April 28, 2007

The Lessons we are Learning

I asked my kids to name the most important applications for school use. "Slide Presentations" hit the top five. I thought, "What if I could build a simple presentation application in Hackety Hack?" The kids helped name it: "SlideySlide."

So, now that we have a name, I need to confess: I am stretching my limits here. Yet, on a self-dare, I began.

My thought is to build a simple application that culls from some of the ideas demonstrated in _why's lessons 1 - 7. I could even use it for the Hackety Hack demonstration at the Boston Ruby group now ten days away. The plan is simple:

1. use W eb.popup to select the slides (Lesson 3)
2. use Hackety Help to Make HTML pages from Scratch (see Web.page{})
3. use Hackety Chats for passing SlideySlide files around (Lesson 6)
4. include a live feed of important sites right into the presentation (Lesson 2)
5. add some design elements and color (Lesson 7)
6. use YAML to read in the presentation text and outline (this is a new Lesson I'd like to write!)
7. Share it all when done (Lesson 7)

Will this work? Is it technically feasible? This is certainly a stretch of my abilities into the unknown. I was able to run a quick Hackety Hack test and YAML worked enough so that I could read files in. There are a number of "big" questions:

1. How do I incorporate CSS into the Web.popup? Is there other mark-up magic already built-in?
2. How do I click back and forth between multiple SlideySlide pages?
3. How do I load and place PNGs onto a SlideSlide page?
4. Can I have a little music running in the background?

Over the next week, I'll see how much progress I can make with this design to see if I can apply the lessons we've learned and concentrate on new lessons we are learning!

NOTE: I'm already learning! I hadn't seen the picture objects in Hackety Help before ... where-o-where did that come from? It is just what I need!!

Footnote:

I've programmed or dabbled in a bunch of languages and environments: Basic, C, C++, Fortran, HyperTalk, Java and JavaScript, Pascal, and Python. I've worked a fair bit with some that might not be too popular - like Cobol and Assembly language (on big computers and small.) I don't know how I ever avoided others that are so popular - like Perl. I have used more macro languages than I can quickly recall and a few programming languages I am glad to forget. There were even a few (like LISP) I could never get my hands on though I tried. Other early-digital-era-acronyms I once knew probably still run in the computer centers of many businesses even though they have long ago disappeared from mainstream parlance - bonus points to anyone who knows why we ever needed CICS or JCL. You deserve more bonus points though if you join in the fun with Hackety Hack and Ruby. This is one project I hope will be worth weaving into 'modern' digital apps.