Dreams of life on the other side...

I have been working part time as a Graphic Designer / IT guy and going to school full time for Application Development. Life has been a bit busy for a while now, and this being the last full two weeks of classes, it is also a tiny bit stressful. On the upside, I am working a job that gives me full creative freedom within reason, and I get to use one heck of a military grade computer while doing so. I do plan on showing some of my work there as soon as it is released, so you are just going to have to be patient a little longer.

I have also been donating my artistic and technical talents still at Frontline Community in Grand Rapids, and things there are also smooth sailing, in fact, this is the first church I have found that doesn't make an overly bureaucratic mess out of suggestions towards artistic direction and visualizing the message. Nice place, you should visit sometime ;) Anyways, I have a few pieces here that I can show from past / current series and a couple proposals for future series... (Will be adding more soon)



After this semester of school is over, my Wife and I plan on doing a role switching exercise, and she is going to be putting work on hold while I will be working full time for Rev-X Products and starting my own personal projects in app development. This will not be easy, since I have pretty much played the role of a stay/work at home Dad for almost three years, but I have all the faith in the world that this will work out for the best for all people involved, and this is where dreaming of life on the other side comes to play. What if this actually works, what if this can actually help us afford to spend time with each other more as a family.

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APPS: The Adventures of making a showcase app for Windows 8 UI

Yesterday, I woke up knowing I would do something I have never done before, but not quite knowing what it might be. I started off the day, took the kids to school, and came home and cleaned up a little with Willow (More like, I cleaned, and she played the defensive linebacker role), so after she fell asleep, I climbed onto the computer and made up a quick and dirty mobile app for my church: Frontline Community It's still not done, but I at least got the basics in there, and can do a little of styling in Visual Studio now. 

Then I decided to take it a step further, and see what I can do to make a Windows 8 app. I put the basics into Joshfire Factory, and deployed it as a Visual Studio project. Opened it and instantly found that it didn't work. That's fine, I thought, I love a good challenge, so I was off looking to see if I can figure out why it didn't work. I found that much of the issues with the project were because it was using the old version of WinJS. I corrected every line that pointed to the old WinJS, and updated them to point to the location of the new version. I rebuilt and then clicked Run. 

Almost... There were a couple of issues still, like when viewing a section or page, and going back, you get the same content loaded behind the items on each section. Well that sux! 

So I dug a little deeper, and found out that it was not checking to see if the content was already loaded when it went back to the home screen, since I'm still a novice at this, I felt a simple CLEAR statement on load will do (I'm not too sure how to do a conditional statement just yet). That did the trick :)

Now all I have to do for it is fix the picture container when it loads the pictures from their sources, and also fix the YouTube stream from trying to use an ActiveX component... (Not even available, cant see why it defaults to it) and I'll be all set. At least I got somewhere in my ventures though, even though it is not 100% working, it is better than anything I've done with the OS thus far. (Minus a couple found registry tweaks :0)

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