Post screenshots of stuff you're working on!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Post screenshots of stuff you're working on!

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

This is the web app I'm working on, Spanner, it's a planned maintenance system. I'm trying to break into a market that sells Excel spreadsheets masquerading as systems for $80,000, so hopefully I can make a dent.

This is a checklist made from the items the system tracks, when printed the browser culls out everything except the 'page'.

Maluco Marinero fucked around with this message at 15:17 on May 22, 2012

# ¿ May 22, 2012 15:14

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 15:09

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

etcetera08 posted:

Looks useful and nice but that font is not what I would've picked

I've grown kind of partial to it but that's fair. There's a version of Calluna Sans (thats he font) that has a more standard numeral set, no dropping below the baseline or anything. I'll probably change to that before release. What don't you like about it specifically? I ask because I'm not Particularly good at any one thing, I'm just good at keeping working, so feedback is always good.

It's written in Python with Django.

\/ \/ duly noted: Thanks.

Maluco Marinero fucked around with this message at 01:32 on May 23, 2012

# ¿ May 23, 2012 00:47

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

akadajet posted:

It might work as a header only font? Use something a little less stylized (i.e. more readable) for the content.

Yeah thats what I'm thinking. I really like how it works with my headers and brand idea, but yeah, the body really does need to change to something more standard.

# ¿ May 23, 2012 01:59

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

G-Dub posted:

Are you concerned about companies preferring the overblown Excel solutions because it's MS Office and everyone without a clue prefers Office?

Yes and no. It is an issue, but from my experience working in the domain as a ships officer, and learning the experiences of others working with that sort of thing, it just isn't a reliable way to track literally thousands of items in a non information overload manner. The excel solutions have information overload, versioning issues, and there is the issue of collaboration between ship and shore.

The database solutions out there are in varying stages of maturity, and while they are set up on the ship, if anything breaks they are just poo poo out of luck until they fly support in, often.

Additionally, an excel solution on its own is not easily audited. Usually every 4-5 years you'll get your paperwork combed over by a national authority. It's not enough to say you use the system effectively, you have to be able to prove it.

A web app eases support problems, browser + Internet = go time as long as I'm doing my job, and also removes versioning issues. I'm going to do offline access if it picks up, but will work around that with a weekly email digest that sends them all their upcoming checklists and jobs so it's available offline.

Younger crew are starting to come in that see the value of this stuff; it saves mountains of time with our paperwork, believe me - and I've had some good contacts and promising feedback thus far from boat managers and crew.

I can also likely do much better on price, which will be suitable for a much less cashed up part of the market, eg. non profit sail training ships, small 1-5 ship operators, service ships that do contract work for the bigger companies.

It's not quite a long shot, and considering the amount of time I've already committed, I'll be damned if I'm not gonna give a launch a red hot go. I'll probably start posting progress regularly. I'm too invested to be a realistic critic of my work, so it's good to bounce ideas off people who have no reason to be anything less than honest.

# ¿ May 23, 2012 08:23

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

Doh004 posted:

It would definitely help if you can find a way for companies to import their existing excel documents into your system. Aside from having to retrain employees, having to maintain two sources of documentation is a big no-no.

Already have a very straightforward excel import system. It's much easier to handle mass data entry in Excel anyway. Most people on manual systems usually have their checklists on an excel spreadsheet or word document anyway, so they just need to arrange their information and it's good to go in. Getting data in easily is definitely a high priority as once I have a customer, once they've invested in the system as long as I do my job it's money in the bank.

# ¿ May 23, 2012 14:23

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

This is the overview page of my web app. Basically it's a todo list for all the corrective maintenance, planned maintenance, expiries and service dates coming up. This is hopefully going to be one of the main sellers of the system, the majority of other systems force you to go all over the place to keep things updated, where as the goal with this page is to keep you there for all your upcoming work, no fishing required.

You can see everything in dated order of priority, click on it to see what you can do about it, and then you stay on the page when you've submitted the form. I'm hoping to figure out a clean way to do multiple items at once, as you can see you'd probably do all the replace light jobs at once and the details would be similar / the same for all of them.

Also, I jumped on the ProximaNova bandwagon as all the cool kids seem to be doing that.

# ¿ Jun 6, 2012 02:19

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

Just finished a redesign of the 'item' page for my web application. Not quite done yet, not pictured is the change log and major links which I still have to clean up, but I'm pretty happy with the amount of information I've managed to cram into this page without making it cluttered, at least to me anyway.

