I’m sure there’s a proper name for this. I know Rails does it. (I should have paid more attention to Agile classes.) I think has something to do with Model-view-controllers? But I’m not sure what that is really either. Showing my ignorance a little here..
So, a class that looks at your table that has the information you which to be displayed on a web site, and it just ahead and formats it for you. I don’t ever want to write that loop again.
This is a little late, so I’m going to set the release time of this entry to about half an hour ago.
I’d really like the ability to do voice commands in my web apps. “Jeeves, send an email to Bob saying I shall be attending lunch today!”
Enough said.
Honestly, I’m a little shocked that I managed to come up with five ideas for the five days that I’ve been doing AIAD. This weekend I’m away in London though, so I probably won’t be able to spend much time on working on one of these ideas. I’ll have my laptop with me, so I can hack something up at least whilst on the coach, or just sitting around.
I’ve not run out of ideas just yet though, so there’ll be more next week.
A free National Rail interface that let me recreate their journey planner. It’s not that their journey planner isn’t good, it’d just be cool to integrate it’s services into my own services.
Websites for events could have a feature that tells customers what the best train (specifically) would be to get to the event. Not just “Get off at Kings Cross station”, but “Get the train that arrives at 13:23 at Kings Cross”. The API could even let the provider book and order train tickets for the customer.
My calendar could automatically update times for services changes or cancellations.
I probably won’t be able to do this one myself. But it’s a cool idea.
One of the most popular pages on my blog is the YouTube comments suck one, so obviously people are bothered by it and since my independent, ranty blog is still getting traction from moaning, no one is doing anything about it.
Essentially, it’ll be cool to make a new website based around the community rather than the videos. Using the YouTube API, and maybe the Disqus API, I think it’d be pretty easy to make a better place. It wouldn’t be a rip of YouTube — that’s against the API terms — but so long as there’s a definite focus on the conversation about videos, I think it’d be okay.
Also, I’d like to pull comments from reddit and other places that have an API for comments on articles onto the page for the video. Maybe news articles if the video has any related stories. A general mashup of information about the video you’re watching.
I’m not sure any of these exist. A story centric RPG that I can play in my web browser that isn’t based on Flash. Final Fantasy or Dragon Age in your browser, or even on your iPhone.
I don’t mean an MMO. Whilst it could be interesting to see that, what I really want is one storyline (maybe with the occasional sub-quests, a la Fallout 3) that I can play through and ultimately complete the game. Then I can start it over again if like. Or not, doesn’t really matter.
I’d like actual save game files, so I can save at one point and load it again. Something that we do with PC games and console games all the time but I’ve never seen on a web based game.
The pluses for web based games are that they’re cross platform (baring a hack or two to get the Javascript to work in IE, or whatever), and run on almost every machine in existence. Nothing more to download or install whilst you’re at work on a school computer (don’t play games at school, kids).
I barely ever watch TV on TV on any more. It’s usually downloaded from somewhere, or streamed. Usually not the same source from episode to episode. That leads to a problem in that you don’t know what episode you’re on any more. My StageVu history says I’ve watched up to episode six, but I might have watched a few episode on 4oD, or watched on actually on TV.
So, I need another service that lets me keep a log of what episode I’ve watched up to. I guess somewhat manual at first, but I don’t see why there can’t be plugins to see what you’re watching and then update the site (a Firefox plugin for websites, VLC plugin for downloaded shows). Some things would have to be manual, but you could text in to the site saying what you’re watching and it could update.
Another problem I have with TV is when I’m watching a series that isn’t out in the UK yet. So there’s no media telling me that there’s a new episode of House. I usually find out at least a few days later than I could have watched it from a friend, or from being spoiled online.
It’d be nice to have a global TV guide that told me when new episodes are released.
This is an idea I’ve had for a while, which I’ve just never gotten around to doing anything about and the Apple’s iPad made me think about it again.
Essentially it’s a new aggregation tool (because I have a love affair with a lot of topical news on one page) but takes the news from a lot of sources. Twitter especially: taking local trending topics and correlating them pragmatically with articles from other places. Reddit, for the comments. BBC for the information. Guardian and a few other online news places for more opinionated pieces. And maybe even finding independent WordPress.com blogs that are talking about the news item.
It wouldn’t be just listing links to various stories, the articles would all be related to each other for that topic.
With a touch screen (which is why the iPad made me think of this again) it would be a simple app that I could just leave running and occasionally click a few things. Without a touch screen it could just be like a news ticker showing snippets from various sources. I’d show a mock up of how I imagine it, but I’m terrible at designing things so it would look horrendous.
It’s the first of February, and since humans love to add meaning to arbitrary days, I’ve decided to start a project today. Each weekday I plan on updating my blog (it needs the attention, after all) with an idea for a web app that I’ve had. The idea doesn’t have to be amazing, nor original. It could be a new application, or a change to another web service out there. It doesn’t have to be a full proposal, just an idea fleshed out enough to show what I think could be done with it, and why it’s interesting.
Then, at the weekend I could be spending on one of the more interesting ones and hopefully release at least a working version by Monday. I’ll push all the code to my github as open source projects, so if someone likes something I’ve started they can happily fork it.
This’ll do a number of things that I think will be helpful for me.
It’ll force me to be creative; to constantly be thinking up different (maybe not even better) ways to do things. Being innovative isn’t about doing everything someone does, just better. Being innovative is doing something new. I’m not saying I’ll be creative, just different.
I want to use a different language to PHP too. I know PHP, and maybe a little too well. Like the partner you’ve been with for a few months now, and everything’s fine, you just feel you need something different. I want to randomly pick another language to learn. In fact, why do these apps have to be web-based? Maybe I can throw in a few client based apps.
Even if I don’t do anything with the idea, maybe someone else will and if that makes the internet a better place then I suppose I’ve still been successful.
It’ll also just give me something to do to kill time. I have a fair bit of it.
I feel like I’ve been busy, but then I come to this blog to talk about what I’ve been busy doing and think to myself “really, I’ve done almost nothing.” That aside, I’m going to talk about the things I have been doing.
I’ve realised I don’t deal with stress too well. When I’m asked “what would you say is your biggest weakness?” in a job interview I think I’ll have to reply that I get stressed. I’ve noticed I only get stressed when there’s something I need to do, but there’s something out of my control that’s stopping me doing it.
For instance, I’m working on my Java assignment and get stuck. I couldn’t explain my problem well enough to go and Google it, so I had to contact my tutor who didn’t reply to my email (no big deal), but then I couldn’t track him down either. So I was stuck, staring at this code that I had no idea how to fix, and no one around who was able to help me. That’s really what gets me stressed the most.
The problem I was having, which my tutor told me within seconds of seeing my code, could be fixed by declaring the variable as the super class, and you can still give it the reference to an object that extends that super class. I had no idea you could do that. So now everything’s fixed and going well with my Java assignment now.
I’ve also been working on Leafcanvas, which is a web development company I’ve set up. The app isn’t exactly finished yet. I want to look more into using Tumblr as a sort of cloud service to hold data for a blog I want to put on Leafcanvas, and use the API to nab the content.
I’m working on a game called n0ded, which I expected to be finished by now but I decided to make it object orientated rather than procedural as it started. I’m also going to make it a facebook based game too, so I need to add the facebook API.
