June 1, 2008
Weekly Report #1: How to obtain the ugliest map ever
(To see the screencast, visit this link and download 20080601_osmarender_frontend_screencast.zip file – 14 Mb)
Despite my weekly report’s title, this week I’ve obtained the first successful step of my project!
New features
These are the new features:
- I’ve seen that my application is now compatible with Firefox 3 RC1 for Windows (worked in beta 4 but didn’t in beta 5)
- Don’t really know what’s happened (perhaps some issues with my previous Kubuntu installation? perhaps some Firefox 3 module kept when downgrading in my 8.04?), but I’ve seen that the application seems to be compatible even with Firefox 2.0.0.14 for Linux
- Can load a predefined rule file or a custom rule file, giving its name in an input box
- Thanks to this CSS Parser, with some modifications, the application will parse the CSS section of the rule file
- A combo box will appear in the application, and selecting a CSS class, you can modify any preset
- I’ve written a little function for CSS Writing, so the application will automatically store in memory any new value
- I’ve found a little trick for saving to disk the edited XML file, and successfully reloading it.
Screencast
So what about the title? As I’ve done during application phase, I’ve produced a little screencast to show those features. In the screencast you’ll see the real meaning of this weekly report’s title 🙂
So, if you have time (it’s 10 minutes long, but I’ve spent 3-4 hours to produce it, so give me some satisfaction 😉 ), you can download and view this SWF screencast! (download the 20080601_osmarender_frontend_screencast.zip file, about 14 Mb) After downloading, unzip it in a directory of your choice and point your browser at 20080601_Osmarender_frontend_screencast.html, playing it in full screen mode (F11).
Next steps
During next week I hope to achieve the following tasks:
- Refactoring of all my code (now it’s a mess)
- Begin using JSDoc for documentation
- Create new CSS properties/classes or delete them
- If time helps, I would like to enrich the internal CSS data model to let the frontend know how to edit single properties with a proper widget. To do this I’ll try to encapsulate some existing JS libraries in the future.
spaetz said,
June 2, 2008 at 9:10 am
Hey, looks cool. Is the code available soewhere to play with it?
fadinlight said,
June 2, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Hi Spaetz, thank you for comment! Actually the code it’s a real mess, planning to release it next week after a bit of refactoring and some changes in the UI. However if you want to play with it I can send you this code anytime.
John said,
June 16, 2008 at 6:14 pm
Great project!
One thing: Have you thought of a more “easy to use” colorfield? There could be two fields: one for the hexcode of the color and one with something like a colortable to choose your favorite color directly.
fadinlight said,
June 20, 2008 at 10:12 pm
Hi John, thank you for pointing out that. I’ve already seen many JS color pickers around the Net, I’m going to choose one after I’ve finished all that’s left “behind-the-scenes”. Best candidate is http://johndyer.name/lab/colorpicker/