fluid-work IRC Logs-2012-03-28

Owned by Fluid IRC Log Bot
Last updated: Mar 28, 2012Version comment
20 min read

[09:56:18 CDT(-0500)] <Justin_o> yura1: for setting priorities in IoC, can i have a negative priority

[09:56:20 CDT(-0500)] <Justin_o> ?

[09:57:08 CDT(-0500)] <yura1> i think so

[09:57:15 CDT(-0500)] <Justin_o> thanks.. can i mix that with "last"

[09:57:25 CDT(-0500)] <yura1> i would step into code though to see what takes precedence

[10:06:22 CDT(-0500)] <Justin_o> yura1: thanjks

[10:06:24 CDT(-0500)] <Justin_o> thanks

[10:10:00 CDT(-0500)] <Justin_o> yura1: i didn't step through the code, but a quick test looks like last wins

[10:10:07 CDT(-0500)] <yura1> cools

[11:49:05 CDT(-0500)] <avtar> hey kasper

[11:49:44 CDT(-0500)] <avtar> i've made the required changes to the gpii wiki

[12:58:15 CDT(-0500)] <kasper> avtar - you're a hero!!!

[12:58:23 CDT(-0500)] <kasper> thanks a lot

[13:04:22 CDT(-0500)] <colinclark> michelled: Here's a fairly concrete example of schema.org's approach to micro data: http://schema.org/Person

[13:05:11 CDT(-0500)] <colinclark> Looks to me like the general approach is based on a proposed W3C Microdata spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/microdata.html

[13:06:56 CDT(-0500)] * clown toots own horn: http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/3.4/#rna11y.zoom-settings

[13:12:29 CDT(-0500)] <colinclark> clown: Yay!

[13:12:36 CDT(-0500)] <colinclark> I enjoyed seeing the dialog in Fedora 17 alpha

[13:12:41 CDT(-0500)] <colinclark> very nice

[13:15:03 CDT(-0500)] <michelled> thx colinclark

[13:40:52 CDT(-0500)] <avtar> kasper: np

[13:52:02 CDT(-0500)] <Justin_o> fluid-everyone: the community meetings is on now.. yura is talking about node.js

[15:09:20 CDT(-0500)] <travis_84> New to an irc but saw this project at GSoC and wanted to introduce myself

[15:12:43 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Hi travis_84, welcome

[15:13:07 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Which project(s) are you interested in?

[15:14:53 CDT(-0500)] <travis_84> Hi. Well the whole program itself is awesome, it hits close to home more and more

[15:15:24 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Glad you like it (smile)

[15:19:23 CDT(-0500)] <travis_84> but there are quite a few projects I want to help on (GSoC accepted or not). The one within my major is the ATutor chat redesign. But I am going big and studying up on something I tried with voice recognition; "Towards non-visual/accessible programming"

[15:21:28 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> travis_84 - that's great

[15:21:48 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> I was disappointed there had been so little interest in that project so far, which I am sure is one of the most interesting

[15:23:59 CDT(-0500)] <travis_84> it really is

[15:24:47 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> There's little enough work being done even in alternative visual methods of programming

[15:24:59 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Most people seemed to get discouraged after the 80s

[15:25:43 CDT(-0500)] <travis_84> especially with touch gestures becoming mainstream, gesture programming with possible voice support sounds possible

[15:25:49 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> You may be interested in this PhD thesis that was published in 92... http://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/techreports/ucb/text/CSD-93-726.pdf

[15:25:56 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> This guy is now at Oracle, but he is generally discouraged : P

[15:26:25 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> There is a little work at Microsoft in using the tablet form factor for some kinds of coding

[15:26:50 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> But it is mostly pretty simplistic stuff which produces lists of rules for actors in games to follow

[15:30:08 CDT(-0500)] <travis_84> hmm, I will add that to my reading lol. I think the first step would be to create a visual language to represent the programming functions and elements?

