Entries from February 2007 ↓

I am having a blast writing some of the things in kiosk. I have put in a few things, I am fairly certain no one has done before. The use of AJAX is completely written throughout the application and it has allowed the application to be placed on a level like no other.

For example, imagine having the ability to upload 1000 images for all of your products using cpCommerce or a different cart variant. You would have to upload them individually. Now, take a look at how kiosk handles it.

Let’s take a look at the Kiosk Image Area located in the Administration Area. This area has many options, but look at the intriguing “Find FTP’d Images”. Now that is what I am talking about!

Now, this is the folder where the images are stored in Kiosk. Look carefully, and you will see a folder named “FTP”. This is the folder where your 1000 images should be uploaded to.

To show you that this works, I have placed over 600 images in the folder! I realize that isn’t exactly 1000, but it should be enough to prove it will work with 1000 as well. Now, that I have the images placed, I need to head back to the Administration Area to complete this process.

Back in the Images Administration Area, I clicked on the “Find FTP’d Images” and this is what you will be presented with! Now realize, only one process of this is able to run at a time. So if you have 4 people updating the store, when one person runs this command, it will prevent the other 3 from running it too. With that said, the process also checks to see where in the process it is. For example, it checks every few seconds to see if it is finished inserting the images, or if it is still running. Now, I know what you are thinking. What about the Time Out Limit in PHP? How do you get around that? Well that is my secret and you can’t figure it out unless you pull down the Source Code from the SVN Repository.

Finally, when it is all said and done, you the user are prompted with this final screen. The process is complete.

Upon clicking on “Close” it will reload the page to show all of your images now listed within the application. That’s it! It doesn’t get any easier than that! Feel free to comment and leave your remarks, as this is going to make kiosk stand out from Joe Smoe and you got my word on that!

Okay, so I attempted to install Windows Vista in my VM (Virtual Machine) and had nothing but issue after issue. A friend of mine gave me a copy at Christmas and I am fairly certain it isn’t legit, but I thought I would at least give it a try for 30 days, or so I thought. It seems Vista had other ideas and did not want me to run it, so I say cool! I wasn’t all that enthused about using it anyways.

Anyways, I am sure there will be a day when I will have to use Vista, either at work or fixing someone else’s PC. But today was not the day and tomorrow isn’t looking good either. In fact, I highly doubt I will see myself installing Vista on a PC anytime soon.

Ever have a day just full of idiosyncrasies that it just drove you mad? Try having a few days of it! The bridge piece I have talked about in previous posts has had its’ fair share of these. In fact, today it just showed me one more that drives me insane.

Take this for example. Let’s say you want to collect a person’s name and possibility two people’s names. How would you do it? If it were me, I would have a text field for the first name, one for the middle initial, and another for the last name. Thus I know if their first name is two words, their last name is two words, or maybe it is just normal and its “John H. Doe”. Nonetheless, I would know which words correspond to each part of their name.

The software, of whose communication I am bridging does not do this! No, they have a single text field that is free form. So you could type “J Howard Doe” or “John H Doe” or “John Howard Van Nilsen” or “John Nilsen and Cindy Nilsen” and it would accept it. What I am supposed to do with this? Notice the last example! This is how they are supposed to enter two names… Am I just totally crazy or is this the weirdest UI you have ever heard of?

Now, I have done a fairly good job at figuring out the names, and it works probably 98% of the time, and can’t really account for the other 2% because of the crazy way the names were entered. Now, the biggest idiosyncrasy of this whole ordeal, is there is another part of the UI that has a ‘name’ entry too. You would think the software would handle that ‘name’ entry the same as the first part of the UI. BUT YOU WOULD BE WRONG! No, it handles it entirely differently and just throws my world in a whirlwind as I try to figure out what to do with this data. For example, if the user entered in “J Howard Doe” on the first screen and “J Howard Doe” on the second, my piece receives the following: Data from First Screen: “J Howard Doe”, Data from Second Screen: “J H Doe”. WTF!! Why the hell was it handled differently?

Welcome to my week.