a new revision. The older revisions are accessible if something went wrong or if you want to compare what has been changed over time. But your whole team always works with the newest revision (if they keep updated). It’s great, every change and every version is ccessible thus the fear of overwriting or messing stuff up is gone.
The results
So much for the workflow, which has become smooth as smör in the sun. Slowly we are getting to the results as well. Anton: Interaction Designer; is working hard on the navigation, getting to figure out the ins and outs of actionscript 3 and papervision. Tore: Chief of Optimization; has made the 3d cover display as sleek as possible with hardcore bitmap caching. The basic setup with all the embedded graphics works, with a staggering framerate of 28 fps. Kasper: Information Architect; has been working on a XMLHandler class that does all the dirty work for you. Even simpler than the current XML handeling in flash, getting requested content is easy as pie. Simone: Father of all Graphics; has done a great job in providing graphics and ideas for this project.
For now I can only tease you with a screenshot, the working version we keep hidden in our laboratory.
Watch out kids, coverbandit is going to kick some buns.
Slashinspect
13:47
As you may already know the purpose of our project is that the application should be able to integrate with an existing web shop. This means we’re not doing everything in flash. The application should be easy applied on any web shop that using php, of course customisation will be needed on different kind of web shops.
We are using Js to communicate with our application built in flash. The application window is minimized until the user needs it; same goes for the shopping cart in the application. The flash shopping cart and the web based one is identical at all times. Our shopping cart will probably have a better overview and functionality than the web based one though.
The items added in the application by a user is stored in a jstone, so the flash file won’t be reset each time the user clicks on a new item in the web shop.
Keep it real!
/inspect
asPandas
01:52
Sorry for the delay of this post, but we’ve been so busy working our asses of in this module. If you haven’t heard what our little interface is all about, here’s a short a elevator pitch for you all (btw, are you supposed to use “a” or “an”, before “elevator pitch”).
Search for videos, the videos are displayed in a PV3D carousel. Navigate between them with your mouse and/or keyboard. Press play with the mouse or just hit SPACE on your keyboard. Press the X or hit ESC on your keyboard to go back to the videos.
Well thats pretty much it.
The source we’re going to use for the videos are Blip.tv. If we’ve a lot of time over we’ll try to include other video sites, such as Vimeo and YouTube.
Over and Out
// asPandas
The Jey Group
14:48
The jay store starting to take shape, the drag n’ drop functions are a bit more advanced, you can now throw away widgets in the trashcan, this will in the future be used for throwing away things that you have put in your shopping cart that you don’t want to buy or a search result widget that you don’t need more.
We have also got the API from Amazon.co.uk to work and we are sorting out the information that we need for the shop such as title, price, release date, genre, actors and bar codes.
Currently the Top Sellers Widget is sorting Children DVD’s ordered by their salesrank. Next on the agenda is to fix filtering options and enable the API in all Widgets.
Slashinspect
16:54
Being able to add cloths from an assortment in a web shop to a “cloth matching window”, to get the best matching cloths. Imagine it as a paper doll, with; hat, t-shirt, jeans etc. The customer can also add more then one sort of item, a pair of jeans for example. When adding more then one pair of jeans, the users can then flip between these items. If the item has more then one colour, this can be changed in the “matching room” as well as size and amount.
We simply want to create a web application that makes it easier for the customer to buy the right cloths. This feature will make the web shop more interactive and enjoyable. It will most likely be as easy to pick cloths here as in the real stores, the costumer will have the chance to get a better overview of what cloths he/she is interested in before adding to cart.
The first Sketch during our brainstorming session, enjoy! :D
The Jey Group
16:08
The Jey Store Interface will be purely based on drag ‘n’ drop. Since both Jimmie and I, Johannes, wants to learn more about creating more advanced “traditional” webpages we’ve come to the conclusion of doing this with AJAX. The Jey Store will be a video store where you drag stop departments onto the shopping floor which creates new windows to browse through. If you’re interested in an item you simply drag that item onto the shopping floor and another window will open that contain the information desired (hopefully). Shop by dragging items into the shopping cart and discard items or windows by dragging them to the trashcan.
The whole store will be based on a feed from an existing online store. Currently we’re thinking of using Amazons feed.
The latest version of our project will always be available at http://www.alvione.com/jeystore. Check it out from time to time since it will be updated frequently.
Current functionality of the Jey Store:
1. You can drag the buttons from the menu bar and onto the shopping floor, a shadow will tell you how big the new window will be. You can place it anywhere within the shopping floor. You won’t be able to put the window on top of the shopping cart or trashcan, though.
2. When you drop the button it will turn into a window, which content is updated using AJAX. Currently the file loaded into the window merely contains the header.
3. The lastest moved window will always be on top.
4. You can redock the windows in the menu bar by either drag the back onto the menu bar, or to the trashcan. An animation will reset the button to it’s original position.
This version has been tested on Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 2, Safari and Opera 9 on PC. It has not yet been tested on Mac. There are some known bugs which only seem to affect Firefox at this time. Don’t redock the windows to fast for example…
thebestgroup
10:42
an excerpt from our project proposal:
“The purpose of our project is to develop a highly interactive interface that features a way of browsing
music in a 3D environment. The user should be able to start by searching for an artist or group and
then dig deeper and explore related artists/groups as-well as getting information about the releases
(album covers, track lists, release dates and so on). We’ll also connect the application to Amazon to
provide the user an easy way to buy the items found.”
- and remember, all nighters are for kids!