[15:30:46 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> travis_84 - it may well be easier to start with some kind of "visual intermediate", yes

[15:30:52 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Especially if you are a sighted user yourself : P

[15:32:16 CDT(-0500)] <travis_84> True, at least once we have a visual context we have a place to start for the hearing only too

[15:32:29 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Some other people who are interested in the project are Clayton Lewis, a professor here at CU, and T.V. Raman, a blind developer who is a research scientist at Google

[15:33:21 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> In talking to Raman, Clayton noticed an interesting idea he had, in treating elements of a non-visual interface as proxies for "queries" which you could say a sighted user runs automatically

[15:33:48 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> So he saw that Raman had made a system where he could play games like "Bejeweled" by use of these kinds of "queries"

[15:34:11 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> But an important part of the system is that the user could manage and edit this set of queries to suit their own use of the system for a particular task

[15:34:24 CDT(-0500)] <travis_84> wow, Raman sounds like a good person to talk to. thanks

[15:34:41 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Raman is very cool - although very busy : P

[15:35:10 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> But he's probably the person in the world who knows most about this kind of system in practice, since he has to use them every day

[15:36:13 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> And after this, you could perhaps bind them to hot-keys so you could play the game at a reasonable kind of rate after you got used to it.... "Find the first jewel in the column to the right of the cursor scanning downwards that is blue", for example, could be one of these kinds of queries

[15:36:26 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> But you might not be able to find out what kinds of queries you wanted until you had played the game for a bit

[15:37:14 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> So, this kind of thing could eventually be the basis of a system for producing "code"... but so far, any work you do on this will be a world first (smile)

[15:38:48 CDT(-0500)] <travis_84> all this said, i do feel extremely under qualified... I am going for it anyway, I have been self taught and learn fast. This is definitely something I want to be apart of either way

[15:40:09 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> travis_84 - you are already a world expert on the subject (smile)

[15:40:28 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> It will be great to have you involved

[15:40:48 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> So, this project of Raman's using "last generation technologies" might have some ideas which can be plundered... http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/emacspeak.html

[15:42:10 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> But of course emacs is based completely on the idea of streams of text characters as the ultimate abstraction for code... which ultimately isn't going to be good enough

[15:42:46 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Still, it is in some ways the "Rolls Royce" of editors, and some people feel that it's even a possibly sane approach to try porting it to the web : P

[15:42:49 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Such as sgithens here....

[15:42:51 CDT(-0500)] <travis_84> true

[15:43:08 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Still, the world of even traditional web-based IDEs is extremely wild and woolly still

[15:43:33 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> There are several solutions emerging at once, but they are all pretty shaky even at best

[15:43:44 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> There is Bespin, which became "ACE"....

[15:43:47 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> There is "CodeMirror"

[15:43:55 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> And there is IBM/Eclipse's "Orion"

[15:44:24 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> All of them are text-based, and all of them have serious issues even just as text-based IDEs, let alone environments that would enable more interesting kinds of structured editing

[15:45:14 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> I worked on a project with CodeMirror recently, and discovered it doesn't even have API support for helping the user to write syntactically correct programs!!

[15:47:05 CDT(-0500)] <travis_84> IDE's like Netbean, and Dr.java from Princeton have been quite frustrating as well since it ignores keyboard focus for windows magnifier for those not so blind

[15:47:42 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Almost all of these "baked-in" projects have no concern for accessibility at all

[15:47:54 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> So the web represents a really huge opportunity to improve the situation enormously

[15:48:23 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Especially if we can create a kind of "open architecture" where end users can contribute and share their own accessibility tweaks and "queries"

[15:50:30 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Here's a sample of Raman's writing style : P

[15:50:33 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> "On this theme, when once challenged by a proponent of a crash-prone but well-marketed mousetrap with the assertion "Emacs is a system from the 70's", the creator of Emacspeak evinced surprise at the unusual candor manifest in the assertion that it would take popular idiot-proven interfaces until the year 2070 to catch up to where the Emacspeak audio desktop is today."

