Finished Another Site: OneCraneSource

December was quite a month, besides the obvious holiday celebration and preparations, I was also helping out my churches Arts Team and creating a Christmas set to remember. I also was able to finish up a clients website and also optimize the site for best search results, which all worked out beautifully ;)

The client was Star Crane, located in Allendale MI. And this job was a two part deal, first, fix their current mail forms that they had on their site, and second, build them a new site that will help them move into the year 2013, and also be flexible and secure, as well as help promote a better search result.

This site took me about 50 hours to complete from start to finish, and with three designs and four revisions, along with a mobile version to boot, that's not too bad. With that said though, this brings me to a place I'm all too familiar with, looking for more work ;) You can check out some of the screenshots of the design below, or you can head out to http://www.onecranesource.com and check it out for yourself.

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How-To - Using Joomla to build mobile Web Apps.

This rough How-To will go through using Joomla to build a simple mobile Web App.

You will need a few things first:

• Joomla 2.5 or 3.0+ - http://www.joomla.org/
• Add2home plugin for Joomla - http://download.waltercedric.com/downloads/joomla/917-apple.html
• A good responsive template. I used the YooTheme Warp Framework with the Yoo_master template for this one - http://www.yootheme.com/themes/warp-framework
• The MobileJoomla framework or one like it, this one is free at least and only used in this case to load a different template on Mobile devices. - http://www.mobilejoomla.com/

Start off by reading the setup instructs for the YooTheme Warp framework, and set up your pages accordingly. I will sometimes make it so the content of the page doesn't go down too far on the first screen, this will give the users an overall good first impression on a mobile device. Once that is complete, we will set it as the default template. With this design, it automatically detects screen size, but if your client wants a different design for Desktop users, then you can use the MobileJoomla plugin and component to assign a different template to mobile devices. 

Next we will have to download the Add2Home plugin, but don't install it right away. Once you download it, navigate to your download directory and extract the file into a folder. then navigate into the plugin folder, and change the photos there (Unless you absolutely love the ones the developer uses)

Once we are done editing and replacing the graphics, we will then re-archive the files back into a .zip and then we will add the Add2Home plugin to your Joomla extensions. Once it is installed, Just make sure you enable it.

Then it's time to start testing it out and making sure all the content is in the right places. Have fun with it and make it yours :)

Till next time!!

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Projects - Star Crane Mobile site design

Did some more work on the mobile app for Star Crane today. I was able to get it to finally show the Add to Home Screen pop up for mobile phones and tablets, and I also added a custom Icon and Start Screen for the web app too.

I wasn't happy with the menu design I was using to start with on this, so I decided to use the native UI controls so that it will appear smoothly on all mobile devices. I have some messing around to do in order to get the slides how's to show up right on the mobile side as well, but the good part of making the entire mobile app just a themed wrapper for the website makes upkeep on the app almost completely automated.

I like the direction this is moving, so I think I will keep it like this unless the client doesn't like it, then I may be able to change what they need, but for usability across the board, this is the way I feel it best presents it's self.

 

 

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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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Giving a webapp a try

Today I set out to make a web app. One that will pull a lot of the different media I have to offer online and present it all to the user in an easy to digest manner. Well, I have something along those lines, but not quite the experience I was rooting for at first. You can check out the latest version of my web app HERE. I will also be working on a Windows 8 app, just as soon as I figure out a couple things first.

If you are interested in making your own, Head out to joshfire ( http://factory.joshfire.com/)

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Weekend Project - Android x86 on Q550 & W500

I know that when a normal person comes up with a weekend project, it is usually just one thing, like weatherproofing the deck, or fixing the steps. Not me, I tend to do things a bit differently, no only am I only taking one day of the weekend, but I am doubling up my work, by performing similar mods to two Windows 7 Tablets. This means that I am starting my Sunday off all Geek like and adding the ability to dual-boot into android or Windows 8(Which I already have on both devices).
So I spent most of Sunday working on two tablets. My Fujitsu Q550 & my Acer W500. What I had set out to do is put Android on both of them, and thanks to the Android x86 project, that process went by very smoothly.

The Fujitsu Q550 - Windows 7 Tablet

For the Q550, I started off by going to the Android x86 homepage at androidx86.org. Then go to the download page, and notice that Huang updated the downloads to RC2.  I downloaded the Tegra2 iso , it is the only one compatible with the Q559 currently. While I was waiting for that to finish, I downloaded Linux Live USB Creator, and once it was finished downloading, I used it to write the ISO to a spare USB drive I had. Then once it was done, I powered down the tablet, plugged in a USB hub, with a keyboard, mouse, and the USB drive I just made, and powered the tablet back on.

On the first screen, I selected install, and then selected the third partition of four on the Q550 (I had Win 8 on it too), then after the initial wright, I made the storage disk at 1gb. Then waited for that to finish.
Once it was all done, I was pleased to find that mostly everything works on it already. No HW acceleration, rotation, and Sleep is a little funky, but other than that, the device is far more usable than it was with Windows 7 or Windows 8. So I'm pleased. There was another issue, where it does not support the full range of WPA2 wifi encryption, so I did have to change my routers settings to connect to the internet. ARM emulation also is enabled in this build, so yipee! Here are some more pics of the Q550 in action.

On the Acer IconiaTab W500 - Windows 7 Tab.

The process was just the same, except for two things, i had to use the AMD-Brazos version of Android x86, and this device has half the storage space of my other tablet. So I had to erase an older version of Android x86 from it to make room for the new release. Once the initial install was done, I got it all set up and downloaded a few apps to test it out. I have to admit that Android is quite speedy on this machine. Its almost fast enough to allow me to type at full speed, and my using my ADHD as an enabler for faster typing, that's a good thing for a tablet. After testing out a couple games, it seems as though ARM emulation is not enabled on this build, some games keep on crashing. It could be something else, I'll have to look into the log files to make sure.

On this device, video seems to work fine, as long as I disable HD video first. So there is one sign HW accell is nit enabled. And any 3D game or app I load crashes, so that's my other sign. On the bright side, the Blogger app works great on the W500, so I think I found my new blogging format for now. The Crackle app loads, but video doesn't play, but the TV.com app works well, so I can at least veg out a little with this device. I'm sure there will be many improvements to come, but for now, I'm quite happy with Android on both of these tablets.

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