Microsoft Imagin Cup Entry

[j1mb0jay]

Please can you have a read of my latest project design. Just wondering if
anyone can think of things that I have missed out. Have spent lots of man
hours hacking this together.

Be honest.......

http://users.aber.ac.uk/jap6/meety.html

 

[Jonathan N. Little]

Please can you have a read of my latest project design. Just wondering
if anyone can think of things that I have missed out. Have spent lots of
man hours hacking this together.

Be honest.......

http://users.aber.ac.uk/jap6/meety.html

Okay, but cut down on the margins! It is only decoration and it robbing
from the *important* information stuff. On some typical browser windows
sizes where your detailed diagrams also scale, they are squeezed into
this narrow ribbon! The diagrams become illegible pretty easily.

Yes the scaling is 'cool', but frustrating if someone is after
information and not entertainment. Sorry to be harsh here, but you have
to consider the function of the page in the design. I think you are
going for for 'technical' here.

 

[j1mb0jay]

Okay, but cut down on the margins! It is only decoration and it
robbing from the *important* information stuff. On some typical
browser windows sizes where your detailed diagrams also scale, they
are squeezed into this narrow ribbon! The diagrams become illegible
pretty easily.
Yes the scaling is 'cool', but frustrating if someone is after
information and not entertainment. Sorry to be harsh here, but you
have to consider the function of the page in the design. I think you
are going for for 'technical' here.

Thank you very much for you comments. Will chance all pages margins to a
about 15px or something (soon). Do you have any details about the project on
the page labled "meety", this is what was handed into Microsoft yesterday

 

[Jim Moe]

Please can you have a read of my latest project design. Just wondering if
anyone can think of things that I have missed out. Have spent lots of man
hours hacking this together.

Be honest.......

Remove the "<?xml ... ?>" from the page. IE6 and earlier don't like it
and it puts those browsers into Quirks mode.
You have one validation error, the "XML reader" link. It belies the
"Vaild CSS" bit in the footer. Also note the typo: Vaild.
The links on the top menu would be better if they become more readable
on :hover rather than less.
If you like wide margins, use % to specify them. This way the content
does not get squished on narrow viewports.
Use the correct dimensions for the images. Or size the images to the
dimensions specified. Browser image resizing uses only speed as a
criterion, not beauty. Result: ugly.
The code links should be to proper HTML pages, not raw text.
The body text is rather dense. Consider adding a line-height attribute
for the body text, say 140% - 160%. The default is usually 120%.

 

[al jones]

Please can you have a read of my latest project design. Just wondering if
anyone can think of things that I have missed out. Have spent lots of man
hours hacking this together.

Be honest.......

http://users.aber.ac.uk/jap6/meety.html

Run a spelling and grammar checker on your CV.

 

[Toby A Inkster]

Please can you have a read of my latest project design. Just wondering if
anyone can think of things that I have missed out.
http://users.aber.ac.uk/jap6/meety.html

Some ideas for further development:

1. This seems to be a specialised case of a calendar application.
Consider having the server provide a "feed" of the data in
iCalendar format, so that users can quickly view their calendar
from within an iCalendar-compatible application (e.g. Outlook,
iCal, Sunbird, etc) without having to log into Meety.

2. As per above, consider an RSS feed too.

3. Consider adding a web-based interface. Many universities will
have vast labs of non-Windows machines (certainly mine did),
rendering the Win32 fat client approach useless. .NET supposedly
makes providing a web-based interface for an already written
fat client easy. This will also help students to access the
system from Internet cafes and, if done carefully, mobile phones.

In summary, it's a data-drive app, so to make it more useful, you just
have to make the data available in more ways.

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact
Geek of ~ HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python*/Apache/Linux

* = I'm getting there!

 

[j1mb0jay]

Some ideas for further development:

1. This seems to be a specialised case of a calendar application.
Consider having the server provide a "feed" of the data in
iCalendar format, so that users can quickly view their calendar
from within an iCalendar-compatible application (e.g. Outlook,
iCal, Sunbird, etc) without having to log into Meety.

I aggree this comment and will take it into consideration next time i sit
down and code.

I would like to output the calender in XHTML so that is can be viewable in
most browsers.

2. As per above, consider an RSS feed too.

Already using RSS feeds to get information about the local area eg weather
......

3. Consider adding a web-based interface. Many universities will
have vast labs of non-Windows machines (certainly mine did),
rendering the Win32 fat client approach useless. .NET supposedly
makes providing a web-based interface for an already written
fat client easy. This will also help students to access the
system from Internet cafes and, if done carefully, mobile phones.

As im sure you already know Mono allows .Net to be run on most non Windows
Machines the application its self was written in Ubuntu.
But yes the system does need a web output.

In summary, it's a data-drive app, so to make it more useful, you just
have to make the data available in more ways.

Aggreed thank you for your comments

 

[Toby A Inkster]

I would like to output the calender in XHTML so that is can be viewable in
most browsers.

Take a look at hCalendar -- it's a specification that fuses XHTML with
iCalendar, written by Tantek Celik (who was the lead developer of IE for
Mac, but now works for Technorati).

An hCalendar document is a valid XHTML 1.0 document that uses particular
values for class attributes to allow for a 1:1 mapping between iCalendar
and hCalendar documents. For example, the following iCalendar event:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID:-//XYZproduct//EN
VERSION:2.0
BEGIN:VEVENT
URL:http://www.web2con.com/
DTSTART:20051005
DTEND:20051008
SUMMARY:Web 2.0 Conference
LOCATION:Argent Hotel\, San Francisco\, CA
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

Becomes this in hCalendar:

<span class="vevent">
<a class="url" href="http://www.web2con.com/">
<span class="summary">Web 2.0 Conference</span>:
<abbr class="dtstart" title="2005-10-05">October 5</abbr>-
<abbr class="dtend" title="2005-10-08">7</abbr>,
at the <span class="location">Argent Hotel,
San Francisco, CA</span>
</a>
</span>

And then an hCalendar-aware tool can parse the event information, or could
convert it to iCalendar if need be.

Specification: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar
Implementations: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcalendar-implementations

For a blogging tool / CMS I'm working on, I decided that the feed engine,
which could already output in several different formats (e.g. RSS, Atom,
RDF, etc) needed a few more. HTML was an obvious choice, and I also
decided on iCalendar. Luckily, while reading the Wikipedia article on
iCalendar I discovered hCalendar, so now my feeds module produces:

RSS 0.91
RSS 1.0 (RDF)
RSS 2.0,
Atom 1.0 (RFC 4287)
iCalendar (RFC 2445)
hCalendar

and a few weirdo ones too.

Already using RSS feeds to get information about the local area eg weather

I actually meant for output, but for input is good too.

As im sure you already know Mono allows .Net to be run on most non Windows
Machines the application its self was written in Ubuntu.
But yes the system does need a web output.

Indeed, though I only seem to have about a 50/50 success rate getting
non-trivial .NET applications to run on Mono as they often do odd
Windows-specific not-pure-.NET things. (Don't ask me what those things are!)

--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact
Geek of ~ HTML/SQL/Perl/PHP/Python*/Apache/Linux

* = I'm getting there!