Senior Project Week 12

Richard Banister
CSC 4790 Senior Projects
Work Log

Week 12: 17 November - 23 November, 2008

Brainstorming: Create pluggable "action modules" to bundle up common action prototypes for easy install and reference. So, for example, create a module for "Dictionary Lookup", which would include the action prototype (link to a page, parameters to pass in, etc), as well as any resources (page, images, etc). Store in a subdirectory, automatically discover available action modules. This would be nice, so that you don't need to redefine actions for every new video you create. Although I hope I can get away with writing up an editor before I nail this down, since it seems I'm getting bogged down in this kind of thing and not progressing on the editor per se. 0.5h

Finished substitution language. Integerated language into action scheme, so that substitutions are now possible. So, for example, you define actions with variable placeholders and call those actions like you would call a function. So "greet(world)" -> "hello world" whereas "greet(kitty)" -> "hello kitty". This is really nice, and adds to the power and convenience significantly. It may add to the security hazards as well, which I should really look into if I'm going to develop this further. Numerous bug fixes on substitution language. Created demos for testing. 3.5h

Met with Toyoda-sensei to show my project and get suggestions. She seemed to think it was appropriate for East Asian Studies, and seemed fairly impressed. Lent me some books, suggested some things to pursue as far as videos. 1h

Various fixes, required to make editor functional. Created editor classes and structure. But couldnâ€™t figure out how to get editor clicks as opposed to player clicks, if that requires a different event model, and what that event model should be. 2h

Worked out event model. Got region info on click. Editor still performs region action on click, though; this needs to be stopped. Was originally going to use AJAX to edit objects, but passing that info back and forth between the browser and the swf started to seem absurd. Maybe next time. Created tabbed info panel for actions, regions, subtitles. Each panel has a list of all respective objects in the application. Took a while to figure out how to do this with mxml list control. It is now bound to an array collection of regions, eg, and automatically updates when the array updates (well, kind of). Struggled with display of each region. It is currently bad â€“ takes up a lot of space and is not user-friendly. Delete regions from list. Draw new regions on video screen. 15.5h