Project Updates

This is been a very progressive week. Plenty of coffee, late-nights, and more importantly: Learning!

1. RSS feeds from www.weather.com were parsed. These feeds were previously generated from a php scripts.
2. The xml file is accessed through Asynchonous requests (hence Ajax) such as http_request
3. XML processing using Javascript functions retrieves the specific strings
4. The string is further parsed to extract only the valuable data (i.e. date, weather)
   
5. The string is displayed a an element added to the calendar

To do:
1. Improve display of data
2. Design stylesheets for pop-ups

web 3.0?

Berners' Lee's comments on yet another .com boom. Only this time, its not a bubble.

Project Update. The Week after Sun God!

Its hard to imagine what web-developers would be doing without Firefox! The past week had some progress with the functionalities being documented. There was a brief discussion in the meeting today on how much of it we can complete. So now we have a set of minimum requirements that would established a proof of concept. Even if we are not able to incorporate "Weather collaboration" whereby locations across "My Calendars" and "Others Calendars" are displayes. We will be able to fullfil the requirements of "My Locations" i.e., weather for locations found in "My Calendars". Took me 2 days to complete the document, although it could have been done faster (Yeah if there wasn't Sun God!). Hoping Erics gets the documentation into the wiki!

This week, Eric and I aim to figure out how the "Weather Box" can be contained inside "Event Box", while Kelly and Karen play around with the side bars and menus. I hope no one figures out our "secret location" of our meeting spot and all the cool gadgets that we use to make our meetings more efficient! (wink wink!)

Its all about User Interface Baby!

Firefox is the best product of 2005, followed closely by Gmail! Here you go:
Best products of 2005
by PC World

Famous Non-Google, non-Yahoo Ajax apps!

Meebo!

• Browser-based IM client supporing AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber and GTalk
• Simple and useful
• Requires no downloads
  

Periodic Table of Elements

• For Chemistry students!
  

Del.icio.us Director

• Would have been our ambitious class-project if they didn't come up with it before!
  

Kiko

• A general purpose online calendar
• Elegant interface and design
• API coming soon

Backbase RSS Reader

• Still in demo, but nice

Backpack

• To-do list, organizer and project manager

Amazon Zuggest

Time-Tracker

• Personal Time-management tool
  

S.W.O.T Team

The jury has spoken and the verdict is out! We have finally nailed down our project plan: Simulate the Google Calendar with Weather Alerts. After careful consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of both our options (Del.icio.us & gCAL), we performed a very business-like S.W.O.T analysis on both cases. These were my conclusions:

Online Bookmark Managers

Strengths
1. Good Visual Design and Interactivity will make the project successful
2. Very user-oriented
3. Patrick LOVES the idea ;-)

Weaknesses
1. Stiff competition, with many people in and outside of class working on the idea
2. Lack of innovation in the idea: We aim to re-design the UI of an existing idea

Opportunities
1. Scope for understanding the nuances user-centered front-end and data-base heavy back-end.

Threats
1. Picking up several database technologies when we would rather focus on UI
2. People are already working on the idea in and outside of class

gCAL and Weather: SWOT!?

Strengths
1. Innovative and Exciting
2. Simulating the gCal interface is a valuble experience
3. Ajax style will be heavily used
4. Involves more Client-side design

Weaknesses
1. Working with the gCal API requires a lot of research
2. gCal is still in Beta Stage
3. The interface will only display the weather and would not enable the user to update events

Opportunities
1. We get to play around with gData
2. gWeather can be extended to provide RSS feeds to Google personalized homepage

Threats
1. Will be able to finish it on time?
2. Making the interface to look as close as possible to gCAL will be a challenge- as we would not like the user to get accustomed to two different designs

Homework III

Click Here for Homework 3

Need API?

Check this out!