a looking-glass book

iam updated

spent some time over the last week and a half tweaking code. i listened to the feedback offered at the show and managed to incorporate some of it into my project.

its nothing earth-shattering, but i wanted to take what i learned from having so many people use the system and try to improve it the best i could.

that said, here are the 3 major changes i have made:

1. the date of the currently viewed movie now appears in the blue stripe section. this way, you have feedback of what movie you are looking at. watching people use the system, they would skip the weekly timeline -- they wanted the calendar to pull up a movie. now, if i was ready to move towards a v2, i might try to do something cooler than i did before and allow that. (the reason for it not working like that is because many days have more than 1 movie and i wanted to display the relationship of a movie in terms of an entire day.)

2. on the timeline, the currently selected film is highlighted. this means when you select something, you get the visual feedback in this menu as well. when people were using the timeline and two movies were up against each other, you couldn't tell what piece you were viewing. this way, the selected movie is highlighted, making it easy to step through movies next to each other on the timeline.

3. finally, i added a javascript function that keeps track of where the quicktime movie is on the image timeline. the function is simple in theory - every 5 seconds, it checks where the movie is, rounds to the nearest minute and then highlights the correct image in the timeline. (in reality, it gets hairy and i had to cheat a little - i was already using the 'id' attribute, so i had to use the 'name' one for this. and name is not supposed to be a unique identifier. ah well, that was easier than making a pseudo-attribute. i wont tell if you wont.)
this is kinda cool, cause as you watch, scrub or skip around in the quicktime file, the outline of the image below will change. its a nice indicater that helps keep the relationship between the movie and images synced. plus its just fun to watch it move automagically as you play a movie.

like i said, none of these are earth-shattering, but it makes me feel like the project is more complete. there is always more to be done, but i feel glad to have taken the show and come out of it with constructive elements i could then use. i learned something and was able to make my project better as a result.

werd.