[15:54:03 CDT(-0500)] <travis_84> hah

[15:54:08 CDT(-0500)] <travis_84> nice

[15:55:35 CDT(-0500)] <travis_84> the whole thing could be open like how games allow their games to be modded to fit the users preferences. code representations could be open to the user and how they feel it should be represented

[15:55:40 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> His "auditory icons" idea is pretty interesting

[15:55:53 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Yes, I think that's a really great analogy

[15:56:04 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> If you've played WoW, for example, you've seen that this "aftermarket" is completely huge

[15:56:17 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> There's a giant bank of keystrokes, icons, and scripts that every expert player comes to rely on

[15:56:55 CDT(-0500)] <travis_84> I have and I did that

[15:57:06 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> To the extent that if you HAVEN'T customised the game in this way, you can't actually expect to become a top player

[15:57:09 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> ha, cool

[15:57:18 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Thankfully I gave up once I got to level 60 (smile)

[15:57:19 CDT(-0500)] <travis_84> made macros to make keystrokes into single icons

[15:57:40 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> But I realised that I was going nowhere in the game unless I was prepared to devote really serious amounts of time to customising it

[15:58:08 CDT(-0500)] <travis_84> ya same

[15:58:34 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> But actually, now I'm playing "Skyrim" I am really missing the fact that I used to be able to have quick access to stuff

[15:58:40 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Although this was essential in a game that wasn't "stoptime"

[15:58:57 CDT(-0500)] <travis_84> and well I think i could contribute to a real world 'guild" right?

[15:59:07 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> But still, Skyrim is clearly designed for the console market, where there ARE no key bindings

[15:59:37 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Which is showing the kinds of ways that the move towards consoles and tablets is at least temporarily making things hugely worse for unsighted users

[15:59:48 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> I think you really could : P

[16:00:24 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Another thing Raman is interested in is ways of making touchscreens "audibly responsive"

[16:00:44 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> So that as you brush your finger over them, you get little "bumps and ticks" indicating when you have moved into an area which is active in a certain way

[16:01:06 CDT(-0500)] <travis_84> agreed, with kinect for pc. coding is not limited to that either

[16:01:28 CDT(-0500)] <travis_84> think of a motion based coder

[16:01:39 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> the possibilities, of Tiberium, are limitless! : P

[16:02:10 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> But so far, all things being equal, losing access to keyboards has been a huge loss for most unsighted users

[16:02:46 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> And that input modality is a lifeline to all kinds of other users as well.... those that depend on non-analog "switches and sensors" of various kinds, like puffer switches

[16:04:00 CDT(-0500)] <travis_84> eye tracking based communicators

[16:04:33 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Yes, could be great

[16:04:41 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Can Kinect do eye tracking?

[16:04:49 CDT(-0500)] <travis_84> sorry excuse me for a sec brb

[16:05:31 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Looks like it can, a bit : P

[16:05:32 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> http://www.kinecthacks.com/eye-detection-feature-of-kinect/

[16:20:09 CDT(-0500)] <travis_84> back

[16:22:43 CDT(-0500)] <travis_84> So Bosmon I guess a question I have is what is the expectation of the project?

[16:38:08 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Hi travis_84

[16:38:28 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Well, it's just a GSoC project (for now!)

[16:38:38 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> The expectation is that something reasonable will happen : P

[16:38:48 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Representing any progress at all on the underlying aims of the project...

[16:39:00 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> And hopefully something which might represent a useful basis for future work

[16:39:37 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> For example, one of the successful GSoC projects of last year, the videoPlayer, had its codebase adopted as the basis of the core Fluid videoPlayer component which we are working on today

[16:40:16 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Our aim in Fluid is always to build communities, rather than to necessarily achieve particular technical outcomes

[16:40:45 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Although achieving technical outcomes is always helpful : p

[16:41:10 CDT(-0500)] <travis_84> true

[16:41:59 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Given there is essentially zero work in this field so far, almost anything you achieved would represent a significant outcome (smile)

[16:42:50 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> An important area to look at, that we didn't explicitly mention so far, is the world of "dataflow programming" represented by environments like Apple's Quartz Composer, or "Pure Data"

[16:43:18 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Although these are incredibly immature, they represent the best efforts to date to move programming into a "structural" rather than a "textual" idiom

[16:43:57 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> But a huge amount of this is up to you

[16:44:28 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> You made decided that moving too far from textual programming would be too much of a leap right now, and you might want to look initially at more web-based equivalents of Raman's "emacspeak"

[16:44:33 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> You may decide

[16:45:18 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Or you may like to concentrate on the part of the system that manages the "social inventory", the "marketplace" or what you want to call it for "accessibility queries and solutions"

[16:46:25 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Here we are with the vague floor plan of what looks like a cathedral of about 120 years work : P

[16:46:38 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> We can start laying the first stones where we like....

