In which a second week begins

Well, we've just had our app being designed for a week and two days now, and I'm still blown away by all that Alex can do when he's coding.


My contribution for the weekend was the icon - which presently looks like this (in various sizes):

It's been kind of fun (for me) trying to work out what we're doing for various images. We're trying to make it so as to have minimal borrowing from other sources, so all our textures and the image used for the icon of our app etc, are based off photos that I've taken and then manipulated.

As for Alex... well... we now have multiple libraries...

 

Which can be added to in a number of ways:

I'm thinking we're going to have to work out the layout of /\ this pop-up. Cancel should be down the bottom yeah?


The isbn button works as well as barcode scanning...
                               

(isbn search first, then continuous barcode scanning screen shot)

The latter is a part of the continuous barcode feature. From what we can see everyone else's app doesn't have this kind of feature. Which means once you have scanned a book you have another screen come up so you can (or rather have to) review/preview all the details of the book before selecting to scan the next item. Alex thinks this is too slow and so instead has created the continuous barcode scanning feature which has an overlay on the camera field show up for the last item scanned - in this case Terry Pratchett's Witches Abroad - but you don't have to actually review it then and there. That "Incomplete Library" from the earlier screen cap is where things go if the app can't actually work out the barcode.

Lastly there's this /\ Whereby not only can you sort by author/title (yeah we're allowing that for some reason)/genre you can also view books by the series they belong to.  Meaning that when you have 9 books out of a 16+ book series it's a lot easier than having to remember what you do/don't currently own. Anyone who doesn't think a series feature is important in a library app probably doesn't read enough sci-fi or fantasy ;)




And well it maybe wasn't such a productive weekend from my side of things, and yes Alex spent the weekend working on some kettlepotblack stuff, but I'm still proud of our little "baby".

Last post for the weekend... I promise

Really, I promise...


It's just exciting because today Alex has also been working on the libraries, and he's managed to integrate my still not perfect graphics too. And wow... I'm just blown away by what we've(1) managed to do in a single weekend. (A weekend where we even managed to do things around the house, and eat and sleep in and things like that!)

Well that's it for now...


(1) I'm still convinced most of the work is his, but I'll call it ours for now ;)

Needing a new name... and other issues

So I've mostly managed to get my bookshelf images up and running. They're not perfect... In fact there's two glaring (to me anyway) imperfections in each of them and I'm really not sure what tool (in photoshop) I can use to fix it. Can anyone else see the issue? Does anyone have some amazingly simple way to fix it?

I've also discovered today that there are other apps available - more than just the one I originally tried and disliked so much (which I think has the most negative reviews :P) - which do similar things. Including one called "MyLibrary". Which makes me think the name Alex and I came up with is a *little* too close. So we may need a new name.  Any suggestions?

Day 2 - in which I get frustrated and Alex does amazing things

So I got that pretty little bookshelf image up yesterday (see below), only to discover that it doesn't size very well so I've had to go back and start doing each "size" manually. At least I now know the process of putting the images together (i.e. what layers in what order) but it's still going to take a while ... especially because my computer apparently finds photoshop a little too intensive to support and tends to crash the program after an hour of me working (and not saving as I go).

Meanwhile Alex has got the barcode scanning thing down to a "T" for almost everything.  It even works when the barcode is partially obscured by the seller's barcode or the residue of the seller's barcode.

About the only thing we really struggled with was having one book's barcode return details of two books - two quite distinct books. (Unless somehow, unbeknownst to me, Tales of Beedle the Bard and The Appeal are actually the same book!)


So he's now onto the next thing. Showing details of items once they've been selected. Thank you to both Sharyn and Regi who spent this morning "listening" to me trying to work out what order the details should go in. As well as what those details should be.  Here's how it currently looks with cover image, title, subtitle and author details populated.

We've got several more things to fit in there still but it's exciting to see this start to come together. Hopefully there will be more to post soon.

Screenshots already

So already we have the first few screenshots coming through...


Alex's work first:
A screen from which he first started allowing look up by barcode. It looks pretty simple really, but this is where iPhone programs start before they become all pretty for the end user. I think he just wanted proof of concept...

So you press "Capture" it starts a barcode reader ... which is what the number displayed is... and it finds the book associated with that barcode. You can then either scan the next book by pressing capture again, or you can go to the "Third" screen (we'll get better names soon) and see all the books you've scanned in (at the moment this is only in a list format until my bits of "pretty-ing" get finished) with a picture for them.

We're not sure why but apparently some books have a couple of versions associated with the same barcode. Like two different language versions of Twelfth Night apparently :S

Also, I'm not trying to brag here (or maybe I am) but it's amazing how fast Alex already has this working. I'm definitely not that fast.

My work for the day has been this blog and this:

Which may not look like much, but considering that's not an actual bookshelf (it's the work of several hours with different textures in photoshop instead) I'm pretty pleased. Of course I'm going to need to keep up with Alex which may or may not be possible. He's already dreaming of a 3D library interface which sounds ridiculously daunting even if I do say so myself.

Where it all began

So, I'd been planning to compile a list of all the books Alex and I owned for sometime, to make it easier to know what I still needed to obtain when wandering through second hand book stores or life-line book sales or even places like Dymocks. And you know, I don't think it's just me who thinks this would be a good idea... my sister in law has tried to mention several times to Alex that he should develop something like this as have other people. But Alex said he had enough on his plate and suggested that there'd be plenty of people doing something similar and so it never happened.

Well, eventually we found an app. It cost - or rather could have cost - a couple of dollars, but Alex found a way to download it for free (legally mind!) so we started using it. Except that it's a little irritating... It adds books by barcode preferentially. Which is a problem for any pre-1980 book. (Or so our collection would suggest). The default sorting is by title. (Does anyone actually first sort their books by title? Before author or anything else?) The search feature only allows you to search by title - which means Foundation by Issac Asimov is practically impossible to find (amongst the "Foundations of modern blah blah blah" type books). It also would wipe out the title and year of publication as you went through manually entering details like the author's name (despite these two fields being at the top of the page and all).

There were other issues too, like how poorly it would import the photos of book covers you'd take (for those manual entries), but the thing that really made Alex frustrated was having to wait for it to load 400Mb for around 600 books.

So finally he's decided he can do better, and we've started working on it together... with me doing the graphics (and publicity - how did this happen O_o), and him doing almost everything else.

If you feel like leaving an opinion on what should and should not be included in such a type of app I'd love to hear it. I'd also love to know how people sort their books... especially if there is someone who sorts by title first...