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LiveJournal
L
i v e J o u r n a l M o d s:
This was the first Danger Hiptop application I spent time with. LiveJournal looked to be a good place to practice skills with the new SDK, is a fine app to play with the Danger UI, and is a good example of a client/server environment for data logging applications. After getting to know the code and the Danger way of things, it was time to dig deeper. The first thing to do was fix the nasty date related bugs in the original SDK drop. With this fix, I was able to upload and download data records to/from the host. Danger has since fixed a couple of the bugs, but there is still an off-by-1 month bug lurking somewhere.
Next on the list was to begin messing around with the UI. For the data logging applications I have in mind, I needed more UI widgets. The problem of course is that the LiveJournal code has its UI elements hard coded. It was assumed a conversion to using the standard Danger resource format was left as an exercise for the reader, so I accepted the challenge. The various Danger wiki pages detailing the RSRC format were invaluable, as was the CalmRock sample code from Non-Prophet.org (see developer links) for its amazing use of pretty much all of the Danger UI elements.
The result of this resource conversion can be found in
(verified against SDK #6 44538):
http://homepage.mac.com/eric3/danger/livejournalmod.hqx
One oddity you will find is the unconditional use of the logged in user name in the edit view. The original Danger source would conditionalize out the user name if the user had access to only one journal. I have not had the time or inclination to address this minor issue, so I just gray out this UI element in the code when there is only one accessible journal choice.
I am still having trouble finding a particular UI element: A simple hour/minute selector to allow input of time deltas (a <how long since> or <how long until> UI. The only time related UI is a clock input which also gives AM/PM. I would settle for a 24-hour time input as my deltas do not need to be more that a few hours. If any of you have thoughts on this, send an email. I really need to ask this question on the Developer wiki.
After the LiveJournal conversion, I was able to add all
of the UI widgets I wanted, experimenting with UI layout
along the way. Here is a sample of probably the largest
.rsrc file to date:
Last Updated: 6/18/03