[16:47:13 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Or, more usefully, where we first expect to be able to encourage engagement from others by producing partial solutions which let people get at least some early value

[16:47:35 CDT(-0500)] <travis_84> I mean I was thinking say I am able to make a basic "web app" that uses javascript to make or code an html web-page using gesture... is that a significant addition? it is a jump off point at least

[16:47:49 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> travis_84 - sounds like a great starting point

[16:48:11 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Even authoring markup is a significantly unsolved problem, even for sighted users with the best technology we have (smile)

[16:53:10 CDT(-0500)] <travis_84> alright I have a lot of reading to do and need to try and figure out what I am going to say in the proposal, thanks for your insights and for the added motivation and help

[16:53:40 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> it's great - looking forward to reading it!

[16:53:47 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Do keep in touch, here or on the mailing list

[16:54:23 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Hey Bosmon

[16:54:33 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Just giving your latest checkin's a test (smile)

[16:54:41 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Thanks for fixing so quickly btw.

[16:54:41 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> The wikipedia page is already a good jumping off point for resources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataflow_programming

[16:54:44 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Hey there NickMayne

[16:54:59 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Hope it works out for you

[16:55:11 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Will let you know in about 1 minute

[16:55:13 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> I found there were a number of timing issues in the 2-editor case, which are hopefully resolved now

[16:55:34 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> I gave a demo of the Fluid Inline editing stuff.

[16:55:42 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> That's awesome

[16:55:43 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> At the Orcahrd CMS Steering committee

[16:55:53 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Btw, I think it is pretty hilarious that you are in Richmond (smile)

[16:55:57 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> I grew up about 5 miles away from there

[16:56:58 CDT(-0500)] <travis_84> Bosmon - alright thanks, i'll be around

[16:57:06 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Richmond UK?

[16:57:10 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Certainly!

[16:57:21 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Cool travis_84 - catch you later

[16:57:25 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Wow.. where abouts did you grow up?

[16:57:43 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Chessington (smile)

[16:59:27 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Chessington world of adventures!!

[16:59:28 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> (smile)

[16:59:33 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Absolutely

[16:59:37 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Although it was CHESSINGTON ZOO in those days

[16:59:49 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> I remember a SCHOOL TRIP to see the FLAMMINGOES....

[16:59:56 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> llol

[17:00:59 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Works perfectly btw Bosmon!

[17:01:21 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> That's splendid!

[17:01:38 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> I noticed there was a remaining error last night if you start a 2nd edit before finishing a 1st one

[17:02:04 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> If you tried to "cancel on blur" only the first one would cancel

[17:02:13 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> but this turned out to be yet more offensive iframe-based malarky

[17:02:18 CDT(-0500)] <codercube> are mentors online? should I submit a proposal on the GSoC website, or should I send it at first to the atutor email?

[17:02:31 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> codercube - I think it's cool to submit on the website

[17:02:39 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> You can edit it their later if you have some further ideas

[17:03:25 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Ah yes, I noticed some wierd Save, cancel, save etc issues too

[17:03:38 CDT(-0500)] <codercube> Bosmon : thanks

[17:03:45 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> They seem to be fixed now whcih is awesome (smile)

[17:04:41 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> I have one or two more issues, would you prefer I log them in the issue tracker?

[17:07:41 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> NickMayne - definitely

[17:07:44 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Did you manage to get an account?

[17:07:49 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> No

[17:07:50 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> I'm not sure how our JIRA is working at the moment

[17:08:03 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> We are in a bit of a state of infrastructure flux right now

[17:08:12 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Oh right

[17:08:19 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> just out of interest

[17:08:20 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> The guy to talk to is named "avtar"

[17:08:26 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> The Fluid group

[17:08:31 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Yes, them

[17:08:33 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> are you all working at universitys?

[17:09:01 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Or are you just a group of guys working on this in your free time?

