First Screenshots

First Screenshots

School started today, and I am using my version of Agenda for organizing my courses and interests.

The look-and-feel is still very primitive, especially since I haven't put in much effort with the style sheets yet. 

But the functionality is beginning to emerge, and the underlying code structures are strong enough to keep me moving forward.

Here's the file menu.  Each user has a library of files, usually sorted by last-accessed.  Because they are in a single database, searching them is easy.

Zooming in, below is what an Agenda view looks like.  (This example doesn't show any categories, I'm not happy with that part of the code yet.

Most of the screen widgets are from JQuery.  The menu tool at the top right is based on Jonathon Sharp's  jdMenu ( http://jdsharp.us), it 'floats' in an absolute DIV so that it stays on the page as you scroll through the items.

The tabs at the top are for 'sections'.   This view only has one section so far - 'Tab 1'.  I first tried 'Accordian' tabs, their vertical operations were closer to the original Agenda concept but not quite as functional.

The icons let me attach files to items, edit the details, link the item to my Google calendar (not yet done), and email an item. 

As well, they let me manipulate the order of items.  If anyone remembers 'MaxThink',  I'm hoping to add some of its  hierarchical and bin-sort capabilities.  If you don't know about MaxThink, then you MUST visit  http://www.maxthink.org.

Zooming into an item gives access to the underlying notes and blogs.  I'm using TinyMCE as my note editor, which allows me to embed graphics and hyperlinks into my notes, and also provides spell-checking.  Not pretty yet, but functional.

I've built the horizontal tabs into all the pages.  It's easy to disable later, but it occurs to me that I will soon want to group files, and that the details of an item may become complex enough to justify tabs.

The design is drifting away from the original Agenda.  Two reasons :  my 'university notes' application is pretty specific (and requires richer items than say a contact manager), and the capabilities of a web program are so different from what the original DOS environment offered.

The nicest part about backing Joomla! out of the design is that I can now use AJAX to update pages on the fly.  This potentially solves some of the UI issues , like editing directly on the view without requiring a SUBMIT button.  But no hurry, first I want to finish the functionality.

And that may take some time at the slow pace I am going.  I figure I'm giving this project about 5-6 hours a week.   There's no hurry, I'm up and running, I'll focus first on the features that I need for my own use.   That might mean adding APA-style references before finishing categories.