First Milestone

Tomorrow is our due date for our first milestone for our project. The past week has been very hectic as we had to make many changes to our stoplight gadget as well as many modifications to our Google project hosting site to get things ready for the first milestone. The goal for our first milestone was to get the stoplight gadget ready for people to begin using and developing.

Some of the modifications that we made to the stoplight gadget this week was using a better stoplight image, give the user an option to use auto page refresh, and we also added an option for the user to input their own messages for certain values. Our original image was too 'cartoony' and plain. Instead I was able to find a good svg stoplight image. I was assigned to get the new image. As easy as this task sounded, I ended up spening a lot of time on it since 1), it was my first time working with an svg file type and 2) I kept running into problem after problem. The image gave me many problems as I was the one to implement the new image. The first problem that I had was finding a good editor to modify the image. I ended up using the open source program Inkscape to modify svg images. I needed to use the program because i was only able to get the svg image with the red light and the svg image with all the lights. So I tinkered with the program and image to get the yellow light and green light images. I uploaded the images into our project host and then tried to use the files but encountered another problem. When I tried to embed the image in an html file using the files from our project host, the image would not appear. Instead the there would be a link that asked me to download the plugin to view the svg images. It turned out that the images mime type was not correct. I fixed this problem by changing the file's mime type through Tortoise. When I was finally able to get the image to appear, I ran into a formatting problem. I was only able to get a portion of the image to show when i messed with the parameters in the html <> command. Again after some research I was able to find out that the problem lied in the xml code that svg uses. I needed to change the parameters in the svg tag in the xml for the svg image file. I had to modify the width and height parameters to equal 100% and then add the code viewBox="0 0 1500 1000" to get the svg image to view properly.

A few changes we made to our project hosting site were cleaning up our project directory, adding user and developer wikis, and create a nice homepage. These changes were simple and easy and took only a hour or so to get done.

For our next version of our gadget, we plan on adding error handling, since our gadget still has some glitches. For example, if we remove the source URL then click save, the gadget will not run. Other things we might add is an option for users to use different types of stoplight images, in case the users do not like the one provided.

The project page for our stoplight gadget can be found here.