Month: May 2015

The Making of My Logo

Here is how I came up with the logo for my “Identiflora” project.

I know normally I would have some pencil sketches, but my idea was all vector fonts from the moment it entered my head, so I didn’t sketch any lines.  I imagined question marks rotated around a circle, looking like flower petals – since my project is about identifying flowers.

many_questionsThe first thing I did was do a cursory Google search, and didn’t discover anyone else using anything like that idea.  (Whew!)

 

flower_appsNext I decided to check the iTunes App Store both to get an idea of what a good, clear logo would look like, and to see which logos are already out there.  I also consulted this article on How to Create Better App Icons.

logo_1So with that in mind I started making my vector question marks. I began with a base font, and squashed it around a bit so it is “mine” and not a specific font.

I like where this is going but, hey, those question marks are all backwards!

So I flipped them. I also decided this orange color is not reading “flower.” It looks more like “sun.”

I switched to green and red, like red rose petals. But it just wasn’t working for me. I tried some more colors and even added leaves to emphasize “flower.” But I don’t just want a flower, I want a question too. So I finally realized I should make the question mark stand out!

But that doesn’t read as a flower. It’s just a “weird octopus made of question marks”. So I went to my secret flower weapon: pink. This one is a keeper.

Indentiflora_2015

What do you think?

 

I have an idea

While I am still working on Udacity classes, I really want to start working on my own personal project. For years I have been passionate about plants, especially identifying wild native plants. You can probably tell, since most of the photos that make it into this blog are plants.

In college plant taxonomy was by far my favorite class. I loved that class. It was just four guys, the teacher, and myself. In retrospect my final project was “sort of phoned in.” It involved going out to a nearby park, several times a week over the course of a few months, and documenting the growth of the spring plants, and the seed dispersal methods they each used. I really didn’t take personal observation seriously, and at the last minute I sort of “Alta Vista-ed1” for a good part of the information. The way I didn’t pursue my college classes with my whole heart still bothers me, and that’s why I really want to complete this Udacity nanodegree. I want to prove to myself I can work hard at something difficult, and push through, and complete it.

But back to the plants.

I love plant books!

I want you to see wildflowers as your friends.

While I know other plant ID sites and apps already exist, this one is going to be my own. Everyone starts with a first project, and, yes, this may be ambitious, but it’s a topic I really enjoy. Ideally, I want to code the web app, sketch the art,  write the text, and take the photos of the plants. Now that probably isn’t going to be exactly how this works out, or else it would be a site that only helps you identify plants that live in my back yard. But it’s a dream, goal, and working idea.

Indentiflora_2015So Identiflora.com was born. If you go there, there is nothing to see. I won’t even link you to the  boring parked page. But I registered the name and drew a little app icon.
I’m excited about this!

 

1That’s what searching was called before it was Google, and after it was Lycos.

Slow Progress, Various Resources

I have been bogged down this week and making very little progress on my Udacity work, to be honest. I still found a few good resources.

Good resources I found this week:

Device Screenshot Emulator allows you take screenshots of how your site looks on various devices. This has been especially handy when I want to place images of projects I’ve worked on into my Udacity resume project. It is so accurate, the function on my site that I could always get to work in emulation in Chrome, but not actually work on my iPhone, fails to work in this emulator.

JSHint allows you to paste a chunk of code into the screen, and will make suggestions about things you may have missed or done in a non-standard way. This helped me a lot when I was getting an obscure error in Chrome due to some missing brackets.

Non JavaScript resources:

HTMLFreeTemplateStuff a Tumblr of interesting HTML and CSS templates.

Fantastic list of art tutorials by Jonathan Rector check out his art.

This isn’t even a resource, but I really have been helped by using HabitRPG to motivate myself. Losing virtual hit points by failing to complete tasks has been compelling! It also motivates me get at least 5k steps a day (yes I know 10k would be better), spend more time in prayer, work on my biceps, and any other thing I set for myself as a task. And I get to ride a pink dragon and have a pet zombie octopus.

 

Now I get to check “Write a Blog Post” off my task list!habitrpg

More JavaScript Resources

JSON

JSON stands for “JavaScript Object Notation”. It’s something I have been learning a lot about this week. When I made my post about JavaScript is Messy I didn’t understand as much about how messy it is as I do now!1
When I wrote about dot notation and bracket notation last week, I thought they were interchangeable. Actually, they aren’t. There are symbols you can use in your bracket notation that you can’t use in dot notation (and symbols that work that you shouldn’t use anyway!). Jason Ellis has gone over all of this information already and I will link you to his excellent Grok-Interactive blog article about it.

But JSON format, at least for me, helps because it’s very consistent. And the best part is this JSONLint checker. Plug your data into that, and it will show you exactly where your mistakes are in your format, and how to fix them. Thank you Udacity for pointing me to that resource!

Here are some of the best resources I’ve found this week:

Fear and Loathing’s list of JSON Resources

SquareSpace’s tutorial on JSON and how it works behind the scenes in a blog post.

Copterlabs article on making JSON do work nicely with AJAX. Technically some of the things they talk about in this article are beyond me, but I have a feeling I will need this information later.

Mastering Javascript Arrays 

1Yes I know that was only a week ago.

Happy Mother’s Day

JavaScript is Messy

I told a friend I was having trouble with JavaScript and she said “JavaScript is messy”. I thought about this and she’s right. I am only starting to learn it, but it does have more instances of “you can do this legitimately a bunch of different ways“1 than you might want your computer language to allow.

I have trouble even remembering where you need to put a “{ }” or where you just need a “;”. I don’t think those are the “messy” parts, those are just me learning the grammar of the program; learning the punctuation.

But when browsing StackOverflow I can find questions like “Why is JavaScript inconsistent across browsers” and articles on Reddit like “My JavaScript is Messy” and ycombinator articles that just confuse me (but contain some good links).

I guess JavaScript is a language. Languages grow and change. It was created by a guy back “in the day” on Netscape, and now it’s being used long after Netscape is cold in the ground. I’m sure they didn’t develop it in the 90’s thinking that it was going to become this big standard thing, used by everyone, everywhere. Now people are so constantly and consistently asking JavaScript to do things, lots of other programming frameworks and libraries have been built up around just trying to make JavaScript work faster/do things you want better/easier/more consistently. Like Node.js and Angular and JQuery and Bootstrap.

And I’m sure I’ll love the speed and ease of use those bring. But first, I’m still trying to work my way into a basic knowledge of JavaScript. The best resource this week has been the Mozilla Developer Network. This is a great, thorough explanation of just about everything you could want to know as a front end developer.  If you were somehow trapped on a desert island with a copy of MDN you would emerge from the harrowing ordeal with a substantive knowledge of the web as we know it today, and also, starve to death.

Ok, back to trying to make a for loop without crashing my browser.

1What is up with “Object Literal Notation” people. OR you can use a constructor? Too many choices!