One Week Munich

Tomorrow I’m going to spend a week (until Saturday) in Munich / München, Germany. No, it’s not a real holiday, but rather a school trip with two classes. Luckily, most of the bigger cities (and the hotels itself) offer free WLAN-hot spots, so I’m taking my netbook with me in the hope to stay connected.

The addon I presented in the last post, OhNoesQueues, became a weekly pick of WoWInterface.com alongside three other addons (that’s a lot for one week, isn’t it?). Such a pick of the week is an important factor of such small addons, because they’re not often updated and tend to disappear quickly in the overwhelming mass of new addons.

In the last time, I’m not very deep into WoW AddOn development. Yeah, I still have to rewrite cargBags for the new stack-compression and item-database in the planned version 2.0, but I couldn’t get a start on it. At the moment I’m devoting myself to PHP: Longer readers maybe remember my C++ project WiredSocial. I’m currently rewriting it in PHP to make a web interface for it. The ultimate plan is to make a central account for me on all social communities, including a “single search in all communities”. Of course, I’ve started with the StudiVZ and derivates, because they’re the only well-known “closed ones”. There’s a good progress – I can already login into these, read all data from a member profile, get the friends of someone (and their profiles & friends) and can fetch members by doing a search for their names.
The API got so complex that with only 20 additional lines of code I could create a diagram which displays the friends that three (or more) persons have in common. It gets really interesting when I introduce meta-accounts, e.g. so you can link a SchülerVZ-account to LastFM and Facebook.

Oh noes, da queues! ... and the heat

School has started today again, after 6 weeks of summer holidays. Well, it was kind of difficult to get back into the ‘right time’, considering that, in the holidays, I got into bed at about 4 am in the morning … and now I have to get up at 6 am.
Apart from that it’s still way too hot in my room. It’s in a very bad position considering the fact that it’s placed on the first floor with the windows on the side of the afternoon sun. However I’ve found some big old fan I can place directly next to me which makes it a lot more bearable.

So, I’ve got into developing another WoW AddOn called OhNoesQueues. The idea and whole design process came very rapidly and it took only one single day from the initial idea to the release on WoWInterface.com. The addon basically puts the whole battleground-queue-listing with its mostly unneeded instance-selection into 6 different join-buttons – one for each battleground. So, now you can manage your battleground joining/leaving with a few less clicks and in my opinion, it looks more intuitive and appealing than the old dropdown-list. But don’t worry, you can still find the old one at the top – the buttons are placed in the bottom part where there was some kind of battleground-description-text-thingy which most likely no one ever read let alone noticed?

Next project on my list is another battleground-related addon … let’s call it a “minimalistic battleground-base-status-frame”, but I haven’t worked out any details yet.

P.S.: If someone likes to get his/her hands on a very simple HTML/PHP/CSS example snippet. I did one for a classmate to introduce PHP to him, you can find it here.