[17:09:27 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> ha

[17:09:50 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> The majority of the Fluid team is based at OCAD in Toronto, the Ontario College of Art and Design

[17:09:57 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> But like the Black Bank, we have branches everywhere : P

[17:10:05 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> lol

[17:10:09 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Personally I am sitting in a basement in Boulder Colorado...

[17:10:22 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> But we have a number of collaborators in Europe and across the US too

[17:10:48 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Thats very cool, I wondered how the team was made up

[17:11:01 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> https://orchardinlineediting.codeplex.com/

[17:11:08 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> How did your demo go?

[17:11:19 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Thats where I have published the Orchard Module for inline enditing.

[17:11:23 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> editing*

[17:14:06 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Demo went well

[17:14:22 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> One developer on the Core Orchard team doesnt want it

[17:14:44 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> he wants more of a modal editor

[17:14:55 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> that sits above the content.

[17:15:07 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Well, he is clearly a rotter

[17:15:35 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> haha, well he has a big say....

[17:15:37 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> No user enjoys a modal interface

[17:15:43 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Yes, sadly developers often too (smile)

[17:15:53 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> As we characterised on your first visit : P

[17:15:57 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> I know I know..

[17:15:59 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> well

[17:16:10 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> What he talked about was the way Drupal currently does it

[17:16:14 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Sure

[17:16:22 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Developers usually just do these things through sheer laziness

[17:16:32 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> And in the end the laziness becomes enshrined as a "standard"

[17:16:48 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> It's why Windows became full of 1300 little dialogue boxes

[17:17:09 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Fair point.

[17:17:09 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Writing a modal interaction, as a developer, guarantees that you never need to THINK (smile)

[17:17:37 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> one other thing that came up was another dependency on a 3rd party

[17:17:47 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Sure, well

[17:17:54 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> If you don't like the way we are going, just fork our code (smile)

[17:18:08 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> They felt nervous that it was a patch upgrade.

[17:18:11 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> As you saw, you could patch up the stuff relatively easily to take care of things you didn't like

[17:18:20 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> I told them, nothing to worry about for the time being

[17:18:24 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Well, it's a fair worry

[17:18:57 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> you can be pretty sure that i) this stuff will be getting into our next release, and ii) that we will still be here some years from now : P

[17:18:59 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Well.. I said that the support I have had from the Fluid community has been second to none which is one of the key thinks i look for in a 3rd party module

[17:19:22 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> They understand that

[17:20:07 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> I also said that I have only really worked on this module (functionality) for about 5-6 hours

[17:20:39 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Thanks for the reasurance Bosmon (smile)

[17:20:40 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> I found a picture of my father in Richmond Park : P

[17:20:41 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> http://www.flickr.com/photos/antranig2/7025104505/in/photostream/lightbox/

[17:20:55 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> As recently as 2006...

[17:20:56 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Wow

[17:21:40 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> So, how did you get to OrchardCMS from the ITV?

[17:21:44 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Are they related projects?

[17:21:51 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Or just a bit of moonlighting? : P

[17:21:55 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> lol

[17:22:08 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> I do Orchard CMS in my freetime

[17:22:46 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> One thing I think the Orchard team and the Fluid team agreed on BTW was that clicking on content to edit is not that user friendly, it should be an edit button... (smile)

[17:22:54 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> I also moonlight as well (smile)

[17:23:02 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> wow

[17:23:10 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> The traditional busy life of the "quick starter" : P

[17:23:21 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> (smile)

[17:23:25 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Yes, certainly for rich text, "click to edit" is just confusing

[17:23:31 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> yup

[17:23:33 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> The primary function of the content has to be to act as content

[17:24:08 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> People are used to the "sectional edit link" idiom from Wikipedia already

[17:24:16 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Yeah, they also said that it would be impossible to click a link once signed in!

[17:25:23 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> The rich text integrations are currently one of the darker corners of the framework, firstly because of the difficulty of writing worthwhile unit tests, and secondly because we haven't actively used them in a project for a while

[17:25:30 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> But actually a big content-based project is coming up shortly

[17:25:48 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> We are working with "Open Educational Resources" in a drupal-based system starting this week

[17:25:50 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> really?