Most everything is in place edited with AJAX, and for anything heavier and unsuitable for that I use an inline form like on the second screenshot.

Just saw that typo too, ah well.

# ¿ Jul 8, 2012 12:58

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

Suspicious Dish posted:

and to stop abusing different font sizes and colors for the same piece of information.

Can you explain this comment for me?
The boxed items are tags rather just text, so that's the way I wanted to present them to make that clear. The Usage is a special case in that it is essentially your odometer for an item, and usually used for determining when maintenance is done. Basically once the usage has been updated enough it starts to put a monthly rate next to the amount, so rough predictions can be made.

Contextually it makes sense to me, and in how I'd expect it to be used by end users. Getting everything perfect is unfortunately something I'm (admittedly) not capable of, so I'd rather just get things serviceable so at the very least I can get my foot in the door with this thing.

That said, I appreciate the feedback. In the end of the day if this gets off the ground as soon as is affordable I'd be looking to shore up my weaknesses with a designer and developer and move myself to onsite customer and support, but until then I'm all I've got.

# ¿ Jul 9, 2012 07:57

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

I'm not so keen on most of these frameworks because they insist on putting style into html classes.

I've got a SASS framework I made that I need to get better with, basically in tthe root file I have:

code:

// GRID ESTABLISHMENT

$grid0_unit_count: 16 !default
$grid0_left_margin_ratio: 1 !default
$grid0_right_margin_ratio: 1 !default
$grid0_unit_ratio: 6 !default
$grid0_gutter_ratio: 1 !default

..and then in the layout files I put something like:

code:

@media only screen and (min-width: 600px)
  .application
    section.main
      @include clearfix
      section.focus
        +grid0_region(11,0,0)
        float: left
        margin-bottom: 1.25em
      aside.sidebar
        +grid0_region(5,0,0)
        float: right
        margin-bottom: 1.25em

+grid0_region breaks down to
5 columns wide, 0 columns & 0 columns for its margins.

You can also use
+grid0_region(5, 1, 1, ('padding_left', 'margin_right')) to make the left side padded and the right side margined.

+grid0_column goes inside a region, ie

code:

section.hello
  +grid0_region(5, 0, 0)
  section.sub
    +grid0_column(2, 5, 0, 0)

So there, a 2 column section is created inside the 5 wide region.

The idea here is I can do the whole thing in css, and I'm using percentages so I can scale up. I basically am trying to avoid fixed width design as much as possible. I need to get better about using my own tools though. I'm absolutely rotten at managing horizontal baseline too.

# ¿ Jul 9, 2012 09:53

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

Lumpy posted:

Hire / befriend a UI designer. As Suspicious Dish pointed out, there are a lot of usability issues in there. UI / UX is something everyone *thinks* they can do because great UI looks so "obvious" once you see it. Getting there is very hard, and takes training, experience, and some natural intuition (much like good programming.)

Yeah, this isn't really an option. As I've said earlier, I don't have enough to pay for anyone to work for me, and spec work is the devil. Thanks for the advice and the feedback, especially yours Dish. It highlighted alot of breakdowns in what my intentions were and how it was interpreted.

Some days I hate being self taught.

Maluco Marinero fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Jul 10, 2012

# ¿ Jul 9, 2012 23:04

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

excidium posted:

There's always the option of looking at website "themes", especially those of the admin variety. Might be able to fit your work into one of those for pretty cheap ($20-$45 range).

This is all nice, but I'd rather keep things in CSS and fix my failings from there, which most of these frameworks don't seem to operate by. Either way, I'm just gonna keep mashing away at it and learn what I can from criticism. Anyhow, a few changes I did last night, bit busy with other things though:

Reorganized a bit, information & maintenance are meant to be tabs, hopefully that's clearer now. Engines & Auxiliaries are tags for organization, not buttons, maybe that will be a little clearer now as well?

Also, there are too many icon actions for the component bar, but I just thought of a good way to reduce that heavily without making it hard to discover the functionality.

The replace item form is Inline but AJAX, so it's only there when a user asks for it. I didn't want to run with a Modal Box because it doesn't require full focus, and tends to be jarring if you make multiple items, do multiple actions.

Still plenty of work to do, and while it's disheartening to know I've still got so much work to do, the great part of web apps is that I can continuously improve it, as long as I'm not breaking user expectations too badly.

Anyway, I'll take my stuff to the Web Design thread from now on, don't want to distract from the cool stuff other people are doing while I'm trying to. Gonna grab a book or two as well.

