Anyone home?

Wow, I have a blog here! *brushes Internet dust off* Apparently I haven't updated this blog in quite a while - largely because I haven't updated Dangerous Apples in quite a while. The end of grad school was quite a turbulent one, and the project time that I did have was largely devoted to Blue Shift Hockey Charts instead. But I'm back, and even though I have a full-time summer internship, I'm going to try to find some time for getting DA finished.

So, just a little status update from where we last left off. I had a successful and favorable user test of DA back in March. I was even able to test it out on an entirely new user, who was able to pick up the interface without any questions whatsoever. That's a good sign! However, one user accidentally joined the room twice, which would have ruined the game irreparably had it not been for my intervention. This represents the type of issues that I feel I need to resolve before DA is ready for prime-time - the overall workflow is in place, but I need to make sure it handles errors such as this gracefully. It's not fun work, but it's certainly more fun than having your game explode on you.

In the meantime, I've started re-doing some of the client-side code, which was getting kind of ugly. I've installed jQuery and am in the process of re-writing my JavaScript code to use it. I wish I had known about it before I started writing A2A, it would've saved me a lot of time. But it'll allow me to add more nifty features (dragging cards to the table, anyone?) in the future. I think I will also have to replace the numerous layout tables with div tags, because it's just a huge problem.

Also, I did have another feature idea for the future. I'm largely designing DA around the idea that it'll be played by people who already know each other. This is why I haven't implemented a formal user account system like a lot of other game sites. With this in mind, I think it does make sense to set up something like a Facebook application where you can create a DA game and invite your friends. Besides Facebook, any suggestions for other social systems that I can exploit?

Finally, just as a general rant about the lengths that web development takes you to. IE 6 (and apparently 5.5) has a rendering bug in which dropdown menus (implemented by the select tag) will always appear "above" everything else on your page, even if you don't want them to. This was a problem for the index page, which features a dropdown menu showing all of the current games and a dialog box that lets you create a new game. Sure enough, the dropdown obscures the dialog box. Apparently, there is a fix for this involving an iframe, but I wasn't sure how to implement it on a draggable dialog box. I also didn't like the fact that dropdowns can't be styled, and that it wasn't fading out with the rest of the page when the dialog was summoned. So I actually wound up implementing my own dropdown menu that doesn't have these problems. Surprisingly, it wasn't that much more of a pain, but the whole principle of what I had to do just makes me shake my head in amazement.

Hopefully, that'll hold you guys until my next update, which I promise won't be as long in the making!