Last night…

… I stayed up with Json, Ajax and jQuery. The least cool people on the planet (I’m a geek - we’re talking programming here.) Oh and Dave, friend who actually knows this stuff!!

My original prototype worked <JUST> but was a bit buggy; and so the whole thing has now been reworked. Originally the speaky software updated the text box while ajax was making constant checks for any change. This was not exactly good practice and may well have been slowing the ipods browser. Instead of doing this, I now have reworked the back end of the project so that an ajax call is only made when a change in text is detected. This is written to a text file, given a unique id and stored phrase by phrase (as opposed to by word which was the method of the original prototype). This means that we are no longer losing data in the conversation, and gives me complete control of the subtitles; without losing words that originally were in danger (believe it was a 40% chance) of missing being ‘read out’ at all! Oops! I now have the ability to test the number of words to remove against the time the display takes to show the subtitles without worrying about the process behind it.

Tonight I am setting up the ‘sprite’ images for control over the typography. I am then integrating the whole process into a web app with the option to change elements of the display. This will help with testing and demonstrating back to users. Quite enjoying the prospect of having a working project!! I am also rewriting the effects used in the display of the typeface: so that each letter has the effect attached, giving me the opportunity to play with different fade rates in an attempt to make the display more suggestive than definitive.