[17:26:01 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> And Orchard CMS of course (smile)

[17:26:03 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> So the Inline Edit infrastructure is probably due for some loving attention before long

[17:26:18 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Well, at the moment we have to work with the CMS the partners put together already : P

[17:26:40 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> But one of the core aims of Fluid is for "everyone to get their cake"

[17:27:04 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> it should always be possible to configure our components to get whatever integration or behaviour you require, without hacking on the core code or monkey-patching it

[17:27:06 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Thats why I chose it!

[17:27:18 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> choose*

[17:27:44 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> But the InlineEdit base is some of our oldest code, which dates from before we constructed our IoC system starting in 2009

[17:27:59 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> So there is still a lot of manual tinkering with adding listeners required, etc.

[17:28:07 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Are you going to look to overhual it?

[17:28:14 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> overhaul*

[17:28:15 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> In time, yes

[17:28:26 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> We've got a huge number of other priorities ahead of that

[17:28:39 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Most of our day-to-day work this year is on our UIOptions and videoPlayer components

[17:29:25 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> And the IoC system itself isn't yet stable enough to justify a wholesale rewrite of already working code

[17:29:31 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> But it will come in time

[17:29:37 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> understandable

[17:30:02 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> I guess some work will be done on it with your educational cms project though right?

[17:30:27 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Yes, it seems like we will certainly be using the "simple inline edit" configuration within the next week

[17:30:39 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Since the inline edit put together by the partners wasn't sufficiently accessible

[17:30:57 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> And I expect some time in the next couple of months we will have to look at the rich content authoring problem again

[17:31:13 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> But currently we are working towards a demo that needs to be shown in about 2 weeks

[17:31:16 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Fair enough, are you going to look at upgrading jquery etc at the same time?

[17:31:29 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Fair enough (smile)

[17:31:32 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Certainly, yes

[17:31:45 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Thankfully the problems with the current upgrade look extremely minor

[17:31:52 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Nothing like what we went through with the jQuery 1.6 debacle

[17:32:08 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> There are issues with the ToolTip stuff

[17:32:08 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Hopefully they learned their lesson after that....

[17:32:14 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Ah cool

[17:32:17 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> hence why I turned it off(smile)

[17:32:17 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Good to know

[17:32:29 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Should really get you a JIRA account

[17:32:51 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Were there even instructions for you for someone to mail?

[17:32:57 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Please do, I dont mind logging issues (smile)

[17:34:16 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> yeah they said ping you guys on IRC to get an account

[17:34:17 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> hehe

[17:37:03 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Sure...

[17:37:10 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> I'll send a mail to avtar to get it sorted out

[17:37:17 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Cool thanks

[17:37:20 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> All of our servers are being upgraded and moved right now so there's a lot goin gon

[17:37:58 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Its cool, im in no rush, lots of other stuff I could be working on aorund this code

[17:38:13 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> So, do you hang out in Richmond Park much? : P

[17:39:02 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Na, go for a run there occasionally

[17:39:18 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Im sure I will once summer rolls around

[17:39:38 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Me and my GF are looking to move to Teddington

[17:39:38 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> (smile)

[17:40:05 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Ah, the legendary culture of TEDDINGTON LOCK : P

[17:40:25 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> One of my earliest memories is of losing a little battery-powered boat in one of the lakes near Richmond Park....

[17:42:16 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> yes the Lock, I like the pubs around there

[17:43:02 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> There are quite a few little lakes and ponds around Richmond park

[17:43:19 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Did a bird steal it? (joking)

[17:43:23 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Hahaha

[17:43:29 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> It just sort of "drifted off" : P

[17:43:38 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> haha

[17:43:39 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> It had a little rudder on it, that must have bashed in to something

[17:43:51 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> This was even before the days that remote-controlled things were very common

[17:44:02 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> like string boat?

[17:44:03 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> lol

[17:44:13 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> I remember in the end my father manfully stripped his trousers off and waded into the lake to go and get it : P

[17:44:21 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> How can I make the TinyMce plugin scale to the height of the content? any ideas?

[17:44:30 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> He jumped in?

