Recovering lost forms
Posted by Peter | Filed under Software
Here’s a problem we’ve all had: you’re typing something into a form on a webpage, and somehow, you lose it all and have to start again. This can be caused by an error when you submit the form (e.g. losing your Internet connection, or login session timeout), or by some other problem occurring, such as your browser or whole computer crashing. Even worse, it can happen if you just accidentally click the wrong button, and navigate away prematurely. It is absolutely infuriating, so I often copy the text to the system clipboard, or simply work in an offline editor, and save it often.
But what if there was a better way? Let’s say, a feature in your web-browser that will notice when you’re filling in a form, and regularly store a copy of what you’re working on… and not just in memory either, but persistently on the hard disk, so you can recover it even if your whole computer crashes. Sounds too good to be true? And as far as I know, it currently is… which is why I propose this as an idea for somebody to work on, or which I may implement myself sometime when I have nothing more important to do.
SLOODLE Presenter
Posted by Peter | Filed under SLOODLE, Software
I’ve just created and uploaded a new SLOODLE video, and this one is a kind of preview tutorial about the new SLOODLE Presenter tool which will be released in SLOODLE 0.4:
The purpose of the tool is to let you put together a presentation in Moodle, consisting of a series of images, webpages, and videos. Your students can then view the presentation in Moodle, or in Second Life. This is achieved by storing a list of URLs in the Moodle database, and then providing those to a script in Second Life. The object then fiddles with the parcel media settings to display the appropriate resource… so this requires that you either own the land, or that you can deed the object to the land-owning group.
This was originally suggested one afternoon at SLCC08… and being the crazy geek that I am, I skipped the parties that night (as I usually do anyway), and had the first prototype ready to demo over breakfast the next morning! 
Between research and other things, it has taken a while to get it to a releasable state… but it is nearly ready now!
There are a few caveats to mention:
- All resources must be hosted on the Internet (i.e. they have to be accessible by URL)
- Resources cannot be password protected (e.g. you can’t upload them into your Moodle course)
- Second Life only supports QuickTime and simple Flash videos
- Webpages in Second Life are non-interactive
We plan to release the first alpha version of SLOODLE 0.4 around the end of January 2009. Final release date is to be confirmed.
“Ball Drop One” — pinball without flippers
Posted by Peter | Filed under Games
Pretty much any pinball game you play (whether on the computer or in real life) has the flippers at the bottom which you can use to save the ball from disaster, and guide it where you need it to go… but it wasn’t always the way. Many versions of the game (particularly older ones) involve simply dropping the ball and hoping for the best on the way down.
“Ball Drop One” is an excellent pinball-style casual game, but there are no flippers in this one. You simply drop the ball (with some control over its size), and then largely just watch it interact with different pin-type elements in the game, such as circles which shrink or disappear when you hit them. There are some interactions you can do, almost all of which are exploratory… you just try it and see what happens. There are helpful hints which appear at the bottom of the screen too.
The graphics in this game are fairly basic, but the sound effects are well chosen, and as a whole it plays nicely. You gain points by making lots of bounces and gaining other bonuses, and more points unlocks more levels, so there is a good incentive to keep playing. There is a level editor too, although I haven’t tried that out myself.
A large amount of the game is effectively luck (unless you are ridiculously good at predicting complex bounces), which may frustrate some folks. However, it’s a really nice, quirky little game, which is worth a try. It felt a little uncomfortable to play at first, as you really go in blind and learn as you go, which goes against the grain for me a little! However, I’ve found myself going back to it and enjoying it… so give it a go!
Flickring into life
Posted by Peter | Filed under Websites
I haven’t blogged in a few days, so here’s a “filler” piece. My Flickr stream is, after a year of no use whatever, finally being resurrected… at least a little. I’m using it to post pics of my side-projects, such as the Slide Toggler, and Stackable Graph Cubes (the latter gaining surprising popularity, and prompting the development/request of some interesting spin-offs).
I also have a newly rejuvenated YouTube channel for hosting videos and tutorials of the projects, mostly to save me bandwidth! Getting quite a few views already… although nothing groundbreaking.
Aside from anything else, the pics and vids provide a bit more exposure for the tools… not so that I make money off them (because they are free and open source), but hopefully so that folks will find them useful, and maybe even learn a thing or two from the source code. Honestly. Fame isn’t my goal at all.
My avatar, on the other hand, is all about the fame… 
“99 Bricks” — cunning Tetris variant
Posted by Peter | Filed under Games
The classic game “Tetris” has been cloned and re-cloned myriads of times, with very little change in the basic concept. However, here’s one that is truly a great twist on the original idea: the objective of “99 Bricks” is actually to build your tower of bricks as high as you can.
