mysiteonline™

It seems that the days of the librarian (as the field stands now) may be numbered. A new product dubbed "Wolfram Alpha", will be released in May (the Alpha) that intends to actually formulate answers to questions posed to it. They claim it's much more powerful than Google as it actually answers the questions, not finding possible pages that may have answers in it.

Source: http://www.twine.com/item/122mz8lst-4b/wolfram-alpha-is-coming-and-it-could-be-as-important-as-google

So it's been quite awhile since I've discussed anything about my little Adobe AIR project - with good reason, I'm a top-down programmer. If I don't know the language, I need to know enough to come up with a good plan of attack so that I'm not coding garbage that would have to be completely reprogrammed from scratch 2 months later (6 months? ...well...). In that end, I've been trying to find good documentation. The Adobe site had the v1.1 runtime documentation, but I couldn't find the newer v1.5 runtime docs. The library system had a book or two, so I took one out. It wasn't that great. Our library got one specifically for v1.5. It was better, but still not quite what I was looking for (though it made some more basic things easier to understand).

Eventually I found the v1.5 runtime documentation on Adobe's website. It was 433 pages long, in a compiled PDF. Yay. I fall asleep after reading two paragraphs. "This won't be easy," I thought to myself. Well, approximately 200 interruptions later, I finally finished the documentation and I've finished a basic mockup for the user interface. I intend for it to be (upon application instantiation) automatically positioned at the user's bottom right viewport. We'll probably set it in the Program's menu Startup folder.

Example mockup image:

Note: The hover property of the button is not set in this mockup (I rushed a little), and Safari's rounded corners (Adobe AIR uses a version of WebKit for it's HTML rendering engine) are much cleaner than Photoshop's.

So, after an interruption of work, first with attempting to fix a core bug with CakePHP to help fix a bug with my own application on our staff site (and failing miserably to create a unit test case so it's not yet fixed), and then being asked to create a Tri-fold pamphlet for a series that our library was putting on (with no knowledge of the series itself other than its name, and the 6 programs), I've been a little busy - oh, and holidays, traveling, and more traveling. (Gonna be out in Arizona for a week starting on the 17th.) Fun times, fun times. I am back to reading up on more stuff about Adobe Air. Our library just got the O'Reilly "Adobe AIR 1.5 Cookbook" and it does have some pretty good examples. Unfortunately, even though extremely confusing and too technically written, I think the official Adobe Help documentation is probably a more thorough resource for me. IT'S SO DRY.

Either way, skimming through the cookbook, I already found a few notes to jot down, such as how to access information about the current monitor's resolution in order to set the location for my application (when using AIRAliases.js with HTML/JS creation):

air.Screen.mainScreen.visibleBounds.width
air.Screen.mainScreen.bounds.height

...and there was a nice and easy example of how to use custom "chrome" with HTML/JS minimize and close buttons:

onClick="window.nativeWindow.minimize()"
onClick="window.nativeWindow.close()"

I've got the internal SQLite chapter bookmarked and may take a quick look at it later if I ultimately decide to deal with network failure to the production DB store or not.

So I've been asked by the Adult Services department head to come up with a means to retrieve and store statistics for "Questions Answered at the Public Service Desks". Currently, they're using a pen and paper approach from a template created in Microsoft Word. Each staff member (reference librarian) at the desks (currently using the paper document) has to print out one sheet per day (therefore, the Reference Desk has 2 sheets each day, Information Desk has one sheet) and will tally (slash slash slash slash, cross) the number of questions asked, separated by hour(s) (9-11, 11-1, 1-3, 3-5, 5-9). There's also a section for notes such as "We need the following items...", "Interesting Questions", and "Suggested books/items to order".

He mostly wanted a way to reduce the paper trail and become more "green". All those papers are then returned to his desk at the end of the day. He tallies the results at the end of the month. That's approximately 3*5*4 = 60 full pieces of paper to go through to count (by hand) all of the stats, as well as read (all at once) the comments and/or notes. Granted, I don't know if he keeps a running tally (one would hope), but either way, that's a lot of unnecessary work.

Since other desks/departments may find this useful, I've extended the schema in the database that will hold the information to account for that. Although it can all be managed via a web page (and is currently working as such in skeletal form -- thank you, CakePHP and 5 minutes of time), I've opted for a better solution. Since it'd be unruly to require a webpage to be open at all times, or dealing with load-times on a webpage from a favorite or desktop shortcut, I'll be developing a dynamically created UI using Adobe Air to allow for a desktop application. All it will require from the staff member is to either click on a button (and then verify -- requested from the department head), or fill in a text box. Upon installation the application will verify which public service desk it is at and use that information from then on.

The department heads in charge of each service desk (in case any other departments wish to use this) will then be able to view reports and statistical data from a staff intranet page, as the database will be maintained on our webserver. I'll probably integrate it with Open Flash Chart like I did on a personal project - it turned out really nice looking and was easily stylized (with a little understanding of its settings).

Hopefully when all done I can post some screenshots of the first draft of the final product. It's meant to be very simple, but nice with features...we'll have to see if I deal with connection issues to the database (as Adobe Air also has a local file store and can check on server responses). Either way, I have a lot of reading ahead of me on Adobe Air now that the database schema is complete. The statistics will come last...but we should have hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly break downs.

I had some fun mixing a couple different JavaScript technologies and web services together to create something "interesting", and helpful for our Children's Room.

Introducing the Saratoga Springs Public Library's Children's Room Photo Gallery!

For the services, I am using Google's AJAX API to serve up my jQuery library, rather than me having to deal with keeping it upgraded and gzip/compressing it. You can read more about it here. For the photographs, I am using Flickr, as many other libraries do. It was one of the easiest and quickest that I could use with a nice desktop-based management tool that also didn't hog network bandwidth while searching for new photos (ala Picasa, or Microsoft Live Photo Gallery). Now staffers in that department can create their own photo sets (or photo categories) and manage their own images.

For the JS effects, I am using two separate libraries. Since I'm using Google's AJAX API to serve up jQuery I'll start with that one... I'm using ThickBox to show a larger version image of a thumbnail when clicked on. The nice things about Thickbox is that (1)it integrates with the other script I'm using, (2)it automatically resizes the images to fit (if too big for the viewport), and (3)is very versatile in its use of modal dialog support. The other library I am using is something called "ImageFlow" written by Finn Rudolph, which is one of the best JS-based CoverFlow implementations I have seen. The Official ImageFlow website isn't as fancy as someone else's implementation, so you may wish to check out the version that also has YouTube integration, and automatic rotation/slideshow.

I know there's currently no way to get from that page back to our home page or other areas of our website. To be honest, I'm not entirely concerned about that at the moment, I have many more pressing non-web-related projects of higher importance (at work) to work on, unfortunately.

Update: Apparently ThickBox is not being fired with the newest photoset, and I'm not sure why...it worked before a staff member updated the textual descriptions of the images, because I tried it. No idea why it's not working now - anyone have any ideas? :P