Categories
Display User Interface

Display View – An Overview

In the last post I’ve did an overview of how Coding works, so in this post I’ll walk you through the Display view and how it works

Let’s start with the basic structure of the display view it self;

Display view is divided mainly into three horizontal sections

  1. First section; contains information about the thread, basic information (name, description, status, starting date and ending date) and then number of boxes representing the  codes and their colors
  2. Second section; contains the bar chart of the calculated “Surfaces Percentage”, it’s not working in this snapshot but it will be working soon.
    We are using Rickshaw which is JavaScript toolkit for creating interactive real-time graphs, and to use it we have to include three files as the following
    <%= javascript_include_tag “d3.min.js”, “d3.layout.min.js”, “rickshaw.min.js” %> and then create an object from Rickshaw.Graph and pass the JSON object of the information to display which is the surfaces percentage for each day in set of images from different magazines, I’ll write about how this values can be calculate exactly in another post after deploying the beta version
  3. Last section which showing the the highlighted images, each newspaper images appears in an individual row
    I’ll try to explain here how we load this images and arrange them in rows and calculate the size of highlighted areas and their position;

    1. First how to calculate the size of the images based on the size of the page, specifically the size of the div which contains the images of a newspaper:
      1. gets the width of the row div which contains images for any newspaper
      2. gets the number of images in a row
      3. divide this width by the number of the images, to specify the height of each image
      4. then calculate the ratio between the original image and the new image size
      5. based on this values I do set the images size and highlighted areas
Try to zoom in and out and you will see how the images and the highlighted areas are calculated, that is happen because I’ve also bind the handler with resize event on the window object
Categories
code User Interface

Coding View – An Overview

I’ll give in this post a technical overview “Coding View”, and how it works and why I’m using specific library, plugin, or even techniques.

Let’s start with the basic structure of the coding view it self;

Coding view divided mainly into two parts:
1 – The left side part which contains the list of codes and their codes, in a colored box (users decide the color of each box in initiate step), and then Newspaper info (name, publication date, image source)

2 – The right side (or the middle part, because the right side is part of the layout) which contains the images slider “Carousel”, and we have faced two options for displaying images in Coding view:

1 – The first one is to display image by image and submit each image highlighted areas values by itself, and the problem with this is the following; first even if the user coding 10 images it take time and the user will even take time to skip images and back to them later, so the main problem was the navigating between images, but this option was much simpler to handel on the front side and even on the server side, becuse we will be dealing with only one image at a time, but for scalability purpose it will be bad, and we will need to refactor a big part of the code for larg set of images

2 – The second one, which we actually using now is using a bootstrap jQuery slider plugin http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/javascript.html#carousel, to display a large set of images with a very easy navigation way, so users can slide to any image to code first and the back again to the uncoded images, the problem with this option is it impose more complexity on how to store the highlighted area in the browser and how to submit this values to the server

Before explaining how we store highlighted areas, we should know how we generate them, which is done using imgAreaSelect jQuery plugin http://odyniec.net/projects/imgareaselect/ which is simple and easy to use.

I’ll explain now how we store highlighted areas in the browser: we are using hidden fields to store the values of highlighted areas, line 3 show hidden field with an id for instance “image3_ha1” with default value “0”, and this field is used to tell us if highlighted area number “1” is used with image or not, then line 4 which store the code id which this highlighted area is represent, by setting the number we can decide the color of the highlighted area (I’ll explain this part after this), then line 5 which stores the x1 value and so on for the following fields (for now we are using x1,y1, width, and height to draw the highlighted area only) and the same for the fields starting from line 11, the differenc is that it represent the other highlighted area

We are using just two highlighted areas to code, but we are going to make it unlimited in the next version

  1. <% @image_counter.downto(1) do |ic| %>
  2.  <div id="image<%= ic %>">
  3.   <%= hidden_field_tag "image#{ic}_ha1","0" %>
  4.   <%= hidden_field_tag "image#{ic}_ha1_code_id","0" %>
  5.   <%= hidden_field_tag "image#{ic}_ha1_x1" %>
  6.   <%= hidden_field_tag "image#{ic}_ha1_y1" %>
  7.   <%= hidden_field_tag "image#{ic}_ha1_x2" %>
  8.   <%= hidden_field_tag "image#{ic}_ha1_y2" %>
  9.   <%= hidden_field_tag "image#{ic}_ha1_width" %>
  10.   <%= hidden_field_tag "image#{ic}_ha1_height" %>
  11.   <%= hidden_field_tag "image#{ic}_ha2","0" %>
  12.   <%= hidden_field_tag "image#{ic}_ha2_code_id","0" %>
  13.   <%= hidden_field_tag "image#{ic}_ha2_x1" %>
  14.   <%= hidden_field_tag "image#{ic}_ha2_y1" %>
  15.   <%= hidden_field_tag "image#{ic}_ha2_x2" %>
  16.   <%= hidden_field_tag "image#{ic}_ha2_y2" %>
  17.   <%= hidden_field_tag "image#{ic}_ha2_width" %>
  18.   <%= hidden_field_tag "image#{ic}_ha2_height" %>
  19.  </div>
  20. <%end%>

We are using bootstrp jQuery modals plugin http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/javascript.html#modals to allow users to select the code of a highlighted area the following snippet shows how codes colors attached to the options, and it’s important to point this part because; loading codes colors fetched from this elements, in line 3, we have added an attribute to the radio button element called “color” and sets it value with the code color, and also code_id element to store the code id, this two attributes is very important, becuase we are using them to set the highlighted areas colors

  1. <% @thread.codes.each do |code| %>
  2.   <%= radio_button_tag "codes", code.code_text, false, color: code.color, code_id: code.id %> <%= code.code_text %><br>
  3. <% end %>

Last part which is submiting buttons at center part, “Display Now” button which will direct the user to display view, “Clear Highlighted Areas” which will reset all hidden fields values and highlighted areas, “Nothing to Code” which will add a box of the images saying “Nothing to code here” (will implemented soon), last button “Cancel” which will delete the thread (will implemented soon)

Categories
code User Interface

PageOneX Development Status

We are now is so close to the first Version 0.1, which will basically give the user the following features; to be able to create an account and creating a Thread, with basic info; name, start date, end date (in the same month, just for alpha version), description, choosing and number of newspaper, and Topics  to code with it and for each topic the user can add a color and description.

Then user start to code scraped images (opened issues) with selected topics, the color of  highlighted area will be based on the topic color, maximum number highlighted areas for alpha version is two, and if the user want to add any other highlighted areas, the system will prompt the user with the option to clear the current highlighted areas or skip adding other highlighted area, after that the display, it’s not finished yet.

Here’s a UI – first drafts and Some of opened issues