Code52 Progress Blog

MarkPad: Day 77

code52@code52.org (Code52 Team) — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

MarkPad might be getting a little "long in the tooth" for a Code52 project but it is still one of the most actively developed projects we have.

If we go back to what we had going on day one, it'd be fair to say it was ugly - not an unusual situation with open source applications, particularly in the "v1" stage.

While we may not be designers or trained in the blackarts of UX, we've made a real effort to give UI/UX the respect it deserves.

While the UI is cleaner and dare I say it - prettier - what else has been going on in the land of MarkPad? A quick highlight

Font selection (size/type) for the editor
Incorrect spelling detection
"Jekyll" detection which allows pasting of images straight into the editor, which copies it to the right folder
Discussion and the beginnings of an extension framework!
wyUpdate/wyBuild auto-updater in the works

Once we get extensions (powered by NuGet!) and app updater going, MarkPad will be an unstoppable Markdown juggernaut!

MyFinances for Windows8: Day 1

code52@code52.org (Code52 Team) — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 23:30:00 -0800

Only 24 hours into building something with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and the JabbR room has been alive and kicking.

Progress? Already?!

The project structure has been created, and a simple Expenses page has been created and styled to demonstrate navigation between pages and binding data to the UI. As this application is built using WinJS, we're seeing some people who are new to it.

While the application is being built, we've identified a number of features we can prototype in parallel to demonstrate various APIs and scenarios which we can integrate into the main application. Chris Sainty has already started work on a synchronization example so that we can share data between devices.

Mockup - Dashboard and Notifications

As I started mocking up the application, I realised I hadn't thought about the dashboard and what the application might display to the user on startup.

So here's a walkthrough of how I envision it working - have input? Leave a comment.

On startup, the application will display to the user any new notifications since they last opened the app. This time, the user is greeted with a couple of items to view, and those are emphasized by the application.

To view the item, the user taps or clicks on the item and the details slide down underneath.

The user can then click Close to dismiss the item, or tap away to hide it.

Once all the notifications are cleared, the bar disappears and the application has access to the default dashboard.

What's next?

I suspect the next couple of days will involve discussion, experimenting with WinJS and prototyping features. If you want to follow the discussion and get involved then check out the chatroom!

Ideastrike: Day 4

code52@code52.org (Code52 Team) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 23:59:00 -0800

Ideastrike is in full swing and it's been a big social week for a few of us, so we've held off blogging a bit in order to devote our time to code!

We were told the site was looking a little thin on details though, so here's your update ;)

What's it looking like?

Paul has done a bit of the UI, as he does and we've got some pretty good looking parts, as you'd expect for the voting and the current layout (using Twitter Bootstrap)

Of course it's just the start and gives us something to work with while we get the features done, but it's a fairly nice look already.

What's it built on so far?

We've got Nancy as we expected, and authentication is being built around Janrain so we get Twitter, Facebook, Google accounts and more (and we don't have to worry about storing passwords.

We have it all wired up with our favorite IoC container - autofac, some Markdown and other things being added in.

Who's involved so far?

Our room has been fairly active with the Nancy guys helping out quite a bit with advice and going through the "Nancy way" of getting things going - and if they are helping you, or you've found it difficult to get some examples of getting it going then please think about giving back to them by helping them document what you had problems with!

Ten people have contributed so far, and please if you think you have some time and would like to contribute we'd be happy to have you. Come into the Jabbr room and select something from our Trello board or add your own idea to code up.

What's next?

We're getting a lot of the base infrastructure down but we've still got some integration points, we've got a lot of ideas in progress to merge in and test out, and to get it up somewhere.

The week's not over yet, so if you want to hope in and join us then come on down!

Jibbr: Day 3

code52@code52.org (Code52 Team) — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Please excuse the inane ramblings of somebody who doesn't usually use the DLR and was somewhat delirious when victory struck. While it's not 100% yet, we have basic support for scripts from Hubot, which means with a bit more work, we should get compatiblity with the 150 or so in the community scripts repo!

-- @aeoth

Jibbr: Day 2

code52@code52.org (Code52 Team) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

More momentum, more interest, more progress and lots more chatter in the JabbR room - including a hilarious discussion on Git's autocrlf behaviour.

Credit goes to @MotoWilliams for the meme.

JabbR Updates

Some changes to JabbR and SignalR - David (and I suppose Damian by extension) is planning a 0.4 version of SignalR. More changes to JabbR and SignalR pulled into Jibbr.

GitHub Sprocket

Most of the heavy-lifting for the GitHub plugin is done - using JSON.NET's dynamic support to parse data from the GitHub API without defining strongly-typed models makes this about eleventy billion times easier.

The plugin is intended to track and display notifications for:

commits to the master repository
people watching the project
pull requests (new and closed)
activity in forks off the master repository - when a new one is created, when code has been pushed to it
issues (new and modified)

For example:

Since taking this screenshot, I've been contemplating how to differentiate notifications. Perhaps JabbR could support Markdown for basic styling of text? :)

Automate all the things

A little anecdote: I hastily put together a script late the night before to move the sample extensions into a folder - for MEF to discover and load into the app. In my haste, I'd ignored the fact that I'd (likely) been running the script from a bash shell (thanks git-bash) and hardcoded some paths to get (what I'd thought was) the job "done".