[17:44:34 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Yes, he did

[17:44:37 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Wow - brave guy

[17:44:42 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Well, more sort of waded : P

[17:44:54 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Well, I guess scaling the plugin is just going to be nasty, given its iframe-based nature

[17:45:17 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> The only thing that will most likely work is grubbily measuring the height of the content in pixels and feeding that into the MCE options

[17:45:32 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> But of course even that isn't going to be great, given issues with whether the editor uses the same font or not

[17:45:47 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> You are welcome of course to consult the MCE admins for their learned support on the issue (smile)

[17:46:01 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> If you are lucky, they will not unclog their nose in your direction

[17:46:15 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> What username do you want for JIRA?

[17:46:56 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> hmm

[17:46:58 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> NickMayne

[17:47:00 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> (smile)

[17:47:08 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> cool

[17:47:15 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Have you considered looking at CKEditor?

[17:47:23 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Apparently we are more favorably inclined to that one these days

[17:47:41 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> I need to implement both

[17:47:49 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Ah, fascinating

[17:47:52 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> TinyMce was a sample

[17:48:01 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> You really do need the benefits of our "flexible approach" : P

[17:48:01 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Orchard has TinyMce as default

[17:48:09 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> there is a CkEditor module on the gallary

[17:48:24 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Yup! Hense why I choose you guys....

[17:50:23 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> We even had an FCKEditor integration, back in the day

[17:50:29 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> But thankfully that rotted away

[17:50:42 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> it was probably the very first of the HTML rich text editors, and its codebase was absolutely awful

[17:51:21 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> CkEditor took over from it right?

[17:51:28 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Yes, it did

[17:51:28 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> FCKEditor! lol

[17:51:30 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> wow

[17:51:39 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> It seems things are a lot better now, but I haven't looked at the codebase recently

[17:51:46 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> But I think FCKEditor even worked in IE 4

[17:52:12 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> So you can imagine what that was like : P

[17:52:37 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> IE4!! I remember that

[17:53:17 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> wow I was in school when that came out

[17:53:39 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> I remember my boss trying to write a tree view with drag n drop that worked in IE4

[17:53:47 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> He basically managed it : P

[17:54:27 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> A treeview! lol

[17:54:32 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> old school.

[17:54:53 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> I do like treeview controls for some stuff.

[17:54:56 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Well, a decade later, we still don't have any tree views that are any good : P

[17:55:30 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Fluid has always needed to write one, but it would be a big effort to produce one that was up to our standards...

[17:55:37 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> All of the existing trees are incredibly unconfigurable

[17:55:56 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> And have a very low level of accessibility too

[17:56:07 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> But we need to make sure we don't spread ourselves too thin

[17:56:10 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> thats number one on your list right?

[17:56:15 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> accessibility?

[17:56:19 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> yes, it is

[17:56:23 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Accessibility is why we exist

[17:56:37 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> thats good.

[17:56:37 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> But as it turns out, accessibility in its widest sense is just a proxy for producing stuff that isn't crap : P

[17:56:59 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> If you can't produce a component which is configurable enough to be accessible, you probably can't produce one that has any decent user factors at all

[17:57:00 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> haha, funny how most people dont realise that.

[17:57:40 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Well, developers tend to not to like spending much time thinking about people who are too different from themselves : P

[17:58:12 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Although that's true of people in general too, I think it's more true of developers than normal people

[17:58:55 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> But most developers don't understand how utterly unusable the things they produce are, even to people who don't traditionally qualify is "requiring accessibility"

[17:59:01 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> qualify as

[17:59:40 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Hence their love of kicking their problems over the fence by creating lots of modal interactions (smile)

[18:00:28 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> lol

[18:00:57 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Right Bosmon!! I need to go to bed

[18:01:02 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Yes, you do!

[18:01:08 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> You were here incredibly late on Monday, I reliased

[18:01:19 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Although I had some vague indefinable sense that you must be a Brit

[18:01:21 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Have a good evening, and thanks for hooking up jira for me

[18:01:30 CDT(-0500)] <Bosmon> Cool, look forward to getting your reports

[18:01:31 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> (smile)

[18:01:33 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Work hard!

[18:01:41 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Will do

[18:01:43 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Latar

[18:01:47 CDT(-0500)] <NickMayne> Later*