At first, it certainly looks like a basic Tetris game, with the same basic shaped blocks falling, and you can move and rotate them on the way down. However, after a few shapes, you quickly realise there’s some differences here — firstly, full rows don’t count for anything… you just keep building. And second… physics! As you build your tower higher and higher, it starts to get less and less stable, and it starts to sway. You need to be careful to fill in gaps, and not put pieces in dangerous positions, in case they fall and take part of your tower with them.
Oh yes, and the title comes from the fact that you only have 99 bricks with which to build your tower. Mustn’t forget that!
I can’t say I found it addictive as such, but I think the concept is great. Graphics are really good, the controls/response are slick, and the physics is well implemented. The music is not wonderful, but it’s not bad either. All things considered, it’s well worth a try.
Sandbox Blox
Posted by Peter | Filed under Software
Kudos to Jesse Barnett (SL name) for creating this fun variant on my Stackable Graph Cubes. You can download the scripts for Sandbox Blox from Jesse’s wiki page, and checkout the forum discussion on Scripting Tips.
The idea is that you start with a basic rezzer block, and click it to begin. It will rez a white block for you, which you can move off wherever you want it. Another white block will appear over the rezzer — click it, and then click any face of the other cube, and it will jump straight to it. When you use a cube, another appears for you. You can use it to build up shapes by joining cubes together in various arrangements. I was never much of an artist, but I reckon I can do immersive cubism with this!
There’s lots of potential variations on the idea. I would probably choose to make it work by ‘growing’ your cubic construction from the root prim — you click a side, and it rezzes the next cube in the appropriate location. That’s less flexible though, since it’s more difficult to move existing cubes then.
Making Videos
Posted by Peter | Filed under Websites
I’ve been making some videos of Second Life stuff lately (tools I’ve developed, including the Slide Toggler and the Stackable Graph Cubes). It’s a learning curve, but I’m getting there, and I’ll likely have to make more soon to document the SLOODLE tools.
What’s involved? First of all, I need to record what I see on the screen, which I do using FRAPS — you can get a free version which lets you record up to 30 seconds of video at time, so I just do everything in 30 second chunks! That produces a bunch of ‘AVI’ files, which I then load into Windows Movie Maker, which I use to stick them together, with simple intro and ending title screens.
Still in Movie Maker, I record the narration to go with the video. That usually takes a number of attempts, and I’ve found it’s useful to ad lib it a few times to get a feel for the timing, then write down the script, and then record it for real. Different approaches work for different people I guess.
Next comes the music, which I typically get from the wonderful SoundSnap website. Unfortunately, Movie Maker doesn’t seem to be able to mix audio tracks, unless one of the audio tracks is already embedded in a video. The sneaky way round that is to render the video out to WMV (or whatever other format), load that back into Movie Maker, and add the music tracks (cropped to fit as necessary). Finally, it’s rendered out, and uploaded to YouTube for the world to see. I also like to embed the YouTube videos on the site at useful locations.
You can check out my YouTube channel to see my results.
Citation Lottery
Posted by Peter | Filed under Academia, Software
For the most part, I’m a big fan of Zotero. It’s citation management software which works as a FireFox plugin, and is great for grabbing all the citation data off a web-page. It can often also find, download, and index the full-text PDF for you, which is seriously groovy!
Anyway, yesterday I did a mini-haul through some HCI texts, and took note of a good looking article by Sussane Bodker, called “Creating Conditions for Participation: Conflicts and Resources in Systems Development” (from HCI 11(3), 1996). Unfortunately, today, upon opening the PDF file which Zotero had diligently downloaded on my behalf, it turned out to be “Out of Scandinavia: Alternative Approaches to Software Design and System Development”, by Floyd et al, from HCI vol. 4, 1989.
At least it’s roughly the same topic… 
It’s the first time I’ve seen this problem, so I’m not going to complain too bitterly. I just think it’s quite an entertaining approach to research: pick a paper… any paper… don’t let me see what it is… and I’ll try to review it blindfolded…
Oh alright… I’ll Twitter…
Posted by Peter | Filed under Software, Websites
I seem to remember encountering Twitter a couple of years ago, and at the time giving the sound judgement that it’s silly and won’t last. Who’d bother with a site which just allows a tiny bit of text?!
I failed to realise 2 salient points:
- Twitter is part of the larger “web experience”, so limited and simple functionality is actually a refreshing change
- Integration! (I’ve added mine to FaceBook)
On the integration front, here’s my Twitterific self in action:
Folks seem to be using Twitter for lots of things, and it seems pretty effective from what I’ve heard. If you can’t beat them, join them. Or at least attempt to thinly justify this as a “research exercise” in personally evaluating socially constructed and interaction-driven web resources. Or something like that…