So I merged the changes into master and hit the hay.

A few hours later, I wake up to Stefan demanding beer karma as a result of the harm I'd caused his mental state. Turns out that 'cp' isn't 'copy' and file paths are easy to destroy completely if you pick the wrong one for the wrong OS.

With some input from Stefan and Tobin, the script now recurses all of the Extensions subfolders for assemblies.

set solution_dir=%1
set output_dir=%solution_dir%\Jabbot.ConsoleBotHost\bin\Debug\Sprockets\

del %solution_dir%\Jabbot.ConsoleBotHost\bin\Debug\Sprockets\*.dll

for /D %%I in ("%solution_dir%\Extensions\*") do (
    xcopy %%I\bin\Debug\*.dll %output_dir% /C /Y
)

Jabbot running on NancyFx

Seth Webster a contributor to the Jabbot project, put together a simple sample app of a Jabber bot running inside NancyFx. He's also been helping out with the JabbR testing over the past couple of days. Many thanks for his hard work.

Paul has taken that sample and started working on an administration tool for the bot:

-- @shiftkey

Jibbr: Day 1

code52@code52.org (Code52 Team) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 23:59:00 -0800

Technically we started this on Day 0 with forking the Jabbot project and gathering ideas and features while people explored the code. Due to the Hanselman effect, we had an overflowing chatroom and lots of discussion to keep us busy.

Drawing

Paul was in the mood for drawing, and he started experimentign with Mr-T/Hubot themed graphics

The Bleeding Edge

Oh, and there were some JabbR fun and games to deal with straight off the bat. Some breaking changes in the JabbR website hadn't propogated to a SignalR.Client release - but thankfully the awesome @davidfowl was on hand to help us get the right commits together and craft a version which played nice.

Experimenting with Sprockets

One of the first features we added was support for periodic sprockets - we're calling them announcements - but more work was needed to get the infrastructure to a point where people could experiment further. A simple scheduler was added to the console app, and a sample plugin - telling you what time it was in Sydney - was added to the code.

Andrew and Stefan also worked on adding support for additional commands to the bot, building test sprockets and running them in a test JabbR chatroom.

We started spawning test rooms to ensure the main Code52 chat room was not annoyed by out experiments.

Even a Mr T bot made an appearance - I wish I had a screenshot handy of the bot making fun of me.

Hosting

We discussed where this hypothetical app would be hosted - a Windows Service was discussed, but we eventually agreed that it should be fine to host on ASP.NET. The NancyFx guys were in the JabbR chatroom to steer us in the right direction.

-- @shiftkey

MarkPad: Day 4

code52@code52.org (Code52 Team) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

If day three was a productive day, day four was insane.

More UI refinement, including "UX" refinement with syncing of scrolling between the two panels

Another icon, this time for documents - that is, .md, .mdown and .markdown. Just like the app logo, we went through several iterations before we found the right one.

1-MetaweblogAPI branch can now communicate with FunnelWeb/Metaweblog API to publish new posts and open, edit and save old posts!

Win7Intergration has (optional) file association (which is what the document icon is for) and jump list support - it's all starting to come together!

MarkPad: Day 3

code52@code52.org (Code52 Team) — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

The first few days of the first project (MarkPad) were retroactively blogged about because we only decided to do that after the fact.

While day two was "slow", day three was anything but. An icon, a UI overhaul, and so many features.

The Logo

One of the good and bad things about an adhoc, democratic app is that everybody has a say. This has led to some great UI or logic choices, but on the flipside has also had a few instances of where nobody could agree and executive decisions has to be made. For the icon, we had two shapes and many colours to pick from!

UI overhaul

It was voted that the anything resembling the "Fluent UI" (Ribbon) should be nuked from orbit, and instead we opted to go for a metro look. Thankfully, we all knew a guy who knew a guy who had a WPF Metro Library.

The design was inspired by (and permitted!) ClindHartsen's "Focus Text Editor"

We also introduced Awesomium as the preview control to make up for the lacking capabilities of the build in WPF WebBrowser (which is really just IE in an ActiveX/COM wrapper)

MarkPad: Day 1

code52@code52.org (Code52 Team) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 23:59:00 -0800

The first few days of the first project (MarkPad) were retroactively blogged about because we only decided to do that after the fact.

What can you expect from day one of a brand new project? Not much, right? Wrong. Awesomeness is what you should expect. The first ~~sucker~~ up to the plate was @distantcam who setup the Caliburn.Micro framework, hooked up MarkdownSharp and we were well on our way to getting a workable utility.

Initially we were using a plain textbox as the editor, but quickly discovered the powerful AvalonEdit control from SharpDevelop.

17 commits for day one? Not shabby.