Entrance to Office

The couple of days before we officially moved in we brought equipment over and Jennifer, Ray, Emmett, and I got the new desks built, painted the walls, put up decor, ran networking, etc. Thursday was our first official day over there and we’re getting settled in. I can’t wait for our first full week over there… should help us all be more productive and improve our communication with each other and clients.

Left: My desk ~ Right: Ray's Desk

Ray and I occupy the front room of the office. We’ve got our desks facing each other and have all the power/networking stuff between them. Not that pretty, but a reasonable solution for now. I think we’re going to put a printer against the wall under the “square” on the wall.

My desk, desktop, laptop, etc

I have created my little corner. Emmett bought chairs and desks and monitors. I brought one of my spare desktops over to use for the time being and I’ve been bringing my laptop for…. well I don’t really know what… I just find it’s useful to have two computers sometimes

Kermit's Office

Emmett got the back office…there are a couple of chairs for clients on the opposite wall.

Contents of my top drawer

This is Tiffany’s favorite part. The contents of my desk drawer. CDs, network tester, tools, and a stash of taco sauce in case I get lunch one day and want some taco sauce. Not sure why that’s so hilarious, but she insisted on taking a picture.

Index Page.... simple, no nonsense. Also -- Boring

I had some idea of what was going on since I built a small .mobi site for this company last year geared toward the iPhone/iPod Touch. It turned out OK, but was nothing I really felt stood out. It works, but I honestly don’t think it gets much attention. I’d like to revisit it sometime and make some improvements with what I’ve learned on this project.

Date and Nights Selection

The site will not be available outside of this office, but I’ve got some screenshots AND A VIDEO showing off the functionality. I’m not much of a designer, so it’s not as pretty as it could be probably, but it works I think. I’ll post a couple of the fun jQuery stuff I found/did as well. I think the most instructional and entertaining part was modifying the jQuery quicksearch plugin from www.rikrikrik.com to be able to use an on-screen keyboard.

And somehow I don’t have a screenshot of that…will update later

Rather than creating a separate keyboard and try to tie it into the event handling for quicksearch, I ended up extending the plugin, adding new functionality through the options passed during the .quicksearch() call so the keyboard was fully integrated. It took some trial and error, and it likely could be done “better”, but it works, and functions great.

$('table#cabin_names tbody tr').quicksearch({
				position:'after',
				attached:'#uber_wrap',
				labelText:'',
				inputClass:'sel wide',
				watchElement:'li.alpha_btns',
				keyboard: true,
				keyboardId: 'alpha_btns'
			});

The ‘watchElement’ option is the elements that should trigger the qs() function in quicksearch. ‘keyboard’ defaults to false, but when set to true, it renders the html to insert the keyboard and bind the events to do the proper stuff. ‘keyboardId’ just lets you define the element Id so you can style at will. This extension of the plugin likely has no real use beyond sites designed for touch screens, but it was still educational, and was an interesting introduction to plugins in jQuery. I’ve never written my own, but if I find some functionality I need in the future, maybe I can break into that field too.

# of Guests

Anyhow, there’s not much else to say. This site was designed specifically for this screen, specifically to run in Firefox, specifically in Fullscreen mode. If I had more time I think it could be made to be a bit more flexible, but I suck at CSS, and I just didn’t know how to make a few things flow fluidly on different sized screens. Enjoy!

kiosk_demo

List of cabins available for selected dates and # of guests

One of the other really fun things to write/integrate was the scrolling buttons. I realized after the initial design that having regular scrollbars just wouldn’t be usable with a touch screen interface. Theoretically I could have altered the Firefox userContent.css to enlarge the scroll bars to the point they would have been usable, but that just didn’t feel right. Once again, though, jQuery plugins to the rescue! I found a nice little scrolling plugin that allowed me to bind relative scroll positions with easing to click events on the fixed-position nav-box on the right side. Not sure I’m thrilled with how it looks right now, but at least it’s functionally complete. Can always tweak it down the road.

Fun screen to write. "Buttons" are actually labels for hidden checkboxes. jQuery styling changes make it look fancy

Individual cabin page...small photos are clickable to rotate through pictures

So I poke around the ubuntuforums.org forums for a while and invariably takes me 15 minutes to find a post about what I remember as being a very easy process, but can’t recall the steps.

Well here they are for Karmic:

1) In Software Sources add the “partner” repositories and let the package manager update

2) In a terminal, run “sudo apt-get install adobereader-enu”

3) Open your PDF’s in Firefox again.

Really Ubuntu is getting quite good. 9.10 is the best yet, although it seems there is always some stupid regression to get around.

For me this is mount points that use fuse. Nautilus tries to automagically detect these mount points and add bookmarks in the left menu. Problem is when I’ve used a script and fstab to automatically mount these points when the network comes up, there’s now 2 entries in the Nautilus menu, and the auto-generated one pops an error whenever you click on it that fuse cannot mount that point as there is already something mounted there. *GRRR* But I haven’t poked around for a fix yet. Both the desktop and laptop do it though, so I don’t think it’s too obscure an issue. But again, this worked perfectly in Jaunty (9.04)….why the regression? The overall system doesn’t improve if you make progress in one place, just to fall behind somewhere else.