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.
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.
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…
