CodeWorkshop

I’ve just graduated college, am currently on the job search, and as a result have A LOT of down time. I’m realizing that my ‘portfolio’ of coding projects is nearly non-existent, and what I have on my github is strictly windows forms applications. So, I’m jumping into Windows Phone development with my latest project, dashBud! dashBud is a simple dashboard camera application for windows phone, with the following list of intended features:

- Save up to five, 10 minute long videos

-Continuously record

-overlay vehicle speed (and perhaps other information)

-automatic uploading to OneDrive or Dropbox (I still need to look into this)

Here's another quick demonstration of the ReliableSubBox program. As it is now, I'm almost content.

I've added labels and aligned the thumbnails in rows as opposed to a long messy line, which makes the program far more usable. The add/remove functionality works just as it should. My only remaining problem is the refresh button. I was working on a way for it to destroy and recreate all of the pictureboxes (for example, after you add a new channel), however, I couldn't get it to work correctly without things getting horribly out of wack. So for now, I have the refresh button set to "application.Restart()" because it's the quickest, dirtiest fix you can find for my problem.

Status update: I added a database to hold the channel video pages so that they don't have to be entered every time the program starts, as that'd defeat the entire purpose. That was simple enough.

The main focus now is dynamically creating pictureboxes for each of the links returned from those video pages. Only half of the thumbnails are showing up at the moment, and I'm assuming it has something to do with my loop incrementation. That's a long messy story so I won't get into it. Another issue is getting the thumbnails to successfully clickthrough to their respective videos. I think I found a solution but my brain's too fried to try and implement it at the moment.  

Back at it! With the start of a new semester, I've just been messing around with C#, trying to figure out new things I can do with it. I took an interest in web scraping, and after failing to figure out how to use HTML Agility Pack, started looking into regular expressions. I've figured out a pattern to find youtube video links from youtubers' video pages!

A little more info for those interested:

It's not perfect. The if statement within the for loop is in place because for some reason, with the pattern I'm using, the MatchCollection will take the entire contents of the <a href/> tag from the link to the end as one match, and then also take just the link as another match after that. Since I'm just looking for the link, I only want those second matches.

Got stumped on this all day and all because I missed one line of code... what else is new? Anyways, I finally added functionality to the "accept task" button! When someone accepts someone else's task, it automatically sends the employer an email with the worker's email, telling them they've accepted it. Just like I planned! Nice.

About a month ago, my fellow jobless friend and I were feeling ambitious. We had a whole summer to create a small time amateur startup business. We threw around a lot of ideas, but settled on this: a website that connects people willing to run small errands with those who needed them run.

We later discovered that this wasn't a very original idea, but we ran with it anyway. There's always a way to make it unique! So we brought in a third friend and started planning how to make this a reality. Soon after however, I picked up a job with a lot of hours, and our third friend was swamped with summer classes and other obligations. The plan fell apart. 

However, I figured that I'd continue working on it in my free time, as a learning experience. This is what I've got so far.

The homepage displays a short message of what the site is all about (mostly just filler as I/we don't have a real vision for it yet), and a dynamically updated list of recently posted tasks. At the time, the links aren't clickable, but can be copy and pasted to lead you to the task page.

This is where employer accounts can post tasks. Once submitted, it will take the username of the employer account and create a unique webpage with it. Due to the nature of the way the task pages are created, each account can only post one task at a time at this point. Also the navbar is all screwed up, as you can see.

When a user creates an account, they automatically have a profile page created for them. Right now, it's very bare bones, and only displays a few details. I'm hoping to add some sort of feedback functionality on them, so users can check others' profiles to see what other people say about doing business with them.

This is a sample of what a task listing would look like. Very simple. The accept task button currently has no function, but when clicked, I'm thinking it will send the employer who posted it an email containing the email of the worker and a link to their account. We'll see!

So here's what I've got so far. I think it's still missing a lot, but I'm proud to have come this far! This is my first "real" game, so it's obviously far from polished, and I doubt it's actually something that would be enjoyed by a lot of people. It's very basic. I'm still planning to add features to give the player more incentive to keep going, other than simply playing to beat their previous time. Power-ups, unlocks, things like that. But as of now, this is it.

Bugs:

-enemy speed increase may be too much too soon, might need a cap.

-one of the spawn positions for cars on the right spawns in lane divider, appears to be passable but is not (you'll see if you check out the game).

-audio decreases after each restart for some reason, which results in eventually muted sound after a number of restarts

-moving finger too fast can stop the movement control, causing you to lose the game

-ads are delayed for some reason, which means you have to wait for them to appear before hitting restart. (Will also probably decrease frequency of appearance to every other restart or less)

So I recently was lucky enough to pick up a summer job to help ease the huge financial burden on my parents of being a college student, and the long hours have had me away from coding... and pretty much everything else (43 hours the first week! 30 something this week which wasn't bad at all).

It's really got me thinking about my financial future and how difficult it is to support yourself in this world. I'm excited, but it's reminding me why I'm going to school and learning how to code in the first place. Sure, I could probably live off a couple tedious jobs like the one I have now, but I'm blessed enough to have the resources to achieve more, so I'm back to coding tonight!

I haven't worked on Scroll Highway in a while due to both work and a web development project I was messing around with for a couple weeks before the job, but I'm back to it and I've built a lot upon the initial version I put out at the start of this blog. It's 2:30am and I worked a solo closing shift so I'm too beat to put it up now, but I'll have it available soon! I'm even thinking about putting it on the google play store, since I can now spare $25 on the developer fee ^.^ 

when you finally figure out a bug that you've been working on for hours. 99% of the time all you needed was one or two extra lines of code, but even still, after hours of tinkering, it feels like you've just won a war watching your code run correctly.

Aaaaahhhhhhhhhhh.

That feeling came today when I finally figured out how to stop the police sprites from increasing in speed exponentially after each time they were destroyed and spawned again. All I needed to do was remove the event listener that controls their movement when they were destroyed. Unbelievably obvious once I realized it, but as a corona noob it took me about half the day. I TRIED EVERYTHING.

Feels so good.

Scroll Highway is still in its infancy, but in a day I've gotten it off the ground and into a playable product. A basic time-sink game, your goal is simple: weave in and out of traffic and avoid colliding with anyone!

You control your car by pressing and holding it to move left and right between lanes.

There's still plenty of work to be done on it; the spawn rate and position could be improved as it's very predictable and spawned cars occasionally collide off-screen. There are also some bugs with restarting after a loss. The icon could use some touching-up (I'm no artist at all, so the fact that I managed to create all original artwork that doesn't make eyes bleed... feelsgoodman), and background music would definitely improve the overall feel and experience.

I plan to fix as much as I can, however I'm eager to share what I've been doing!

I signed up for admob and placed an ad that apprears after losing the game just for the heck of it. I'm a starving college student, so if you'd like to help me out by clicking the ads all day that'd be fantastic (totally kidding, asking for clicks is against admob's policy hehe)!

As I said, starving college student, so I don't feel like paying the developer fee for a google play store is worth it just yet. With that in mind, you can find Scroll Highway on my public dropbox folder via the link below! 

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/38772969/scrollHighway.apk