Archive for the ‘Visual Flavor’ Category
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Back from Seattle and Long Beach
…and now, back to work. I’ll try to be online today to catch up with everybody. :)
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VF Mockup Status and Possible Reorganization
Hello from Seattle!
Those of you that have been watching development of Visual Flavor know that we’re in the phase after deciding what features and stuff we want to start out with and go ahead wherein I now begin making new mockups and such for the site, and that’s what
I’ve gotten plenty of ideas (my “Examples of Great Web Sites” bookmarks folder has grown by more than a few sites), but I was counting a little bit too much on having lots of downtime here to play with my ideas. However, this has turned out to be a good thing in a way. One of the many places I’ve visited here was the Seattle Art Museum. Naturally some of the works in there gave me even more ideas, but perhaps more importantly, I realized a lot more things that should not be in the design of this web site that weren’t yet on my “watch-out list.”
It’s sort of disappointing to realize that some of the designs you like won’t work for reasons that are more technical than aesthetic since you get attached to things that you like and stuff, but I’m not feeling too bad since it just means that the final selection will be that much more polished and pure. And besides, a lot of them will still work perfectly for other types of sites, so I can use them later.
As for the reorganization of the project, I recently took it upon myself to read Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (the humorous autobiography of Linus Torvalds) and The Cathedral and The Bazaar (a book of essays by Eric S. Raymond that talks about the open source movement from a lot of perspectives). I’d been wanting to read them both for quite a few months now actually. Regardless, the point is that my method of organization thus far for Visual Flavor has been that of an open source “cathedral” in the same vein as how Richard M. Stallman runs the GNU Emacs project. I think I’d like to reorganize so that we’re more “bazaar” though, like how the Linus Torvalds set up the Linux kernel’s development. I still think we should have a staff with titles and specific roles and all that, but the idea is have all work be done in public so that non-staff can work on anything at the same time as we do, and switch to a “release early, release often” doctrine. We’ll talk more about this reorganization when Christopher Villareal gets back from Hawaii though, methinks.
I hope everybody is enjoying their summer!
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Open Source Trading Card Game
Steve, Collin, and Mark got me interested in something called 4GXG (“For Gamers, By Gamers”), which is a community of people trying to make a trading card game like Magic the Gathering, Star Wars TCG, and the like. From scratch. Open source style. Anyway, I could see them being one of the first projects to take advantage of Visual Flavor when we’re ready on our end.
I’ve already made a logo and a flier for them. If they pick my flier, I’ll get a cool $100, so head on over and vote on their site in their forums here for the one that you think is the most attractive and professional! May the best flier win!
I recommend you go on my Deviant Art site here to see the full-size version of my poster, but here’s a half-size thumbnail anyway.
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The Calendar Game
I figure that it would be nice of me to start by posting the timeline for Visual Flavor before my personal schedule. Here it is, straight from the header in our IRC room #VisualFlavor on irc.cyber-earth.com:
Present-June 14: Feature planning, idea submission, discussion, etc.
June 15-June 22: Create design mockups.
June 23-July 2: Code the front and backend.
July 3-Aug 15: Alpha.
Aug 16-Aug 31: Beta.
Sept 1: Final!
(Schedule last changed: June 3)As for me…
Trip up to Seattle, WA: June 23-June26 (4 days)
Anime Expo in Long Beach, CA: June 29-July 2 (4 days)*
Work at Montecito Sequoia Lodge: July 8-July 28 (3 weeks)*Sorry to disappoint all of you sadistic bastards out there, but I’ve wiggled my way out of having to dress up as a kittenboy for this.
I’m pretty sure the hotels in Seattle and Long Beach will have wireless internet, and if not, there’s always Starbucks or something, right? I know for a fact that I will have access to the web while working at Montecito, just like last year.
And with my new schedule manifesting, life is good. On top of working on various open source projects and doing the usual jobs for my lovely bunch of clients, I’ll be able to enjoy my trusty stack of books again. First up, “Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary.” Fitting?
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Friday Looms
I have to submit the Visual Flavor site for the design competition by Friday. I thought I overheard Miss Jones say that she was actually going to be driving them up on Tuesday, but she told me Friday, so I don’t want to rely on that knowledge.
Rawrr. I just don’t know if I’ll have it done. I mean, I’ve something up at the actual VisualFlavor.org site right now, but I want to turn in more than what basically amounts to a particularly fancy and featured coming soon page. Cvill64 has been working on other parts of the site a lot, so he deserves a round of applause, but yeah. I haven’t quite gotten to practice my motto of “Let the artists do the artwork; let the coders do the coding” sadly, which means that all my code is… well, it isn’t as pretty as it would be if a programmer wrote it, heh.
Speaking of programmers, we’re looking for some web programmers. Not just people like me who know X/HTML and CSS, heh, but rather, if you know PHP or Ruby-on-Rails or something else like that (we haven’t decided what we’re going to use yet, so anything should be good as long as you know it), then email me or Cvill64. Really, anybody interested in helping the project out should get in touch with me or Christopher though.
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