April 30th, 2005
The other day I 'officially' launched a brand-new demo of the RIT Schedule Maker. In all, it's very very slick. It's a pure web application with zero server-side processing, all communication going straight from the user to the data source. Lots of Ajax, lots of XML - it's exciting. Doesn't work 100% yet in IE, but that's not my main concern, at the moment - my main concern was just getting something out for people to tinker with.
If you're interested in playing around with it, it isn't RIT exclusive, so feel free to hop on, plug in some courses, and see what happens. If that doesn't interest you, you can browse a collection of screenshots taken of the demo.
And now for the big news: I've made a big decision, this summer I will be putting all of my time towards launching the Schedule Maker and getting Juniper Bay (my company) off the ground. This is going to be a really big undertaking. By the end of the summer I will be launching a full-fledged scheduling application for use by students at a number of colleges and (hopefully) businesses. It will be completely free, have a complete API, you will be able to export your data into any known format, and will use all the greatest tech available in modern browsers. Once this quarter wraps up, I'm going to update the Juniper Bay web site, start a corporate blog going (detailing the advances that I make) and really get things moving.
Some things developers can look forward to:
- Completely open API and documentation
- (Pending) Open XML data set for external manipulation
- Lots of Open Source mini-projects (Ajax Authentication, Extensible REST API, screen-scraping scripts, etc.)
- Plenty of updates during the summer and upcoming months.
To say the least, the experience is going to be interesting. I will be working alone, doing all the planning, design, development, and customer support. Not that I haven't done anything like this before, but I just hope it works out. So, long story short, I'm really hoping for a lot of user input to get this off the ground. I'm going to be bouncing ideas through this web log and the (soon to exist) Juniper Bay one. Anyway, that's all for now, I'll keep everyone posted.
Tags: ajax, schedule, juniperbay, xml
7 Comments on 'Schedule Maker Future'
March 28th, 2005
At the last Social Computing Club meeting an interesting idea came up for discussion. We were trying to figure out what the easiest possible way to schedule an event could be. But in order to do so, we needed to figure out where people got their event notifications from, so I've compiled a mini-list.
- Email - A lot of people plan new events by email. Some of these even do it by attaching a new ical event to the email for the recipients to add to their calendar. Attaching an event is the most efficient way for the recipients to manage the event, not necessarily so for the sender. The proposed solution, by Jon Schull, was to simply forward the email that you received with a subject line of "Tomorrow at 8, Meeting with Fred" (for example)to a specified email box. This will automatically update your calendar with this event and attach the email as data. This is would be very easy.
- Instant Messenger - I, personally, plan a lot of events through AIM. Similar to the email solution, one could simply forward a new event to an AIM bot. An issue with this, however, lies in the fact that you don't have the prior conversation automatically attached to the event (for context).
- Web Sites - Browsing around web sites and spotting a new event (such as 'FooBar Concert, 8pm, July 1, 2005') is the final location, that I can think of, where an event would exist. To test this theory, I wrote a quick GreaseMonkey hack which parses through some selected text, looks for something representing a date, and returns the date in a properly-formatted time (you can check it out here). Note: It doesn't actually do anything yet, but hopefully will soon. It currently only supports phrases like 'tomorrow', 'yesterday', 'evening', and 'morning' - which are much much easier to find then all the possible date formats.
In all, it's an intriguing problem: Constructing some form of an interface through which users can most easily maintain their calendar. At least one feature that I would find to be intriguing would be if someone says to you "Are you available tomorrow evening?" your calendar application would be able to tell you what time to meet would be best. and maybe even what location? Anyway, it's all just a bunch of speculation right now, but the Lab for Social Computing is going to try hacking on it and see if they can take it somewhere. I'll be interested to see what the results look like.
Tags: date, event, greasemonkey, planning, schedule, time
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January 19th, 2005
The majority of my free time, lately, has been going into redesigning the RIT Schedule Maker, which I released two years ago, on the 29th. For the anniversary I'm planning on releasing a demo of the new application for people to play around with and get use to.
On a side note: I'm really enjoying designing web applications. Creating GUIs using HTML/Javascript is not too far away from Swing/Java (in my opinion), of course the difference in how it looks and operates is rather drastic.
The big change with this redesign is the fact that the entire application is in the form of a single page with changes being made by Javascript. Of course, this doesn't fair too well in older browsers, but it's a sacrafice that's going to have to be made. (of course, the number of people who actually use non-modern browsers is rather minimal) I've been trying very hard to make this version user friendly, hiding a lot of features and keeping the interface as simple as possible. (Which is a challenge considering the premise of the application.)
I just finished purchasing the hosting from an interesting company called Web Site Source, the cost was so minimal that it really doesn't matter if they're bad or not, I can always just transfer away later. I'm really excited, more details are coming soon.
Tags: db, javascript, perl, schedule
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