After a long hiatus due to job commitments, I can happily say UR!KA is finally live. Any questions please feel free to tweet us at @urika_app or use the feedback system we have running. Changes won’t be instant but we will keep a log.
And last of all get uploading, either using the upload page or using the Chrome extension. The content has to come from all of you, we can’t wait to see what you share!
Initially, UR!KA will be invite only, with each user being given new invites at regular intervals. Please note this is not due some sort of elitist mindset. Due to time constraints for maintenance and uncertainty on how the site will cope with larger amounts of traffic, I’ve decided to keep some control over the user base until I can put some research into hosting, use of the cloud etc.
Any questions feel free to get in touch contact@urika-app.com.
In better news, I received my mark for the project, 85%! So that means it nearly time to launch. Some further bug fixes will go up this weekend, then hopefully within the next two weeks I’ll have it live. Follow @urika_app for updates.
Another small update on the status of UR!KA. All work is in, now I’m just waiting on the marks to make any changes to the online system. I have a local copy which I’m using to fix bugs, add features etc, that should hopefully translate smoothly to the live site. The expected date for the marks is June 10th so from this point on I’ll be really pushing for the live site to go up.
The photo shows a new context menu, making the process of adding image or moodboards slightly simpler, as well as the new invites tab. I’ll be covering the process of invites in a later post, but basically I’ve enabled it as a measure to test my hosting and sort bugs in the beta before I release it to the public.
Exciting times!
Despite not being able to touch UR!KA till the project is marked in June, I’ve already made a list of improvements to make as soon as I possibly can. These mainly concern design fixes, such a thumbnail size, as well as completing some parts of the project that got sidelined due to deadlines, such as browser extensions for browsers other than Google Chrome.
The eventual plan is make complete finishing touches and invite beta testers to give the site a good run through. The fact this project still excites me even after working on it for a year is encouraging, driving me to get UR!KA out there into the web community as soon as possible.
Nearly a year on from starting work on this project, I’ve handed in the codebase. The only thing left to do now is a) pray that no-one finds the site and tries to break it, and b) write the report and user manual. I have an astonishing amount to cover so the difficulty will be being concise.
And finally, once the project has been marked, I will release a beta version of the site into the public for some serious testing. And then quickly onto looking for better hosting!
3 days to go and things are so far looking good. Usability testing is complete, I’ve a few more bugs/features to work through, three video tutorials to record and finally, like a monolith against the horizon, IE8 testing. I’ve already added a warning to the page since the site’s coolest features will SIMPLY NOT WORK in IE8 due to it being so behind the times.
That said, hopefully my target audience of web developers will be very aware of the lack of features in IE8 and not use it to peruse the site. IE9 testing should be interesting though.
Just finished the Google Chrome extension today. An interesting and arduous task to say the least, but ultimately rewarding.
Tomorrow I will finish writing up the FAQs section, the browser testing plan and usability testing sheets.
9 days to go.
23 days to go! I’ve implemented quite a few new features since last time, and also ran into some strange and unusual bugs:
- Moodboard system is now up and running, and is successfully intergrated into the rest of the site (search, favourites, comments). One interesting issue I’m having is the speed of my live server affecting the loading times on the moodboard. There is a lag between pressing the button to add an image to canvas and it actually appearing. Since I built the site on a localhost initially this was never an issue, but on the live server since the JS loads the image from a source this HTTP request takes time, which varies greatly. This issue also occurs on the moodboard edit screen. Javascript is not a sequential language, meaning I had to use setInterval to make sure as the loop was running to load the images they were arriving in the right place regardless of filesize. I will be looking into making use of the load() function in jQuery to get round this probably.
- Made use of mySQL’s UNION function to create a search function for both images and moodboards, pretty nifty. Also created AJAX pagination for user profile pages which worked well (locally at least).
- A lot of tidying up pieces of design and code, making sure everything sticks to MVC structure.
With not long to go I’m focusing on getting all the nitty gritty out of the way, such as content pages, FAQ and video section section, before I even attempt the browser plugin I mentioned in the last post. After more research I definitely believe this is feasible for Chrome and FF, maybe even Safari, but IE not a chance, I dont have time to be dealing with ActiveX or Java applets right now, maybe if the future.
I will post another video of the new features soon enough. Watch this space!
Things are going fairly smoothly with 5 weeks to go. I’m hoping to do all the usability testing a final testing myself within the last two weeks. But the workload still looms pretty large:
- Finish Moodboard system
- Update the rest of the site to match this (favourites/comments/search)
- Tutorial videos + Content Pages
- Any final touches to the design that need doing
- Browser Plugins
The last one is an issue I could spend 5 weeks on alone. There is no one method that works in all browsers to allow a user to crop part of a site and send it to UR!KA to upload, so at the moment I’m looking at ActiveX, Java, perhaps even Python. Ideally I’d like a virtual machine like xBrowse or BrowserShots.org which I could use but no dice with that. The long slog continues.
At least I managed 90% in my presentation!
The second part of the presentation part of the module involves showing off a working prototype of your model, which I did today, in week 14/22. Very positive feedback, and some more aspects to add to the to-do list (currently at 300 lines). Can’t really ask for me much more! Onwards and upwards with the development.