Maluco Marinero fucked around with this message at 01:42 on Jul 10, 2012

# ¿ Jul 10, 2012 01:33

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

Yeah, the context is a bit different. This is considered more of an editing and review page, setting up the plan. The operating hours is a value that they can keep up to date on the overview page (not implemented yet, that's on this weeks sprint). This is fairly standard fare on ships, every day you do rounds and update your numbers. Instead of a paper form it goes on a computer. They only really have to do it weekly anyway. The meat of the action is in the overview page (last shot I promise, then I'll take it to the web thread):

This is a bit heavily populated due to me running and not updating some of my test data, but the idea is simple:

Everything you need to do is on this page. Your corrective maintenance, your expiries, services, planned maintenance, worked out based on the information in the plan. If you update your operating hours regularly and you have a planned maintenance entry that says 'Do so and so every 600 hours' it's expected date will be predicted and show up on this page when it's coming up.

Every action is dealt with on this page without a full refresh. You click on it, you choose to do something, dispose, replace, record service, record maintenance, whatever and it gives you a form. You do the form, then the changes are saved and it says in the line item, you can see four entries where I've already done this.

I need to make those completed entries more obvious though, use a bit of colour there, and there'll also be the option to Undo the action soon enough, the framework is there so I just need to hook the UI in to it.

The whole idea of this page is:
1. Give me a job to do.
2. Let me record what I've done.

Everything else is in support of editing the plan to make this page work. I should put some more context notifications on the edit page but I haven't figured out the right way to go about it yet. The main thing is some of these items can be complex, but some of them are literally just a name, category, and expiry date. I distilled the maintenance model down as simple as possible so the user won't have to treat things differently all the time, it's just a case of getting the UI to properly communicate it.

# ¿ Jul 10, 2012 06:16

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

Pfhreak posted:

Your usage of dates is inconsistent. For past due items you use "<number of days> days". For future items you use "<day of the month> <name of day of the week>".

So I go from 1 day overdue to 1st Friday. It's a bit jarring. Might want to go with a consistent <X> days on either side and perhaps include the day of the week on the next line or something. (Or maybe include the day of the week only for events within the next 7 days.)

Sort of, from my experience on ships, if you're overdue, you only care about how much you're overdue. If it's coming up, you care about when because you have to fit it in with your other work and the schedule of the vessel's operation. I could definitely format it better but I still want to maintain that style of dating the jobs.

Lumpy posted:

I spent 5 mins layering stuff on your revisions....

The main gist of what I'd chage / did change is:

** Good advice

As Gnack said, kudos to you for taking critique as a learning experience instead of hurf durfing away.

Cheers, I'll post a response to this on the web design thread once I'm done with some other stuff I'm working on. I figured hurf durf doesn't get me any closer to a release ready product, but engaging with feedback does, so it seemed like the smarter choice even if it dents the ego a tonne.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2012 00:33

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

Playing around with making a text entry based todo system, sort of trying to make it like GTD.

The idea is when you use it as a journal and a todo system, and the app automatically organizes what you've put in in the GTD style of next action lists, a hard landscape calendar and what not. Anyway, only just started, learning about AngularJS (a javascript MVC framework) which is heaps of fun to use.

Maluco Marinero fucked around with this message at 14:18 on Sep 10, 2012

# ¿ Sep 10, 2012 14:14

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

Volte posted:

I don't think the king and queen are distinguishable enough from each other. The defining characteristic of the king is usually the cross on top and the queen's is the spiky crown. They both look like queens to me.

Yeah, definitely. My kid of 3 can recognize the different pieces between multiple chess sets because the standard ones follow certain rules to identify pieces. The King should definitely have some sort of cross for it to be recognized as such.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2012 04:20

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

Yeah, I'm sure that looks better side by side with the rest. Now every top mark is different between piece types.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2012 15:06

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

SlightlyMadman posted:

There was definitely something to be said for checking out a book full of video games from the library for free.

edit: This was the poo poo, right here:

Aha, yep yep. First exposure to programming right there when I was 6.

# ¿ Oct 19, 2012 03:48

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

This is pretty cool. When would you say is the average age of your class? I'm becoming part of a homeschooling coop and thinking about whether I can do some programming with the older kids. (mine is 3 1/2 so a while off for him yet)

# ¿ Nov 4, 2012 21:31

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

I'm working on something a little more mundane, a task management and notetaking wob app using Getting Things Done methodology. The main thing that makes it different is a lot of the interaction will be based on plain text being parsed into calendar entries, new projects and tasks.

