Simpleface Lives!
Simpleface lives!
Finally I've gotten a chance (well, incentive) to get around to adding the one crucial piece to the Simpleface wiki: file uploading. You can now upload an image or other small file (100k limit) to the web so you include those files in the page you're creating.
It didn't take that long to do once I got around to doing it... I actually thought about it on the bus quite a bit while going to and fro to work. Do I use the database? How do I make it somewhat secure? What does it look like? etc. Once I had jotted all those answers in my notebook, it was just a matter of sitting down and writing the code. (I'm my own software architect... ;-) )
I also got inspiration from the "minimalist" websites link that I saw earlier and redesigned the already simple design to be even smoother and more grey (that seemed to be the theme among minimalist sites. Less color too...) To add some funkiness to it, I rotate the colors of the logo to give it a little eye-candy even though the rest of the site is bland as hell.
For those of you who are just reading about it now, Simpleface is a project I started a few months ago after posting an idea to Slashdot and getting some good responses. It's a collaborative effort to design a set of User Interface Design Patterns for Open Source Software. That's a mouthful, but what it means is that we're trying to gather a set of best practices in UI design and put them in an easy to read/use format. When we have enough patterns, we'll roll them into a guideline and see if we can get OSS projects to start using them. Those projects that comply with the guidelines get to use the Simpleface(tm) logo. The guidelines are free, the process is open.
Everyone who hears about the idea likes it, so now it's a matter of building momentum and producing a document. The problem is that Alex arrived a few weeks after starting the site, so even though a bunch of us were exchanging emails and adding to the site at first, the project quickly lost momentum as people started getting busy with other stuff. I'm glad I have a chance to get back into it because I really believe this is a solution to the cruddy OSS software problem...
(Damn, my left shift key is breaking again... I just did surgery on it last week.. ugh! I know how to type, but it's the only shift key I use for some reason. Bad habits and long fingers I guess.)
When I get a chance, I'm going to publish the code to the Wiki software too. Again, it's in Java - I need to clean it up a bit, genericize it, use the HSQLDB (which rules) and wrap it up in a .war file ready to use.
Okay. It's like 2:15 a.m. I'm going to make one more pass at the BlogAgent. I think it's ready for another publication, even though not all the pieces are there. I'll post again here when It's ready to go...
-Russ