Anyway, a teaser with the parser is at https://elephantneverforgets.com.au, but I'm hoping to put together a cleaner demonstration with a screencast soon.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2012 01:59

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

Mug posted:

It's licensed for use, but you can buy it at https://www.abductedbysharks.com

edit: In case it's not obvious, that's the in-game music - it's not playing externally or overlaid. The little song-changer at the bottom-right is in-game.

Nice find btw, I just bought this guy's album, he's got good stuff.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2013 06:12

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

So I've been working on a personal organiser that uses Getting Things Done principles, it has note taking, calendars, projects and tasks. This is a proof of concept that is entirely offline based using HTML5. It'll cache the whole website so you can take it offline, and the only functionality you'll lose is the embedded Google Maps and Directions.

The unique aspect of it is how you enter information into the system. All input is done through the same text entry system, the app parses the text to turn it into calendar entries, projects and next actions. Here's an example:

It's not exactly conventional, which is why I've built a proof of concept to get feedback and see whether it's the kind of thing people would use. Personally I've been using it for real while developing it, and it feels pretty good being able to enter information without switching contexts all the time, and just see it self organize actions using @Contexts, #Topics and +Contacts.

I'm making the prototype freely available at http://elephantneverforgets.com.au if you want to have a play with it. At this point it's only Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, due to the storage medium I'm using to keep everything on the browser. That wouldn't be the case when I build a commercial release product.

# ¿ Jan 13, 2013 22:42

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

I made a short video for my GTD style web app, Elephant. You can try the thing out at http://elephantneverforgets.com.au too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApNYF0QAXTg

# ¿ Jan 30, 2013 14:17

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

Fruit Smoothies posted:

This looks super useful! It would be nice if it could link to an external calendar for mobile access (IE: GMail or Exchange)

Thanks!

At the moment it is just a standalone offline prototype with no central server. I'm not really certain I could use Google Calendar's API whilst keeping it like that.

My target product is a desktop web app like the one shown, a mobile focused web app, and a web server for backup and sync. Certainly look to hook into existing services for contacts, calendars, and so on where it's applicable.

# ¿ Feb 1, 2013 00:24

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

I've redesigned the front page for the productivity application I've been working on, called Elephant. Fully responsive now from mobile to desktop. Also put together a new video demonstration for it all.

http://responsive.is/elephantneverforgets.com.au

http://youtu.be/NLT0TlCm5SU

# ¿ Feb 18, 2013 23:14

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

I only remember it being brought up when talking about TDD, ended up on Peter Norvig's Solution vs a TDD approach that didn't understand the problem space well enough. Basically it boiled down to the fact that if you don't understand the concepts required, you can't brute force TDD your way to understanding them and it won't help you.

edit: \/\/ Ahem, thanks.

Maluco Marinero fucked around with this message at 06:51 on Mar 24, 2013

# ¿ Mar 24, 2013 04:12

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

Mug posted:

Digital distributors actually approaching me, instead of me emailing them 5 times to get any response at all.

edit: Well, I put it on Greenlight - http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=112030991
I'm really in over my head at this point, I can't stand that fact that I have to go to work tomorrow - I have so much poo poo to take care of and maintain now.

Good on you mate. And yeah, going to work will be a killer now, there's all this momentum you'll want to capitalise on now.

# ¿ Apr 4, 2013 11:58

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

Not much to look at but I'm putting together a little Offline Documentation Server in NodeJS. Type in the language, library and version, and where to get it from, and it keeps it organised.

Currently in can fetch zips, copy local directories, or use wget to mirror online directories.

Pretty pleased with what I've put together over this weekend, set it up with a way to locally search and I'll be Googling a whole lot less I reckon.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2013 16:03

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

Over the last week I've started writing an ORM for Javascript's IndexedDB and WebSQL.

This is the API so far: https://gist.github.com/MalucoMarinero/5519900
The only thing that needs to change for me to use one or the other is the name given to the initDB method. Pretty happy with this so far, working using promises has been very enjoyable once I got my head around them, made it very straightforward to put together some of the more complex stuff I found in putting together asynchronous calls.

# ¿ May 5, 2013 14:15

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 15:09

Maluco Marinero: Jan 18, 2001; Damn that's a
fine elephant.

Mug posted:

I write PHP all day at work and BASIC all night.

You win. Anyway it's moot guys, if you don't want to write a game because x reason, that's fine, but if you decide 'I work all day' is a reason not to get started, the game probably wasn't high up on your priority list to begin with.

# ¿ May 23, 2013 06:17

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Post screenshots of stuff you're working on!